Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [74]
Colette had supplemented her income during the Occupation by writing for the collaborationist paper Le Petit Parisien, and even produced an article for the pro-German La Gerbe. On the other hand, she was hiding her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket. After his escape from prison camp in 1942, he did not leave their apartment in the Palais Royal until the Liberation.
Colette’s neighbour in the Palais Royal, Jean Cocteau, exaggerated the insults and blows he received from fascists during the Occupation as an avant-garde writer and a homosexual. As a persecuted minority, he stood a better chance of effacing his appearances in Otto Abetz’s salon at the German Embassy.
Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s protégé, who during the Occupation had been the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra and had toured in Germany, was initially banned for life from the French stage but was then let off with only a year’s suspension. He protested that he should have been honoured, not condemned, for having saved the Opéra from the Germans, but Lifar was seldom in touch with the real world.
Collaborators in the plastic arts numbered those who had attended the opening of the exhibition of Nazi-approved sculpture by Arno Breker at the Orangerie in May 1942 and those who had accepted an official tour of Germany sponsored by Berlin.
The Breker exhibition, in aid of Wehrmacht charities, was opened by the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and the occasion attracted most of the demi-collaboration. Guitry even argued in his memoirs that because Breker had asked Maillol to open his exhibition, and introduced him to a line of saluting Wehrmacht generals as ‘Mon maître vénéré’, the whole event represented France’s supremacy in the arts over Germany, and thus washed away the defeat of 1940. Guitry did not mention that a year later ‘degenerate works’ by Max Ernst, Léger, Miró, Picabia and Picasso were publicly destroyed outside the Jeu de Paume.
Among the painters who had been on the sponsored tour of Germany were Paul Belmondo, André Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Kees van Dongen and Vlaminck. Vlaminck, a friend of Simenon and bitter enemy of Picasso, went into hiding at the Liberation. But the sanctions against the painters were mild. The Beaux-Arts recommended that they should each be made to create a major work for the state as punishment, and their works were excluded from the Salon de la Libération.
‘It is clear,’ wrote Galtier-Boissière in his diary two weeks after the Liberation, ‘that the majority of our stars are more or less tainted… but in the campaigns which are gathering steam, there is a strong whiff of jealousy.’ Even after Arletty’s death in the summer of 1992, letters were published in newspapers objecting to the fulsome obituaries. They did not complain about her ‘collaboration horizontale’ with a German officer, but about the fact that she had been dining at the Ritz while the rest of France was going hungry.
Most of the directors and stars of the cinema had worked with the German-controlled company Continental. Henri-Georges Clouzot was the director of Le Corbeau, considered one of the most remarkable films of the war years. The Germans were very dubious about Le Corbeau, in which a series of poison-pen letters throws the inhabitants of a village into a turmoil of mutual hatred and suspicion. Many people saw it as a veiled indictment of the Occupation; but after the Liberation, Clouzot was banned from working in France. As soon as the decision was announced he left for Hollywood.
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Robert Brasillach reached Fresnes prison a week after Benoist-Méchin, but at first neither of them knew of the other’s presence, even though they were colleagues in an alien world, with echoing sounds of footsteps, keys jangling and iron doors clanging. Benoist-Méchin described the image of shivering figures in its foggy penumbra as ‘a queue of the damned waiting to cross the River Styx’.
In the rare moments they found for conversation, usually in the