Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [75]
The last day of October marked the trial of a fanatical old scribbler of pamphlets, Comte Armand de Chastenet de Puységur, who described himself professionally on his visiting cards as ‘anti-sémite, anti-maçon, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitaliste, anti-communiste, anti-démocrate et anti-républicain’. When he heard the death sentence read out, he gave the fascist salute and shouted, ‘Vive la France!’ The anti-Semites of vieille France had forgotten nothing and forgiven nobody. When Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, was condemned to life imprisonment a few months later, he cried from the dock, ‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus!’ Maurras lost his chair at the Académie Française.
Céline, imprisoned in Denmark, was accused in absentia of collaboration under Article 75. His retort, predictably sarcastic, was that he had hardly sold the plans of the Maginot Line. He also sent the following diatribe from Copenhagen: ‘I never set foot in the German Embassy. I never met Otto Abetz before the war. Abetz always detested me. I met Abetz during the war two or three times for a few minutes. I always found the political activities of Abetz grotesque and disastrous and the man himself a creature of terrible vanity, a cataclysmic clown.’
The purge of writers was not only a judicial affair. It became a matter of professional conscience, or politics. During the Occupation the Comité National des Écrivains (CNE) – the National Committee of Writers – had been established as an association of intellectual resistance. Its mouthpiece was Les Lettres françaises, the literary review of the Resistance, established by Jacques Decour (later executed by the Germans at the fort of Mont Valérian) and Jean Paulhan, a writer and editor at Gallimard.Les Lettres françaises was a defiant challenge to Drieu la Rochelle’s takeover of La Nouvelle Revue française.
On 9 September, two weeks after the Liberation, the first non-clandestine issue was published. It contained not only articles by Mauriac, Sartre and Paulhan, but also a ‘Manifesto of French Writers’ signed by some sixty leading intellectuals. This contained a demand for ‘the just punishment of usurpers and traitors’. The next issue had a blacklist from the CNE containing ninety-four names. An expanded list of 156 names was included in the issue of 21 October.
Jean Paulhan – ‘Paulhan le Juste’, as Galtier-Boissière called him – became first uneasy about, then strongly opposed to, the calls for retribution. Like Paulhan, Galtier-Boissière distrusted and disliked the rush to accuse. ‘The Nazis,’ he wrote, ‘have left us an imprint of authoritarianism and persecution.’
Louis Aragon, the Surrealist turned Stalinist, with his silver hair and icy looks, was the Robespierre of the intellectuals. He attempted to extend the attack to writers hated by the Communist Party. But he was not as bloodthirsty against his right-wing colleagues as has often been made out. He stood up for Drieu la Rochelle and for his former publisher, Robert Denoël.
The trials of journalists and writers continued in December and into January 1945. This rapid rhythm was explained by Pierre-Henri Teitgen, who became de Gaulle’s next Minister of Justice: ‘these “intellectuals” had provided the prosecution case for their own trial during the Occupation. It was only necessary to reread their articles and other published work to establish, without any argument, the indictment they deserved before sending them in front of the court.’ The result was that writers were tried while the clamour for vengeance was at its peak.
On 29 December, however, when Henri Béraud, the editor of Grin-goire, was condemned to death, people were shocked. Béraud was right-wing, anti-Semitic and hated the British, but he had never written in favour of the Germans. Many suspected that jealousy had played a part. Béraud had been the best-paid journalist in France,