Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [98]
Gaston Gallimard agreed to back the publication and to give it office space; three of its editors – Paulhan, Camus and Queneau – were on Gallimard’s own editorial committee, to say nothing of the others who were his authors. The first problem was to secure a paper ration. Beauvoir and Leiris went to see Jacques Soustelle, de Gaulle’s Minister of Information, but he was reluctant because Raymond Aron, who had turned against the General, was on their committee. In fact, Aron was to leave not long afterwards because of an ideological dispute.
Simone de Beauvoir saw Les Temps modernes as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrian ideal’. Almost immediately, however, she found herself swamped by manuscripts and besieged by earnestly ambitious young writers. It seemed as if half the young men on the Left Bank had been working on equally gloomy, pseudo-existentialist novels of the Resistance, because that was what was expected of them.
The theatre in France during the last two years of the Occupation had certainly proved itself alive, even if many leading members of the profession found themselves under clouds of varying sizes at the Liberation.
Parisian audiences had been educated to the avant-garde in the 1920s, and in the years before the war the playwrights Anouilh, Giraudoux, Salacrou and Cocteau had already prepared the ground for what is seen as the post-Liberation theatre.
Sartre’s first play, The Flies, was performed in 1943. So too was Giraudoux’s Sodom et Gomorrhe, although it was produced without France’s greatest actor-manager, Louis Jouvet, who had taken his company into a nomadic exile in South America. One of the great successes had been Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Paul Claudel’s The Satin Shoe, but Sartre and Beauvoir felt unable to judge the play objectively, so sickened were they by Claudel’s ‘Ode au maréchal’. Early in 1944, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone appeared, then shortly before the invasion of Normandy Sartre’s Huis clos was put on at the Vieux-Colombier. This play about hell, which Brasillach went to see before going into hiding, was the most influential. The notion that ‘Hell is other people’ passed into international currency.
More plays from the existentialist group followed over the next two years. In 1945 Albert Camus’s Caligula received great acclaim, while Simone de Beauvoir’s Useless Mouths was regarded as too mechanical. Then Sartre returned in the following year with Men Without Shadows and The Respectful Prostitute at the Théâtre Antoine, where his most politically important play, Dirty Hands, would follow. But while Sartre headed back towards realism with issues and moral dilemmas, the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ of Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, all influenced by Pirandello, was about to wander off in a very different direction.
Without doubt, the greatest success of the immediate post-war theatre was Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot at the Théâtre de l’Athénée. Written during the Occupation, shortly before Giraudoux’s death early in 1944, it was produced by Louis Jouvet at the end of the following year. Even if the story today may seem a curious piece of radical chic fantasy (an inspired madwoman, in a sort of modern court of miracles, manages to trick the exploiters of Paris by playing upon their greed and to imprison them in the city’s sewers), Jouvet’s direction, Christian Bérard’s sets and the acting were superb. When the play opened in December 1945 and, for a long time to come, the little theatre was packed with both the beau monde and bohemia.
The world of painting and sculpture was also undergoing a period of intellectual and political ferment. When the Salon d’Automne opened on 6 October 1944, it was called the ‘Salon de la Libération’. All painters deemed collaborationist were banned, including Derain, Van Dongen, Segonzac,