Hunger for the New
After the Occupation, the urge to express opinions was quite overwhelming for a cerebral society.
Galtier-Boissiere was amused by the instant outpouring of prose by the French writers who had refused to write for
the collaborationist press. An astonishing number of newspapers and literary magazines appeared, feeding the hunger
for ideas.
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The greatest problem was the shortage of paper: Le Monde had to be reduced to tabloid size, and became
known as the `Demi-Monde'. Paper supplies permitting, Les Lettres francaises was selling over 100,000 copies by the
end of 1944.
The main complaint about this deluge of printed matter, however, was the similarity of political approach. Even the
review Esprit, published by Emmanuel Mounier, propagated a form of Christian Socialism which sought to bridge the chasm
between Catholicism and Communism. Like many who shared the ideals of the Resistance, Mounier now believed that revolution
was a vital renewal of the organism; this even led him into accepting the brutal transformation of Soviet-occupied Europe
as natural in the circumstances.
The Liberation produced a heady mood for the young. 'To be twenty or twenty-five in September 1944,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, `seemed a great stroke of luck: all roads opened up. Journalists, writers, budding film-makers
discussed, planned, made decisions with passion, as if their future depended only on themselves ... I was old. I was
thirty-six.'
`Oh wonders!' wrote Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, of his first sight of the Boulevard Saint-Michel after the war. `I was
struck by the extraordinary concentration of young people, the highest in France to the square kilometre, in a nation
which appeared to be a country of old people.'
Parisian youth had not been docile during the Occupation. Their response to the Petainist slogan of `Work, Nation, Family'
had taken the form of `resistance, black market, surprise-party’. Many had acted as messengers or deliverers of tracts
and underground newspapers; others dealt on the edges of the black market. Being forbidden, such activities acquired
their own mystique of revolt. And 'surprise-parties' represented their revolt against a regime which they saw as
boy-scouting in jackboots.
Some of them were zazous - a shamelessly unheroic and anarchic movement of disdain for Vichy, the Germans and all
military values everywhere. Zazous, with their long greasy hair, have sometimes been described as the first beatniks,
but the boys' fashion for long jackets with high collars and the girls' for very short skirts made them look more like
teddy boys in the 1950s; while the anti-virile ethos of the boys had more in common with the hippies of the 1960s.
To avoid military service, zazous used to crush three aspirins into a cigarette which they smoked an hour before their
army medical examination. But zazous also ran a risk every time they appeared in public. If a gang of fascist youths
from the Parti Populaire Francais spotted a zazou, they would beat him up or, if a girl, torment her mercilessly.
Most zazous were children of the wealthy middle class. They organized their 'surprise-parties' - also known as
'pot-lucks', since American terms were all the rage - in the apartments of parents temporarily absent, with friends
and gatecrashers bringing food and drink. These parties were essentially a response to Vichy's ban on jazz and dancing,
so if you owned some Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller records the word spread. Because of the curfew, the parties often
went on all night. After the Liberation, the real zazou fashion died out, but the word remained a term of abuse, employed
by the puritan left and right.
The Liberation changed everything for the young, or the 'J3s' as they were often called, after the name of the
ration category for fifteen- to twenty-one-year-olds. There was no more curfew, so they savoured the freedom of the
streets at night, even if that meant freezing on street corners outside jazz clubs in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Staying up
all night retained the thrill of the illicit. A lack of food produced a continual light-headed, sometimes vertiginous
sensation. They ignored the last metro at eleven - many did not even have the fare - so they slept in doorways and
walked home at dawn. The luckiest had roller-skates, on which they crossed half of Paris.
Clothes - best of all genuine American clothes - could be bought for almost nothing in the flea-market of Saint-Ouen,
where clothes sent by the Jewish community in New York to help fellow Jews were on sale. So by giving each other crew-cuts
imitated from the GIs, and dressing themselves up in second-hand check shirts with trousers cut so short they came
halfway down the shin, with vilely striped socks and tennis shoes, the ex-zazous created a new style.
Students seemed to live off nervous energy and ideas. The greatest hunger was for reading material, yet there was so
little time and so much to read - Aragon, Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as Apollinaire, Lautreamont, Gide, and
now all the American novels which proliferated in translation, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Damon Runyan, Thornton Wilder
and Thomas Wolfe. Everything formerly banned must be seen - whether the plays of Garcia Lorca or the films of Bunuel.
Philosophy student or not, you needed to be able to discuss Hegel's master-slave paradigm, the collected works of
Karl Marx, and existentialism's less than apostolic succession from Soren Kierkegaard and the phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl, via Martin Heidegger, then Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's professor of philosophy, Beaufret, had an immense prestige among students: he had actually
met Heidegger. Young Communist students, swollen with the importance of their historical mission, were far from
impressed. In the eves of the party, Heidegger was a Nazi and existentialism was decadent.
Lycees as well as university faculties in Paris were very politicized, a situation which had grown far worse during
the Occupation, when right-wing students had been recruited by the Milice to spy on their classmates. Now the Communists
attempted to exert a political and intellectual hegemony. Their first target was Catholic students, but by manipulating
issues anyone even on the left who did not demonstrate a strong commitment to progressisme as defined by the Communist
Party was `objectively' a fascist. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie made an appalling gaffe when he confessed in front of a
Communist that he had been impressed by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Every area of art came in for a relentless
Marxist-Leninist critique. To admit that you enjoyed Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes demonstrated a pathetic and
depasse sentimentality as well as reactionary tendencies.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery had written of 1940 in Pilote de guerre, `La defaite divise.' The Liberation managed at
first to unite the majority of the country under the banner of progressisme, as the opinion polls demonstrated in
the massive support for the nationalization of banks and heavy industry. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of `Paris in the
year zero'. And indeed for Communists and their fellow-travellers there was a sense of marching with history.
Another sign of the times, as Galtier-Boissiere pointed out, was Vogue of all magazines - publishing a poem by
Eluard and a portrait of Marcel Cachin, the veteran Communist.
Extract from “Paris After The Liberation 1944-1949”, Written by Antony Beevor. Penguin Books, United States of America: 2004.
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