The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War: (1944-47)

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The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War Michael Kelly

The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War

Also by Michael Kelly FRENCH CULTURE AND SOCIETY PIERRE BOURDIEU: LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND EDUCATION (editor) FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES: AN INTRODUCTION (editor) FRANCE: NATION AND REGIONS (editor) HEGEL IN FRANCE MODERN FRENCH MARXISM PIONEER OF THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL: THE IDEAS AND INFLUENCE OF EMMANUEL MOUNIER

The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War Michael Kelly

© Michael Kelly 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3376–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelly, Michael, 1946– The cultural and intellectual rebuilding of France after the Second World War / Michael Kelly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-3376-6 (cloth) 1. France–Civilization–1945- 2. National characteristics, French. 3. Social change–France. I. Title. DC33.7.K44 2004 944.083–dc22 2004045801

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. Contexts for Rebuilding

12

2. Inventing a Language

33

3. Finding the Symbols

59

4. Workers and Intellectuals

84

5. Regendering the Nation

106

6. The Humanist Moment

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7. The Battle of Ideas

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Illustrations 1. Phili (Philippe Grach), Libération, 1944. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Centre d’études Edmond-Michelet, Brive, France 2. René Brantonne, Paris se libère, 1944 copyright holder not located 3. Paul Colin, Libération, August 1944 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 4. Francis Gruber, Job, 1944 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 5. Raymond Gid, Retour à la France, retour à la vie, 1945 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 6. Cropping at Gisors, 1944. Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, negative no. B9818 7. André Fougeron, Renaissance française, July 1945 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 8. Georges Rouault, Homo homini lupus, 1944–5 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 9. Denis Thébault, Depuis un an ça va déjà mieux, 1945 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004 10. Denis Thébault, Retroussons nos manches ça ira encore mieux, 1945 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2004

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Acknowledgements The research and writing of this book is the result of a dialogue with many academic colleagues, students, friends and family, stretching over several years. It began in the colloquia and discussions that led up to the launching of the journal French Cultural Studies, which continues to inspire my reflection, and of which I am proud to be an Associate Editor. The dialogue was enriched through the production of French Cultural Studies: an Introduction, which I co-edited with Jill Forbes, and the help of over a dozen contributors. It continued in two courses I taught at the University of Southampton, in which students contributed numerous insights, and in numerous conferences at which I presented one or other aspect of the research. I should like to pay particular tribute to four colleagues who are no longer here to share my gratitude: Donald Charlton, who was a pathfinder in French studies; Jill Forbes, whose energy and strategic sense shaped French cultural studies from the beginning; Claire Duchen, whose insights brought a cutting edge to French women’s studies; and Richard Sacker, whose work on the French Communist Party was a model of lucidity. I am grateful for the generous assistance of the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Southampton in providing support for periods of research leave. The book has been enriched by more people than I can hope to mention by name, but I hope the following will recognise traces of their assistance and accept my thanks for it: Margaret Atack, Nick Atkin, Rodney Ball, Alan Bance, Rosemary Böck, Bill Brooks, Christophe Campos, Jackie Clarke, Martyn Cornick, David Coward, Robert Crawshaw, Máire Cross, Ceri Crossley, Hannah Diamond, Philip Dine, David Drake, Hélène Eck, Elizabeth Fallaize, Chris Flood, John Flower, Hilary Footitt, Joe Golsan, Bert Gordon, Claire Gorrara, David Hanley, Alec Hargreaves, Nicholas Hewitt, Diana Holmes, Alice Kaplan, Roderick Kedward, Bill Kidd, Corran Laurens, Michel Leymarie, Sylvie Lindeperg, David Looseley, Bill Marshall, Pascal Ory, Keith Reader, Brian Rigby, Kristin Ross, David Scott, Michael Scriven, Naomi Segal, Max Silverman, Jean-François Sirinelli, Michel Trebitsch, Steven Ungar, Cécile Velu, Susan Weiner, Sarah Wilson, Nancy Wood. None of this work would have been possible without the love, support and encouragement of my family, in particular my ix

x Acknowledgements

sons, Tom Kelly and Paul Kelly, and my wife, Jo Doyle, who kept me to a promise. They have offered constant encouragement, all the support I could have wished, and much much more. The book is dedicated to them. MHK Southampton February 2004

Introduction

Reinventing France France reinvented itself in the aftermath of the Second World War. Emerging from the war and a succession of foreign military interventions, the French political and intellectual elites embraced regime change and launched an urgent programme of nation building. The way in which they rebuilt their nation might hold lessons for other countries in the present day, where embattled national elites confront the strategic task of building or rebuilding a nation after conflict and regime change. The leaders of former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, might well examine post-conflict France for approaches that could be applied in their own context, as well as for insight into the difficulties that might have to be overcome, and the price that might have to be paid for success. This book focuses on intellectual and cultural processes, which are perhaps less tangible and less measurable than rebuilding a shattered economy and constructing workable political structures. But it shows how the subtle processes of intellectual and cultural reconstruction proved vital for France, enabling a broken and divided country to re-imagine itself as a community and piece together a viable sense of itself. Over a period of two or three years, the French elites pursued an endeavour of dogged ‘bricolage’,1 which combined high strategy with the spirit of resourceful improvisation, known as the ‘Système D’.2 In the process they created a sense of the new France, which reality might in due course match. The first steps towards new political institutions were faltering and conflicted, and the economic miracle of the ‘thirty glorious years’ was a long time coming. But these post-war years were marked by remarkable success in the cultural and intellectual sphere, where a 1

2 The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War

French national identity was rebuilt, with all its deep ambiguities, triumphant gains and painful losses. This was a mythical time, in the sense both that myths flourished and that the period subsequently became a myth itself.3 The established images, ideas and values which had dominated France’s recent past were largely rendered unacceptable at the end of the war. Their potential replacements were little known at best. It was therefore a moment when identities emerged that are still the dominant face of France for its own inhabitants and for the rest of the world. As a result, subsequent French accounts of this period have been strongly affected by the logic of myth, in which narratives carry a strong charge of implicit justification and exhortation. These stories of yesterday are embedded for always in the field of present-day French cultural memory, overlaid with today’s political and cultural connotations. No doubt the same logic attends all historical narratives, but the foundational position of this period stems from the perception that it is a break-point in history, and that the end of the Second World War is the starting point for contemporary France. On closer inspection, the period lacks clear boundaries. One historian has recently proposed the notion of ‘the long liberation’, suggesting that the liberation struggles began from the signing of the Armistice in 1940, and that in important respects they remain unfinished to the present day.4 This study will focus on the period of three years that stretches from the Normandy landings in the spring of 1944 to the onset of the Cold War in France in 1947. During the summer of 1944, France experienced foreign military intervention and regime change. The provisional government of General de Gaulle, implanted in the wake of the Allied landings, had the task of reconstructing the country in complex post-conflict circumstances. The economic and political aspects of reconstruction were daunting and laborious. But it was at least as important and no less difficult to achieve a cultural and intellectual reconstruction. The challenge was to rebuild a sense of national identity capable of transcending the divisions that took France to the brink of civil war in 1944, in the confrontation between the forces of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime and Resistance movements. The new identity would only be sustainable in the longer term if it could accommodate the long-standing political and cultural divisions, later termed the ‘Franco-French war’, which had boiled up regularly into bloodshed over the previous century and a half in revolutions, revolts and restorations.5 Reinventing France for the second half of the twentieth century, it was

Introduction 3

crucial to reshape the hearts and minds of the people and rebuild the nation as an ‘imagined community’ to which they could feel they belonged. In the event, under the whip of necessity, French national identity was reinvented at astonishing speed through its culture. It was achieved by a new generation of political elites, under the initial leadership of Charles de Gaulle, and by a young generation of writers, artists and academics, who developed new cultural and intellectual resources from the rubble of the old. The cultural and intellectual synthesis they created enabled the nation to reunite, and return to a leading role in the international arena. It still forms the bedrock of contemporary France. In the following pages, we shall see how France rebuilt and reinvented itself symbolically, using the available cultural materials of language, images and ideas. Though locked in bitter ideological and political conflicts, the French elites struggled towards agreement on the words to describe what had happened in the recent past and what they hoped for the future. Writers and artists built on the long-term involvement of the state in national culture and, working with symbols, constructed a consensual national identity, which recognised and negotiated the complexities and ambiguities of the recent past. This identity took overriding priority over the diverse social identities, especially those of class and gender. Workers subordinated the defence of their working conditions and class interests to the greater good of the nation as a whole, while intellectuals reluctantly abandoned their professional autonomy to play their part as national assets. Though France was symbolised as a woman, in practice, women were excluded from the sphere of public life, while men reasserted their dominance and set about the task of rebuilding their masculinity and their country. This new configuration of identities was embedded in a widely agreed system of values, based on a revitalised humanism, to which all intellectual movements were obliged to subscribe. But within it, the contending intellectual movements of existentialism, Catholic personalism and Marxism battled for the hearts and minds of the nation, propelling a new generation of French intellectuals to international prominence. The successes achieved were substantial, though they came at the cost of denials, ambiguities and compromises. Consequently, the French experience may hold lessons for more recent post-conflict situations in other countries. Conversely, the perspective of the present day may enable different patterns to be discerned in the French developments of the immediate post-war period.


Military intervention The circumstances in which the war ended in France are well documented.6 The events have been recounted many times in France and internationally, and in every medium of communication. Each narration offers its distinctive interpretation of these complex and ambiguous events. Contemporary accounts varied enormously, and later accounts have varied just as much. The quantity of material now available concerning this period makes any account necessarily selective, and new interpretations are emerging constantly in France and elsewhere. The present study proposes to interpret the events in a way that draws links with what is happening in the world sixty years later. It suggests that there are parallels between France in the aftermath of the Second World War, and other countries in the aftermath of more recent wars, such as conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many differences, in both the context of the time and in the unfolding of events, but there are also striking similarities. Three aspects of war, in particular, have now become a familiar part of international relations: external military intervention, regime change and nation building. France experienced military intervention and regime change in 1944: both were relatively rapid and dramatic. The rebuilding of the nation was a longer and more complex process, which sat uneasily with the circumstances from which it arose, as it still does. But within the undoubted success of national reconstruction, there is a paradox. While the economic and political dimensions of reconstruction have left explicit traces, the cultural reconstruction, rebuilding a national identity, has left little explicit evidence that it took place. It is as if the task of cultural reconstruction included erasure of its own historicity. Why and how this happened will be an important part of the story that follows. There were several external military interventions on French soil during the Second World War, involving forces of the German and Italian Axis and the Allied forces of America, Britain and their partners. The two most important interventions still mark the beginning and end of the war for France. The German invasion of May 1940 brought an end to the ‘phoney war’ and secured the defeat of French and British forces within a few weeks, leading to the Armistice of July 1940. Four years later, in June 1944, the Allied landings in Normandy opened up a Western Front and drove the Germans from most of French territory by the end of the autumn. The role of French forces in both stages of the conflict remains a sensitive matter. The French

Introduction 5

historian Marc Bloch named the events of 1940 a ‘strange defeat’, suggesting that defeat was in part a result of French failures, including deficiencies in military strategy and political will, if not active complicity with the enemy on the part of some of the French elites.7 Other commentators have also pointed to the anti-war role of the banned French Communist Party as a factor in the defeat. But, however much the French military and civilian war effort might be criticised, there remains little doubt that the defeat was primarily a result of the superior military strategy of the Wehrmacht. The role of French forces in 1944 has been equally contentious. The Resistance movements and the military units of the Free French forces undoubtedly played an important role in the battles to drive out the German occupying forces. How significant their military weight was remains a matter for heated debate. The overwhelming weight of arms was certainly provided by the British and American forces, but the French role was not negligible, either militarily or politically. The Second Armoured Division of Colonel Leclerc played a highly symbolic role in the battle for control of Paris, and the French regular army was part of the Allied advance into Germany, with a French signature on the German document of surrender and a share in the occupation of Germany. At the time, de Gaulle frequently protested that he and his forces were not given sufficient prominence in the campaigns, while his allies equally frequently protested that he gave insufficient recognition to their contribution in freeing his country from occupation. Similar reproaches continue to be exchanged at moments of diplomatic tension between the countries.8 An even more delicate issue is the involvement of French forces in fighting against Free French and Allied forces. An array of French paramilitary forces supported the Vichy government, including Joseph Darnand’s Milice française, while others took up arms in support of the German occupying forces, including several thousand French recruits to the Waffen SS.9 Many young men in Alsace were also conscripted directly into the German army after the province was annexed. Military action by French forces against other French forces was an integral part of the battles of 1944, to the extent that in some instances it came close to conditions of civil war. The conflict was therefore a complex one, especially in the involvement of French participants. But from a military point of view, these complexities were on the margins of the conflict, and the big battalions were undoubtedly the external forces deployed by the German occupying army on the one side, and the American and British Allies on the other.


Regime change If the military interventions had complexities, the processes of regime change had even more. At its simplest, both in 1940 and 1944, the French regime changed as a direct result of external military intervention. However, this simplicity conceals great complexity. In 1940, the remnants of the National Assembly of the embattled Third Republic handed over full powers to Marshal Pétain, who negotiated an Armistice and declared the establishment of the French state (État français ), with its capital in Vichy and authority mainly over those parts of France not directly administered by the Germans. Much debate has revolved around whether this was a legitimate state authority. Certainly, it began with broad popular support in France, and it could reasonably claim formal legitimacy by virtue of the constitutional procedures by which it was established. It was given diplomatic recognition as the legitimate French government by other countries, apart from Britain. But until very recent years, successive French governments recognised Vichy only as a de facto regime, without legal legitimacy. At all events, it was not a simple puppet government, installed by military victors, but a regime established by French agency. The intermittent French bouts of anxiously re-examining its activities over the last sixty years, aptly described by Henry Rousso as the ‘Vichy Syndrome’, are clear evidence that Vichy was a French issue, rather than a foreign imposition.10 There is no doubt that the regime would not have been able to survive without the support of the German occupying authorities, and in reality, it was only one part of the governing arrangements those authorities set in place. The German authorities made administrative decisions for zones they directly occupied. Apart from a strip along the Atlantic coast, these zones were located in the north and north-eastern parts of the country, and the largest of them was governed from Paris. A south-western area was also governed for a period by Italian forces. Increasingly, the Germans’ writ ran in the southern zone that was ostensibly unoccupied, and when they occupied it militarily in November 1942, French selfgovernment in this area became largely nominal. The Germans also made considerable use of parts of the French elites, who were content, through ideology or opportunism, to play a supporting role. When the regime changed again in 1944, some of the same conditions applied. The role of external forces was complex. There is no doubt that de Gaulle’s provisional government would not have been able to establish itself without the support of the advancing Allied forces. However, it was far from being an arrangement imposed by

Introduction 7

the British and American Allies. On the contrary, the American government developed plans for a military administration, the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), comparable to the arrangements that were later imposed on defeated Germany. President Roosevelt’s advisers hankered after a new regime under the unifying leadership of Marshal Pétain, following elections they planned to organise.11 That seemed to them a better bulwark against communist influence. De Gaulle struggled long and hard against this plan, gaining support from the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and then from the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower. As a result, he was able to declare the establishment of a provisional government a few days before the Normandy landings, and with the initially grudging permission of the Allies he installed his own officials to provide de facto administration for the liberated French territory as the armies advanced. Over the next four and a half months, de Gaulle’s diplomatic efforts, combined with the military success of the Free French forces, finally secured formal Allied recognition of his government on 23 October 1944. Recognition confirmed the independent self-governing status of France, but did not wholly abolish the spectre of military administration. This remained as a largely unspoken possibility if the French government should fail to achieve national unity or fail to prevent a communist takeover. Moreover, political independence had to be understood in the context of France’s limited military capability and the devastated condition of its economy, both of which imposed significant dependence on external assistance, primarily from the United States. The internal circumstances of regime change were just as complex. In the most public aspects of government, it was a new regime, and some historians have gone so far as to describe it as a political revolution.12 The new governing cadres were largely composed of people appointed from among those who had joined de Gaulle in London or Algiers, and to a lesser extent those who had shown their mettle in the Resistance movements. They had typically begun their careers under the Third Republic, achieving middle ranking status, like de Gaulle himself, who was an up-and-coming young one-star general when the war broke out. Now, having mainly declined to serve under Pétain, the new governing cadres received an accelerated promotion to senior positions under the provisional government. But they were not numerous enough to fill all the functions of government, let alone the wider state apparatus, and as a result there was a high level of continuity of personnel with the Vichy regime. The career of the young François


Mitterrand is a well-known example of this.13 At the beginning of a career that later led to his election as President of the Republic, he occupied responsible positions in Vichy and in the Resistance, before becoming a junior minister in the provisional government. The postwar campaign to purify national life from the influence of former collaborators and Vichy sympathisers led to many older figures withdrawing from public life, at least for a year or two, thus increasing the ‘new look’ of the post-conflict regime. However, outside these changes, there was a great deal of continuity of personnel within the state apparatus, especially in the wider public sector, including the police, the legal and medical professions, education and the nationalised industries. The example of Maurice Papon illustrates this. His wartime role in organising official campaigns against Jews did not prevent him rising to senior government positions during a long and distinguished post-war career. Only in his old age was he brought to account, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for complicity in crimes against humanity.14 His is one of several cases where the continuity of civil service personnel between Vichy and later administrations has led to high-profile trials in recent years on issues of human rights and war crimes. As a result, the regime change of 1944 must be seen as a more complex transition in which the break with the past is moderated by continuities.

Nation building Following external intervention and regime change, the provisional government faced a number of strategic issues on the military, economic and political fronts. It needed to bring a successful conclusion to the war, to reconstruct the country at home, and to restore its position internationally as a world power. Underpinning all of these was the overwhelming need to establish national unity. De Gaulle articulated this clearly from the very beginning, and it formed the main thrust of his first speech in Paris, on 25 August 1944, at the City Hall. The nation would not permit, in the situation in which she finds herself, that this unity should be broken. The nation is well aware that in order to conquer, to reconstruct herself, to be great, she must have all her children with her.15 De Gaulle had an ideal vision of the French nation, and considered himself as embodying it. Even those who did not share his political or

Introduction 9

ideological stances knew the importance of reaching agreement on a common programme. They also recognised that the future of France as an independent country would be seriously undermined if its leading elites could not reach a high level of consensus on a shared set of values and a common purpose, encapsulated in a national identity around which the whole country could unite. The three strategic priorities of victory, reconstruction and greatness were closely interlinked. Victory was the most urgent, and it was an immediate priority in 1944 to drive the German occupying forces out of France. Even more important was to ensure that French forces were clearly seen to play a full role in it. This was in part a matter of honour. France needed to expunge the dishonour brought upon it by those French people who had collaborated with the Germans. The ‘small band of traitors who have gone over to the enemy’ were excluded from de Gaulle’s vision of the national community,16 and it was necessary to set as much distance as possible between them and the nation as a whole. Beyond that, it was important to ensure French involvement in the subsequent drive to defeat Germany in the wider war. In part, this too was a matter of honour, and perhaps revenge, but it was also a matter of establishing France among the victors rather than the vanquished at the end of the war. For this to be plausible, it was crucial that the war aims should not be contested within France, but rather that they should appear as the manifestation of a shared national will. The difficulty of achieving this should not be underestimated, particularly in resolving the deep-seated differences between de Gaulle’s regular army and the irregular forces of the Resistance movements. For many in the Resistance, and not just the communists, the expulsion of the Germans offered the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. They were reluctant to throw their hand in with a conservative nationalist like de Gaulle, whose aspirations were the antithesis of their own. In the event, these tensions were defused, partly by the iron discipline of the Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow to desist from any revolutionary attempts to seize state power. French participation in victory on its own territory was successfully achieved. And its role in the overall victory of the Allies in Europe was officially marked by the presence of the French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny at the formal German surrender on 9 May 1945. The success in participating in victory was a major step towards the other two strategic priorities. It was certainly a prerequisite for the campaign to recover France’s international standing, and it was of significant assistance in beginning economic and political reconstruction.


These priorities were by their nature more long term and both concerned areas in which France continued to be deeply divided. In the international field, the new government achieved early diplomatic successes, including a share in the occupation of Germany and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. But the quest for international status also sowed the seeds of a long-term crisis in the sprawling colonial empire over which the administration sought to re-establish control. Within ten years French forces were driven out of Indo-China, forced to withdraw from the Suez Canal, and drawn into a war in Algeria, which came close to precipitating civil war within metropolitan France. In the domestic reconstruction too, there were early successes and later crises. On the economic front, the trades unions and the parties of the Left restrained labour disputes. Extensive nationalisations were implemented with little opposition. And a national economic planning framework was laid down under the supervision of Jean Monnet. These were followed by a large-scale economic aid programme from the United States through the Marshall Plan, and then by the economic miracle which brought prosperity in the 1950s, and the formation of the European Common Market under the Treaty of Rome in 1957. But here too, there were the seeds of later crisis. The working population bore great hardships during the later 1940s, exacerbated by a series of unusually severe winters, and leading eventually to a wave of bitter strikes. A pattern of disputes and repressions was re-established, which has continued to flare up periodically, as it did in the strikes and demonstrations of 1968. In the political domain, the provisional government was able to draw on a broad consensus in setting up the institutions of post-war political life. Its first crisis was the surprise resignation of General de Gaulle in January 1946, in protest against the growing influence of political parties. Over a period of two years, France struggled to find a constitution acceptable to its electorate, and was then plunged into the early polarisations of the Cold War. The emergent political institutions proved sufficiently robust to survive. But succeeding governments were notoriously short-lived. The Fourth Republic was dogged by the fragility of its governing coalitions and by the existence of major political movements outside the governing groups: the Gaullists on the Right and the communists on the Left. France’s successive crises in the international sphere and in the domestic economic and political spheres have provided an endlessly fertile object of analysis and debate, and it is not the intention of this study to delve deeply into them. But amid the disputes and polemics of the post-war years, and the long running Franco-French war, there was only one occasion after 1944 on which the integrity

Introduction 11

of the national community was threatened. This was at the time of the attempted coup d’état of May 1958, triggered by the settler community in Algiers, which eventually led to de Gaulle’s return to government and his creation of the Fifth Republic.17 Apart from this moment of crisis, the ability of the French people to maintain a national unity that transcends otherwise bitter and fundamental divisions has generally been taken for granted over the past sixty years. However, in order for it to remain effective, there must be many bonds holding the nation together, which are stronger than the pressures pulling it apart. The immediate post-war period is a privileged time to observe how these bonds work. The political and economic bonds were badly depleted, and the less tangible bindings of culture and identity were called upon to take much of the strain. The effectiveness with which they worked suggests that their strength is considerable, and that their role in rebuilding the nation was also much greater than is generally recognised.

1 Contexts for Rebuilding

The imperative of unity The French political and intellectual elites worked hard to rebuild a shared identity. From the perspective of hindsight, it seems self-evident that they should have succeeded, and unthinkable that they might have failed. But recent history now offers many examples of countries whose leaders and peoples lose the will or the ability to remain united. The former Yugoslavia is a conspicuous European example of internal divisions widening to breaking point, once the unifying bonds of common purpose and shared narratives were loosened. The former Soviet Union followed a similar path. More recently, in post-war Iraq, the diverse languages, identities and beliefs have built strong internal pressures to divide the country into separate fragments. The consequences of the collapse of national unity are usually damaging and frequently disastrous. The amicable break-up of Czechoslovakia into two successor states in 1992 is an unusually benign example, while the bitterly contested break-up of nearby Yugoslavia at the same period is confirmation of the potential for disaster. Seeing the success of French national reconstruction in the context of other countries with a different experience is a reminder that the French success was not a foregone conclusion, and that there were serious risks to be overcome. French efforts to rebuild their national identity were in many respects dependent on the more tangible areas of reconstruction, especially the rebuilding of the economy and the re-establishment of government and administration. But the rebuilding of France in the hearts and minds of the people was no less vital to the country’s recovery. It had an important role in motivating people for the immediate tasks of repairing shattered infrastructures, getting the wheels of industry 12

Contexts for Rebuilding 13

turning again, and making the sacrifices needed if the country was to achieve future prosperity. It was crucial to the task of motivating different groups and sectors of French society to work together, to identify common aims and to set aside, or at least surmount, the long-standing and often bitter divisions of interests, aspirations and ideology. The task was seen as all the more vital since there were many in France who ascribed the military defeat of 1940 to a moral failure, rooted in national divisions and disunity. This had been a recurrent theme in the early months of Vichy, and was echoed at the other end of the political spectrum by the historian Marc Bloch, whose influential analysis of the ‘strange defeat’ was published posthumously after the war.1 De Gaulle’s war memoirs also suggest that he ascribed the pre-war stagnation and military failures in large measure to the spirit of the Third Republic, especially its traditions of political discord, complacency and impotence.2 There was therefore a widespread desire to avoid replicating the same divisions after the war. National unity was not the result of culture alone, but a shared national identity could not have been achieved or maintained without a strongly unifying movement in the cultural realm. This chapter will focus on ways of understanding French national identity, in its cultural and historical contexts. It will analyse the nature of national identity, culture and the state. It will explore the relations between them, tracing those elements that made the situation of post-war France specific, particularly in its emergence from a long and contested history. Although the end of the war was felt as a radical break, the rebuilding necessarily drew on the cultural materials already available, and took place in the context of a previous history of relations between national identity, the state and cultural practices in France.

Towards a national identity The idea of a nation goes back to antiquity, though it was not used as a political concept in English until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea of nationalism is an even later product, dating from the nineteenth century.3 One of the earliest theorists of the nation was the French writer Ernest Renan, who famously declared that a nation is ‘a daily plebiscite’. 4 His concept of the nation was more complex, however, emphasising that material factors, such as geography, were insufficient on their own to form a nation. He argued that a nation requires a spiritual dimension, a ‘soul’, of which one component was the continuing consent of its members, the daily plebiscite. The other


component of the national soul was shared historical memories and tales of sacrifice. Renan was conscious that his ideas were somewhat out of fashion when he expressed them, in 1882, and Eric Hobsbawm has shown that the emergence of nation and nationalism as concepts in political and historical studies is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Their rise to prominence in these fields dates only from the late 1960s.5 The concept of national identity developed even more recently, becoming a pervasive concept in the last two decades of the twentieth century.6 Its emergence accompanied the worldwide reassertion of national particularities towards the end of the Cold War, in conditions where individual states and other national groupings were more interdependent than ever before in material and organisational terms. Rather than heralding the end of national particularities, the decline of economic and political differences between countries has led to a corresponding increase in the assertion of cultural differentiation, based in a sense of identity. The principal theoretical framework in which national identity is now discussed in the English-speaking world is that presented in Benedict Anderson’s influential book, Imagined Communities. Anderson’s central concept is that the nation is ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.7 The emphasis on the imagined nature of the community encapsulates Anderson’s key insight that nations are to a significant extent sustained by cultural means, through forms that promote widely shared identification with a national community and its representations. Following Renan, French theorists have echoed this emphasis. The historian Pierre Nora has emphasised the importance of ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) in constructing French national identity.8 The sociologist Dominque Schnapper similarly accepts the key role of historical memory in national identity, but also emphasises the importance of a shared language and of social practices, such as those surrounding food and drink, which are particularly important in France.9 During the 1990s, there were many studies of the cultural dimensions of national identity, in particular exploring the importance of narrative.10 As a result, the idea has been widely accepted that the nation is, in Bhabha’s phrase, ‘a system of cultural signification’.11 Some resulting interpretations have suggested that nations are entirely constituted by narration and imagination, and are therefore purely cultural constructs. This is an unnecessarily reductive view, which ignores many of the dimensions in which a nation is located. Political and economic factors cannot be reduced to culture, even in its broadest sense. Nor


can geography, biology, linguistics and many other domains that are necessary to understand the complexities of a nation or a national movement. Nevertheless, the concept of the nation as an imagined community, sustained by cultural means, is a valuable insight, which reasserts the importance of culture in the building and maintenance of a nation, alongside and in constant interaction with other social processes. If the nation is viewed as a process, in which national identity is constantly being reiterated and reworked, it is inseparable from the aspiration to weave a single narrative, however complex, and to achieve greater national unification. The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his monumental work The Identity of France, argued that this was a necessary corollary of identity. A nation can have its being only at the price of being forever in search of itself, forever transforming itself in the direction of its logical development, always measuring itself against others and identifying itself with the best, the most essential part of its being; a nation will consequently recognize itself in certain stock images, in certain passwords known to the initiated (whether the latter are an elite or the mass of people, which is not always the case); it will recognize itself in a thousand touchstones, beliefs, ways of speech, excuses, in an unbounded subconscious, in the flowing together of many obscure currents, in a shared ideology, shared myths, shared fantasies. And any national identity necessarily implies a degree of national unity, of which it is in some sense the reflection, the transposition and the condition.12 Braudel’s reflections point not only to the process of cultural recognition by which national identity is constructed, but also to the interaction between national identity and national unity. Identity cannot emerge without a degree of unity, which it reflects. But conversely, national unity is conditional on a sense of identity, which helps to produce it. The interdependence between the two provides a motive force for national development. His suggestion that a nation must forever be in search of itself is intended to point to the dynamic nature of nations, which are constantly developing. But it is a particularly appropriate insight, when applied to the period following the war. Rather than a steady evolution, the post-war reconstruction was closer to an act of creation, in which the debris of a country in ruins was sifted for the makings of a new nation.


The role of the state The French state itself was urgently in need of rebuilding, but it also played an important role in directing the rebuilding process. It was an organising force within French culture, but was also a major component of the national identity that needed to be reconstructed. The complexity of any state’s relationship to national identity and culture is usually acknowledged in general theories of the state, though it tends to be overshadowed by more narrowly political issues. Theories centre on the political role of the state in governing and administering the life of society, and wielding a range of powers within a framework of laws, rules and norms.13 Most theorists have accepted that the longterm survival of a state depends on its success in securing legitimacy in the eyes of its people, and perhaps also in the eyes of its neighbours. It achieves this through the manner of its formation, for example by democratic election, or through the benefits it confers on citizens or subjects, for example a stable framework of law and order. An important part of the state’s existence depends therefore on its ability to gain the approval and loyalty of the people it governs. Hegel puts this even more strongly, arguing that ‘the state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge and activity’14. The existence of the state is located directly in the habits and behaviour of its people collectively, and is therefore located indirectly in each individual, in their life and especially in their self-awareness. Within the intimate interaction between the state and society more broadly, the subjective commitment of individual citizens therefore assumes great importance. The French historian Pierre Rosanvallon suggests that the state, in France at least, can be analysed in terms of its four basic types of relationship with society.15 First, the state plays a constitutional role in organising administration and government; second, it establishes the main social institutions that keep the nation together; third, it assures support and protection for individuals; and fourth, it regulates the economy. As part of the state’s role in maintaining social institutions, Roasanvallon suggests that the state ‘produces the nation’.16 He emphasises the role of education and culture in this process, concluding that these are not ‘simple “domains” of State action: they are, like diplomacy or finances, this State’s very reason for existing’.17 His main focus is the nineteenth century, however, and looking at more recent French history, there is clearly a case for suggesting a fifth type of relationship between the state and society: that the state shapes the


citizens’ understanding of the nation and of their place within it, through education and culture. It is evidently a distinctive characteristic of modern French society, even if it has been sharply attacked by critics, such as Marc Fumaroli, who consider that state intervention is damaging to culture, which he regards as an essentially private matter.18 But if the state does ‘produce the nation’ through education and culture, the process is a reciprocal one. To some extent at least, education and culture also ‘produce’ the state. Rosanvallon’s notion of the state as a producer of the nation resonates with Anderson’s conception of the nation as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.19 Applied to the French situation, at least, the process of imagining is closely interwoven with the state. The limited, sovereign political community is a description that fits the French state like a glove. If the nation is an imagined entity, an ideological and cultural sign, then the state is the practical social organisation to which it points. In principle, the imagined national community may be in search of an actual state on which to confer its symbolic capital, in the same way that many national liberation movements aspire to selfdetermination and thence statehood. And if the imagined national community is predicated on the need for a state, so in a reciprocal way the operation of the modern state requires the support of an imagined national community, which will both bind its citizens together and bind them to the state. In France at the end of the war, the problem facing the French state was first to secure its own survival, and second to rebuild an imagined national community. To a large extent, the Vichy government succeeded in maintaining the state administrative apparatus intact throughout the war. This perhaps was the real content of Pétain’s claim that he acted as a shield for his country, where de Gaulle was its sword. What Pétain protected was not the French people but rather the French state, or at least most of it. Although his État français did not formally survive, this was in fact merely the temporary constitutional form of the regime from 1940 to 1944, a kind of place-holder for the highest governing levels of Rosanvallon’s first function of the state: its administrative structures and services. The remaining levels of these structures did survive, though, as did the state’s social and economic functions. During the four years of the war, the French state experienced great turbulence, with the collapse of the Third Republic, the relocation of its centre from Paris to Vichy, the emergence of a shadow government in London and later Algiers, and finally its reinstallation in Paris in


August 1944. But the administrative infrastructure survived these changes as it had survived the many previous changes of regime over a century and half. Monarchies, republics and empires came and went, each with their own constitution, but from the early nineteenth century, each regime largely continued the legal and administrative arrangements it inherited from its predecessor.20 After seventy years of Republican stability, Vichy reaccustomed France to the fragility of constitutions. Pétain’s État français was a provisional government in all but name, and never achieved the constitutional settlement to which it initially aspired. Consequently, the installation of de Gaulle’s provisional government could build on an essential continuity. His refusal to declare the Republic on his arrival in liberated Paris in August 1945 was in part a confirmation of this, rather than simply an ostentatious denial of the Vichy interlude and a return to the previous regime.21 De Gaulle was neither the first nor the last French political leader to invoke the distinction between the state and the regime, and to trade on the ambiguity of their relationship. With limited reorganisation and change of personnel, the French state made a relatively smooth transition from the Vichy regime to the provisional government. In the process, it became the chief motor of national unity.

The concept of culture If the state mobilises culture to build national identity, it is important to understand what culture is. It has become one of the most expanded terms in contemporary discourse, and as a result it is difficult to offer a comprehensive definition that does not spread the meaning so wide as to lose all its explanatory value.22 At its widest, culture has been conceived for over a century in the anthropological sense. The definition offered by Clifford Geertz has been widely adopted. For Geertz, culture ‘denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life’.23 In short, all human activities are cultural to the extent that they involve the transmission of meanings through symbolic forms. At its narrowest, culture is identified with ‘intellectual development’, or with a ‘group of products or achievements’ resulting from it.24 Acknowledging the exceptional complexity of the notion of culture, Raymond Williams identified a convergence between the anthropological conception and the more specialised if also more common understanding of culture as artistic


and intellectual activities. The effect of this convergence has been to extend the field of culture to a wider range of signifying practices, ‘from language through the arts and philosophy to journalism, fashion and advertising’. 25 More recently, Mike Featherstone has argued that the cultural sphere needs to be understood in a more differentiated way, which takes account of the countervailing tendencies towards greater autonomy (high culture) and towards production for popular markets (mass consumer culture). This conception would focus on ‘the long-term process of cultural production within Western societies that has enabled the development of a massive capacity for producing, circulating and consuming symbolic goods’.26 It would be wrong to project the patterns of contemporary globalised culture directly on to the world of the mid 1940s. However, it is useful to adopt a concept of culture that combines the notion of an extended cultural field, suggested by Williams, with Featherstone’s notion of a differentiated process of production of symbolic goods. What the two aspects have in common is the understanding that culture is a social process, which develops historically. Like any social process, culture has on the one hand its own characteristic products and patterns of activity, and on the other hand a network of relationships with other social processes. In this sense, culture includes intellectual debate (philosophy, religion, the social and natural sciences); literary production (prose fiction, plays, poetry); audio-visual media (radio, the press, posters, newsreels, cinema, photography); the visual and performing arts (fine art, music, theatre, fashion and design); popular culture (entertainment, comics, festivals, sport and leisure); public events (exhibitions, commemorations, funerals); and other related practices (such as religious observances, reading habits, best-sellers, tastes, fads). This notion of culture has social and historical limitations. In particular, culture is embedded in a set of relationships with other social domains and activities. These other domains mark the boundaries of the cultural domain, which are subject to constant negotiation. The outcome of these negotiations determines what will be regarded as culture, and the result varies over time and space. There is some risk of anachronism in adopting concepts of culture developed in the 1990s, in order to analyse the situation in 1945. There are also risks of crosscultural misunderstandings in applying concepts developed in one country to understand the workings of another. Two important considerations mitigate these risks. In the first place, a primary purpose of this study is to understand this period in terms that are intelligible today, and as a result perhaps to illuminate


processes that are in train in the early twenty-first century. In this sense, the study brings a ‘stranger’s gaze’ to the material. It will be part of the analysis to show how the events of the period were understood at the time. And there will be occasion to incorporate contemporaneous insights into the analysis. But the ways of understanding that were characteristic of the time are above all objects of study, as part of the cultural field, which is under investigation. In the second place, an important part of the argument presented here is that there was a significant social shift, which changed the historical boundaries and identities of culture, and consequently the ways in which it was understood. This renegotiation produced a cultural field more closely resembling our own, though it took somewhat longer to produce the means of rethinking it. As a result, the conceptual framework adopted here offers the prospect of understanding the changes that took place, with some benefit of hindsight.

The French sense of culture Terminology apart, the notion of an extended field of cultural production would not be wholly unfamiliar to French writers of 1945. The semantic field of the word ‘culture’ was almost as extensive in France fifty years ago, and was the subject of considerable differences of interpretation.27 The anthropological meaning was well established, even if some of the leading French ethnographers of the Third Republic tended to see cultures as hierarchically arranged with France at the pinnacle.28 The notion of culture as a sphere of social production was also familiar, and the cultural domain was routinely distinguished from the economic and political domains, for example, especially by Catholics and Marxists.29 The narrow sense of culture was in common use, referring certainly to literary, intellectual and artistic high culture, but also commonly extended to include the sciences. Those who, like the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, wished to convey a narrower conception would for the most part speak of literature, arts and letters, or artists and writers.30 In conservative circles, ‘culture’ had long been synonymous with Western civilisation and Christian values, threatened by the barbarity of the modern age. During the 1930s, many of its proponents made common cause with prominent figures on the Left, for whom culture was a broadly humanist concept, and regarded as an important resource in resistance to the rising tide of barbarous fascism. While its core was certainly high culture, this concept of culture was an extended one in that it included the whole of a civilisation, or at least


the way of life identified with civilised peoples. After the war, this concept of culture was recognised as too restricted, and efforts were made to extend it further. The idea that popular culture had a place in Western culture was not altogether new, though it was relatively recent. It emerged in France mainly during the interwar period, when the movement of the Maisons de la culture (Culture Houses) of the 1920s and 1930s advocated the recognition of popular culture. It brought with it a distinctive left-wing flavour, and met some resistance from literary figures, who tended to view the Maisons as demagogic exercises.31 Under the Popular Front government, the cause of popular culture was pursued with energy by Léo Lagrange. He was appointed as Under-Secretary for Sports and Leisure in 1936 with a mission to democratise culture, leisure and sport. His vision was subsequently influential both in the Vichy government, which sought to revalorise the folk culture of the peasantry, and in the Resistance, which attached great importance to workingclass values. The recognition of popular culture was a cornerstone of the ‘Peuples et culture’ movement, founded in 1945 by the sociologist Joffre Dumazedier, which became a leading force in the development of adult education (éducation populaire).32 The extended notion of culture was espoused by the dominant political groupings after the war, especially by the socialists and Christian democrats. The philosophic argument was clearly articulated by the Catholic intellectual Emmanuel Mounier, who argued that: Western culture has become an inert legacy in the hands of a social class that only seeks to enjoy it, and not to renew its sources. This culture must be revitalised by new élites of popular origin, who will give back its authenticity and fruitfulness.33 Though his concern was still with elites, Mounier’s long-term project was a moral revolution at the level of an entire civilisation, which a later commentator might easily describe as a cultural revolution. But it certainly reflected the high ambitions of the early post-war period. In addition to meaning a form of civilisation, culture had, and still has, another area of meaning, perhaps more specific to France. It refers to the ‘general culture’, which every French person might be expected to acquire in the course of formal education. This conception was developed with the extension of compulsory schooling at the end of the nineteenth century. It was strongly promoted within the national education system in the interwar period, and is still current in France.


It has no direct equivalent in the English-speaking world, and it encompasses general knowledge, civic education and a familiarity with landmarks of French and international intellectual and artistic achievement. General culture was not viewed exclusively as a matter of knowledge, and French writers were fond of repeating the dictum that culture is what remains when you have forgotten everything.34 Nonetheless, it was strongly overlaid with the association of school and the state education system. The philosopher Simone Weil, whose posthumous influence was strong in post-war France, made a rhetorical assault on the idea of culture, declaring that ‘Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who when their turn comes will manufacture teachers.’ 35 Undoubtedly, her sense of the alienating effect of culture was linked to the long-standing tension between the Catholic Church and the French state, which is nowhere more visible than in education. Weil’s comments, written during the Occupation, confirm the strong links which already existed in France, between culture and the state, embodied in the national education system, even though she wished strongly to contest the links. She did not, however, live to see the movement of national unanimity, which so firmly reinforced those links at the end of the war. In attempting to understand what happened to culture after the war, it is useful to distinguish two principal dimensions, which the historian Roger Chartier calls representations and practices.36 Representations are the visible signs and symbolic forms, which convey meanings and display identities. They may be constructed through written or spoken texts, pictures, objects or performances. Whatever the actual or claimed relationship to an object of reference, a representation produces a configuration by which a shared perception of reality is constructed, and it enables the recognition of a social identity, whose marks are exhibited and symbolised. In short, a representation is an image that conveys a social meaning, and is the carrier of collective memory and imagination. Practices, on the other hand, are the processes of production by which representations are constituted. They may be discursive, administrative, legal, educational, military or other practices. At the limit, all social practices are productive of meaning. However, in this study the focus of attention is on the practices of the cultural domain, and in particular on the changes of practice at the level of structures and institutions. Representations and practices are closely interdependent and are, in a sense, simply different facets of a single social process. They are separable only in analytical terms. However, conceiving them separately as two distinct dimensions has the benefit of enabling the


real complexity of social meanings and identities to be analysed with greater clarity. With the aid of this methodological distinction, we shall at times focus on the images, ideas and narratives of the period, while at other times focusing on the political and social conditions in which they were produced. The interaction between these two axes of culture will be a recurrent strand, and will help to reveal the importance and uniqueness of the immediate post-war moment.

The state and cultural practices In the realm of practice, state intervention in culture was particularly significant after the end of the war. But state involvement was by no means new. On the contrary, France had a long tradition of state sponsorship and state control. A number of recent studies in the cultural history of France have highlighted the role of kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, royal courts and republican governments in creating the country’s rich cultural heritage.37 From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, the ancien régime monarchies dispensed patronage and commissioned works, at the same time as policing literary and artistic production. But with the rise of commerce and the literate middle classes, the state purse accounted for a shrinking proportion of cultural expenditure. And the growing market for cultural goods and services progressively loosened the system of permissions and privileges which regulated them. During the nineteenth century, the onset of industrialisation and urban growth accelerated the changes in the social and economic basis. At the same time, the systems of state regulation swung between degrees of freedom and constraint, according to the royal, imperial or republican regime in place. Jean-Pierre Rioux and others have argued that a real watershed occurred in the state’s cultural role during the 1880s.38 This was the moment at which the Third Republic was able to consolidate its institutions and inaugurate a cultural revolution. It implanted Republican ideas and values in the minds and hearts of its citizens by means of a series of laws, of which the most important was the introduction of free compulsory schooling associated with Jules Ferry. It established in law the symbols of the Republic: the Marseillaise, Marianne, the fête nationale of 14 July, the French national day. It regulated drinking, meetings and associations, the press and advertising, introducing one of the best known laws in France, that of 29 July 1881, whose title is still displayed on walls, with the warning, ‘Défense d’afficher’ (Stick no bills). The Third Republic continued the tradition of public spending


on large cultural projects, such as the Paris Opera (1875), the World Fairs (expositions universelles) of 1878, 1889 and 1900, and the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the 1889 event. However, the combination of growing literacy, leisure and prosperity meant that the main dynamic force in the cultural domain lay in the private sector and voluntary associations. State resources accounted for only a small proportion of the large-scale investment that poured into art galleries, concert halls, sports stadiums and film studios that characterised the ‘banquet years’ of the belle époque.39 For the most part, it was a buoyant market of private consumers that supported the vibrant cultural life of the years before the First World War. The interwar period followed much the same pattern, with a small number of conspicuous state-sponsored events, like the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, the World Fair of 1937, and the opening of the Musée de l’homme (anthropological museum) in 1938. But to a large extent, these were overshadowed by the growth of cultural activities for the mass market.40 Publishing of books, newspapers, reviews and magazines developed into a powerful industry. Sport assumed growing importance as France built on the pre-war achievements of the Baron de Coubertin, the French founder of the Olympic Games, and his contemporaries. Football, rugby, tennis, cycling, motor racing and winter sports all developed into large-scale activities for both spectators and participants, drawing substantial industrial sponsorship. Paris and Chamonix hosted the 1924 Olympic Games. The 1920s and 1930s were a golden age of cinema-going and film production. They also saw the birth of radio as a mass medium, developed partly by state action, but increasingly through private radio stations. Alongside private enterprise, an energetic voluntary sector entered the cultural domain. Religious organisations, trades unions, political parties and other affinity groups saw the opportunities and dangers in the new media, and in mass access to culture. They were important actors in organising cinema clubs, reading groups, exhibitions and musical venues. They were arbiters of taste and of moral or political acceptability, with an influential voice in the institutions of the state. No doubt the best organised groupings were those sponsored by the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. The latter’s codes and classifications of films, for example, exercised a pervasive influence well into the Fifth Republic. The election of a Popular Front government in 1936 marked another turning point in the state’s role in culture. Spurred by the socialist aim of democratising culture, or at least popularising it, the new government


began to develop a programme of strategic intervention. It was designed to give ideological direction to existing cultural activities, especially those concerned with young people and those associated with the movements participating in, or supporting the government. It aimed to articulate a cultural policy of which Léo Lagrange’s work on popular culture was a part. And it sought to give increased order and structure to the industries and professions engaged in cultural activity. Because the Popular Front government was, in the event, too short-lived, many of its initiatives did not bear immediate fruit. But the ideas remained active, and their fruits can be seen in the cultural policies of Vichy, aligned to a different ideological agenda, and in the cultural policies pursued by the provisional government after 1944.

Culture under Vichy The cultural life of the ‘dark years’ of 1940–44 was dominated by shortages. Basic resources were in short supply. For example, supplies of paper available to printers fell to less than one-twentieth of their prewar level.41 Rationing of such materials gave immense leverage to the authorities that controlled their availability, and compounded the effects of censorship. Both the Vichy government and the German occupying authorities established elaborate mechanisms, through which they exercised strict control and censorship at all stages of publication and broadcasting. Radio-Vichy was a propaganda arm of Pétain’s État français, and the German authorities ran Radio-Paris. Vichy’s censors vetted new publications in advance, and the Germans’ ‘Otto’ lists showed details of all books that they deemed undesirable, and were therefore banned. Cinema and theatre were subject to similarly close control. For the most part censorship was proscriptive rather than prescriptive, concerned less with promoting positive values and models, than with avoiding political challenge and with eliminating the contributions of Jews, freemasons, communists and other undesirables. The censorship was not monolithic, and many examples of incoherence sprang from the divisions and at times conflicts between the competing Vichy and German authorities. Notwithstanding the difficulties, it has often been noted that French cultural life flourished unexpectedly, to the point where many in the creative professions looked back on it as a ‘golden age’.42 A relative lack of imported cultural goods gave unprecedented market opportunities for French producers of films and comics, for example. The desire for escapist amusement helped to ensure that


cinemas and theatres were well attended and sporting events were enthusiastically supported. Churches were full to overflowing and people flocked to popular festivals, pilgrimages, exhibitions and concerts. Youth movements flourished. In its early stages, the declared ambition of the Vichy regime was to undertake a National Revolution, which was explicitly designed to rebuild the moral fibre of France after its humiliating defeat. In essence, it proposed a cultural revolution. To a surprising extent it built on the embryonic institutional changes begun by the Popular Front, in an attempt to give coherence and direction to the nation. While its ends were very different, based in conservative authoritarian nationalism, its means were similar. In many cases, the activities were supervised, at middle ranking levels, by the same technocratic administrators that were in office before the war. Two particular innovations devised by the regime indicate the scope of its ambitions. The École des cadres (leadership school) at Uriage was designed to educate a new social and cultural elite to renew the country; and the ‘Jeune France’ (Young France) movement was aimed at promoting a renaissance of cultural creation throughout the country. Both initiatives were abandoned in 1942 with the return to power of Pierre Laval and the hard Right, but they remained examples of astute state investment in culture and as myths of what might have been. They also offered models of elite education and cultural decentralisation that had influence in the post-war period. While Vichy’s corporatist project did not survive, many of its structural reforms did endure. In particular, it grouped responsibility for cultural affairs under three main government departments: National Education, Youth and Sport, and Information. It established a number of official bodies with jurisdiction over specific areas, such as the Commission for General Education and Sport, and the Committee for the Organisation of the Cinematographic Industry. And more generally, it contributed to the extension of state involvement in the cultural realm, which had been inaugurated by the Popular Front. In another respect, the Vichy regime also echoed its predecessor from a symmetrically opposite position: its intervention was ideologically based in a partisan purpose, which sharply divided the country. Like the pre-war governments, it perpetuated what has since become known as the ‘Franco-French war’, which pitted Left against Right, nationalists against socialists, democrats against authoritarians. Pétain’s ‘French state’ became increasingly pitted against an internal Resistance and an external Free French opposition that challenged its legitimacy. In the short term, this resulted in an increased disaffiliation


from the state on the part of a significant number of participants in the cultural sphere. It was only marginally attenuated by the relative autonomy accorded by the authorities in matters of artistic rather than political judgement. Paradoxically, in the circumstances of war, cultural dissidents repelled by Vichy were inevitably propelled into the ambit of other combatant state or quasi-state authorities. This was true of the ultra-collaborationists who, finding Vichy insufficiently resolute, looked for the support of the German occupying authorities. More significant, for the longer term, a number of cultural figures were attracted to the external Free French movement around Charles de Gaulle, which gradually coalesced into an alternative government-in-waiting. And many more aligned themselves with the internal Resistance movements, which also began to crystallise state functions under the guidance of de Gaulle’s envoy, Jean Moulin. The growing prestige of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union was also translated into cultural forms, for example, in the battle of the airwaves. The BBC, Radio-Moscow and the Voice of America competed for hearts and minds against Radio-Vichy and Radio-Paris, and against each other, each speaking implicitly or explicitly for its sponsoring state. In summary, by the end of the war, the terrain of culture was largely occupied by states. Relatively few zones were left to private initiative, and most of those that were, like publishing, were heavily regulated by the state. The importance of culture to states was apparent in many activities, but is well symbolised by the RAF’s action in dropping supplies of Vercors’s novella, Le Silence de la mer (Silence of the Sea, 1942) for mass distribution by the Resistance.43 They recognised the symbolic value of a high-quality literary work produced by an underground press, as well as appreciating the appeal to resist that it contained. The lesson was not lost on de Gaulle and his provisional government, as they set about exercising state power and rebuilding French national identity.

Culture and national identity Culture has always played a key role in building French national identity. Handbooks of French civilisation have traditionally carried images of French cultural achievements and heroes of the nation, going back to the ancient Gauls and beyond. By 1940, French national ancestry was being traced back to the Stone Age hunters who painted the caves of the Dordogne.44 No doubt, a large proportion of the images and stories had a national identity attached to them retrospectively. The Gallic chieftain


Vercingetorix may not have considered himself French as he surrendered to Caesar in 52 BC, but he was certainly presented as a Frenchman in the textbooks of the Third Republic. Recent volumes of French cultural history have been in agreement that the most important time for the construction of modern French identity was the nineteenth century.45 In particular, they focus on two periods. The first is located after 1820 when the restored monarchy assimilated the changes that had been produced by the Revolution of 1789 and by the empire of Napoléon Bonaparte. The second period is located after 1880 when the Third Republic became sufficiently secure to undertake a programme of modernisation and national reaffirmation. Both of these periods are characterised by determined action on the part of the state to restore France’s international position after military disaster and to build national unity after something close to civil war. The sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) which remain from these periods are those which most successfully express the unity and prestige of the nation, embodied in the state. In concluding the section on the Nation, in his monumental Lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora suggests that the role of the state has been unusually dominant in constructing French national identity.46 No country has established such a narrow equivalence between the national State, its economy, its culture, its language and its society. […] The paradox of French national history has been to localise its essential continuity in politics, which is by nature the least continuous. As a result, French national memory has developed in a more conflictual manner than others.47 While many nations have constructed their identity around an economy, a society, a culture or a language, he argues, the French state has taken charge of each of these four domains. Nora’s own enterprise was to bring together all the layers and cross-currents of national memory under the umbrella of a heritage-memory (mémoire-patrimoine), a post-nationalist treasure chest that would benefit France in adjusting to new roles in the world of the late twentieth century. As a result, his volumes are less concerned with France’s internal conflicts than with the contribution that all components can make to a rich and diverse identity. However, the ability of the French state to reconcile internal conflicts has varied considerably. As Nora suggests, it has been riven with political discontinuities, and successive incarnations of the state have confronted revolts and secessions at the cultural level as well as the political, social and linguistic levels.


The Third Republic’s success in forging national unity in the 1880s followed a period in which much of the cultural domain was arraigned against the state, sometimes in physical exile, like the poet Victor Hugo or the supporters of the Paris Commune of 1871, but more often in moral or social dissidence. And for most of its later history, the Third Republic was likewise fiercely contested and divided. The Dreyfus Case notoriously brought deep divisions, casting writers and artists in the role of ‘intellectuals’ ranged against the chief institutions of the state, especially the army, the church and the government. But its effects were scarcely more far-reaching than social changes like the rise of militant trades unions, and the socialist and anarchist movements, or ideological changes like the aggressive secularism that led to the separation of Church and State. These profoundly undermined the ability of the French state to direct and channel cultural development. Their effect was only briefly and partially overcome by the ‘sacred union’ which mobilised culture to support the Nation during the Great War.48 On the contrary, the consequences of the First World War included the resumption (and intensification) of social and political conflict, and the beginning of a shift within the cultural sphere, which linked intellectual and artistic innovation to political and social rebellion. The Dada and surrealist movements were the most visible examples of this shift, but the ‘generation of 1920’, who came to maturity after the war, shared a common suspicion that the values and institutions of the French nationstate were at best irrelevant, and at worst nefarious. The economic depression of the 1930s was accompanied by an increased polarisation of cultural life. The rise of fascism was mirrored by the rise of communism. Both movements, by their dynamism, attracted writers and artists to express different forms of rebellion against the bourgeois state. The Popular Front movement of the mid-1930s succeeded in reconnecting parts of the cultural sector with a state political project, but its achievements in government fell far short of the hopes it had raised. The Third Republic ended in a culture of disillusion and decadence. After the defeat of 1940, Marshal Pétain announced a National Revolution, which was culturally an attempt to replicate the achievements of the Popular Front, though at the opposite end of the political spectrum. It was significantly more effective in the area of practices than in representations. The positive images it inspired were mainly sponsored directly by the authorities, and some also emerged in the popular culture of songs, sport and posters, rather than in traditional high culture. More often than not, the cultural products of the period displayed extreme caution in offering direct representations of France.


They preferred the ‘contemporain vague’ (vaguely contemporary setting) of films like Les Visiteurs du soir (Evening Visitors, 1942),49 which set their action in an unspecified time and place. Or they relied on the safety of classical mythology, used in plays like Sartre’s Les Mouches or Anouilh’s Antigone.50 Outside the state-sponsored sector, publicly circulated cultural material tended to represent France and matters of national identity in highly coded form. Some dissenting writers played on ambiguities and hints to offer ‘contraband’ messages of resistance. Paradoxically, however, it was in the clandestine world of underground publication that some of the most dissident of pre-war writers came to espouse a national agenda. Former surrealists and communists like Aragon and Éluard were perhaps the most conspicuous examples, but they were accompanied by progressive Catholics and by former sympathisers of the Left and the Popular Front in offering cultural support to the Resistance, Free France and the broad movement of national liberation.

The divided house The opposition between the official culture of Vichy and the cultural, intellectual or spiritual Resistance, had many characteristics of a civil war. However, on both sides, its participants shared a common stance in offering an unprecedented allegiance to the French nation, however they conceived it, and to the French state, whichever of its competing embodiments they considered legitimate. In this respect, the ‘dark years’ of the Second World War effected a reconciliation between the nation, the state and the cultural sphere. Each side of France’s divided house found a nation-state it could and should support. Both Pétain and de Gaulle recognised the importance of cultural support for their respective causes. So did the various political and social movements and associations that looked to either leader. The strategic importance of culture to France was combined with the willingness of culture workers to support their nation-state. The question at the end of the war was whether this happy congruence could be sustained, and whether the two competing states and cultures could be reconciled. In the event, the unitary French state that took power in 1944 deftly averted the threat of civil war, and found the re-emerging cultural sphere eagerly prepared to represent the nation, as embodied in the provisional government. In symbolic terms, the task of rebuilding the nation was made particularly difficult by the fact that it had already been done once, by


Marshal Pétain, after the Armistice of 1940. All the symbolic resources used in the earlier attempt were effectively unavailable in 1944, and there was an implicit exclusion zone, which precluded the use of references that might recall themes favoured by Vichy. Hence, though the notion of revolution was widely canvassed,51 it was not possible to speak of a National Revolution, since Pétain had made that his own. It was difficult to appeal to figures from pre-Revolutionary history, particularly the medieval period, since they had supplied many of Vichy’s icons, led by martyred warrior maid Joan of Arc and the valiant knight in shining armour, Bayard. It was not easy to call on some of the great national institutions, including the Church, the army, the navy, the law, the police, the civil service, commerce, industry or popular culture. Many members of these institutions distinguished themselves in resistance activities, but the institutions themselves were deeply compromised with Pétain. France’s rural roots, peasant values, folk culture and the notion of an ‘eternal France’ had been heavily marketed by the Vichy regime and its campaign to return to the land. Likewise, it was advisable to tread carefully around the values of youth, work, family and leadership, all beloved of Vichy. And some of the most obvious metaphors of destruction and rebuilding had to be avoided, including the familiar one of France as a house, which had been endlessly recycled by Vichy propagandists after 1940, to suggest that despite the superficial damage incurred, the foundations were strong, or the walls were intact, for example. This list of damaged symbols is not exhaustive, but gives some sense of the cultural devastation of the nation, a prime example of what Braudel called ‘great rents in the canvas of history’.52 At the cultural level alone, it is difficult to see why the French nation should have been able to survive the catastrophe and regenerate itself. The ignominious and partially self-inflicted collapse of the Third Republic had not only swept away the political structures of the seventy-year-old state, but had also blighted any explicit return to the state of affairs prevailing on the eve of the war. Even more clearly, the political structures of Pétain’s État français were entirely destroyed in 1944, and its supporting cultural and ideological framework condemned to virtual silence. Only a provisional replacement was in view. It is difficult to see what political basis existed for national unity in 1944, given the bitter political divisions and the quasi civil war that accompanied the process of liberation in some areas. Braudel’s solution is to invoke a notion of ‘la France profonde’, a silent majority whose deep-seated presence and commitment ensures the nation’s continuity


despite the surface turbulence. However, this simple faith is unlikely to satisfy those who have seen the unmaking of so many countries in the last years of the twentieth century. Division lurks every bit as deeply as unity in the historical constitution of the nation. Moreover, the conditions of the occupation had served to exacerbate economic and geographical divisions, particularly between agriculture and industry, town and country, north and south, east and west, Paris and provinces. Nevertheless, French national identity was effectively rebuilt from the rubble. In part, it resulted from the determination of the political and cultural elites who had formed the vanguard of the Resistance and Free French movements, but it also resulted from a popular unanimity, that was able to surmount deep-seated divisions and rally round a body of shared culture. This conjunction was achieved through the mobilisation of language, images and ideas, which enabled the national community to be reimagined. The following chapters will examine some of the main processes that produced this reinvention of France.

2 Inventing a Language

Finding the words One of the principal tasks of government is to frame the language that is used to talk and think about what is happening.1 For the French political and intellectual elites at the end of the war, reinventing France began with the search for a suitable language and terminology to describe the military and political events of 1944, and the processes that followed from them. In the twenty-first century, when instant worldwide communications have made the media a battlefield of war, it seems obvious that words and labels are important weapons. When, in April 2003, the slogan ‘Occupation is not a Liberation’ was adopted for an international campaign of opposition to American intervention in Iraq,2 it recalled the many instances when those terms have been invoked to describe post-conflict situations over the previous sixty years. It also emphasised the way in which the words have come to summarise powerful interpretations of complex political scenarios. The notion of liberation was rapidly adopted to describe the position of France as it emerged from the war. Though this was not the first time it had been used, liberation was fashioned into a potent and wideranging concept in 1944, and became a successful tool for the reinvention of France in the eyes of its own people and in the eyes of the world. This chapter will examine how that tool was forged, and will examine the struggles to find a similarly suitable language to describe the processes of rebuilding that followed. More than any previous conflict, the Second World War was a war of words. The broadcast and published word was a key weapon for most governments, movements and groups as they strove to impose their interpretations on events, and win hearts and minds in their own and 33


other countries. Radio broadcasts played an unprecedented role, alongside the print media of newspapers, magazines and reviews. Leaflets and posters were widely circulated, encapsulating their message in a few pregnant words, often underlined by highly charged illustrations. In France, the verbal warfare developed many layers of complexity. Listeners and readers were familiar with words carrying heavily encoded meanings. They heard, for example, coded messages of instruction broadcast daily to the French underground movements at the end of BBC radio programmes aimed at French listeners. They might read the ‘contraband’ writings of poets who smuggled calls to resistance in ostensibly anodyne verses. And they learned to read between the lines of carefully worded newspaper reports that were produced under conditions of close official censorship.3 As a result, the French people were more than usually attuned to the nuances and connotations of words. With the passage of time, it becomes more difficult to reconstitute what French people of 1944 might have understood by the words they used, or what resonances would be evoked by particular terms. But there is a large quantity of printed material from the period, and some broadcast material, which provides a basis for analysing what the most important concepts were, and how they were used. The work of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre offers a useful way of approaching this, and relating textual material to its social and historical context. He drew on concepts derived from the linguistic theory of André Martinet and Roman Jakobson to distinguish three dimensions of language, each of which needs to be taken into account when deciphering a message.4 The first dimension is composed of all the alternatives from which a given element in the message has been selected. Choosing one term rather than another means that the chosen term is different from the alternatives and may be opposed to some of them. It also opens up some possibilities and places some constraints on what can be conveyed by the message. This dimension thus refers to the paradigm or system that gives a distinctive meaning to each element in a message, and is termed the paradigmatic dimension. The second dimension is composed of the sequence in which elements occur in a given message. Depending on its position in the message, a term can be combined or associated in certain ways with others. Its position may suggest a direction of movement and may be shown in contrast to other terms. This dimension thus refers to the syntax or ordering which combines the elements together to construct the whole message, and is termed the syntagmatic dimension. The third dimension is composed of the socially constituted networks of associations to

Inventing a Language 35

which a message may refer, implying figures and patterns from memory or history which a society has charged with imagination, emotion and meaning. It refers to the symbols or myths that locate a message in a community, and is termed the symbolic dimension. Lefebvre’s notion of the symbolic dimension of language is comparable to the approach adopted by Roland Barthes to understand modern ‘mythologies’.5 Barthes begins from Saussure’s conception that communication takes place through signs, each composed of a ‘signifier’ (a written or spoken word) and a ‘signified’ (a concept or concepts which it denotes). Barthes suggests that the meaningful linguistic sign then becomes in turn a ‘signifer’ at a second level, where it is associated with a further ‘signified’, composed of associations and meanings circulating in society. These connotations overlay the first level of meaning, the denotations. People who share a similar social situation and culture readily understand the set of connotations attached to a particular ‘mythological’ sign. They possess the key to the code, where those outside the cultural context may not. In much of the writing and imagery of this period, connotation lies heavily over denotation, and the later observer, especially the foreign observer, has a challenging task to reconstruct the codes that were readily available to French observers at the time. The three dimensions of meaning, paradigmatic, syntagmatic and symbolic/mythological, are intimately interconnected. The struggle to give meaning to France’s post-war experience was not only a contest for the resources of history and memory, but also a struggle to assert paradigms or models within which the historical process should be construed, and a battle to insert it into a sequence providing a sense of tradition and future direction. To a remarkable extent, the outcome of these struggles in the mid-1940s established the dominant perception of post-war France.

A language of liberation Written histories of France have almost universally adopted the word ‘liberation’ to describe the immediate post-war period.6 In doing so, they have built upon the fact that the term was adopted in France at the period, and rapidly became the standard way of referring to it. ‘Libération’ and the related ‘libre’ and ‘libérer’ were words which appeared to articulate a consensus. They were emblazoned on posters, and adopted by the new state apparatus to describe the military campaign that drove the German occupying army out of France.


A paradigmatic analysis of the term suggests that a number of alternative words existed. Perhaps the most obvious alternative was Victory, which had long been aspired to and had been signalled by the widespread use of the sign ‘V’ for Victory, scrawled on walls, and formed in images of all manner of intersecting straight lines. In practice the word was rarely invoked by French people to describe the liberation of France, and tended to be reserved for the wider Allied victory over Germany, which would bring an end to the war in Europe. ‘Victory’ was not often used to describe the more limited military objective of defeating the occupying forces on French soil, not least because the war continued for some nine months after the liberation of Paris, and talk of victory would appear premature. Moreover, the use of the idea of victory in the wider context could not help but emphasise the leading military role of the American and British Allies, and the supporting role of French forces. It could not be used comfortably to describe the French experience of the ending of the war. The sense of discomfort with the notion of victory became clear in May 1945, when Victory in Europe was declared, and was greeted without great enthusiasm in France. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it: ‘People were told to hang out the flags: they did not do so, the war ended in indifference and anguish.’7 At the other end of the political spectrum, the collaborationist circles and members of the Vichy regime regarded the ‘Allied intervention’ as an ‘invasion’, an ‘act of aggression’, or worse. They and the German occupying authorities did all they could to discredit the idea that this was liberation, emphasising the loss of life and destruction of property caused by Allied military intervention, and pointing to callous attitudes and rapacious motives behind the action.8 The idea that the intervention was an invasion also appeared occasionally in Allied documents, no doubt reflecting the similarity with earlier action in Italy, and the preoccupation with confronting fierce military opposition.9 But to all intents and purposes, the use of these alternative descriptions vanished in August 1944, reflecting the expulsion of collaborators and former Vichy supporters from the realm of public discourse. Undoubtedly, there were those who, in speech or writing, gave an ironic or cynical twist to the term ‘liberation’. There were certainly those, not just on the extreme Right, who privately resented the high price in lives and property that had been paid for liberation. And there were also mixed feelings about the presence of foreign troops on French territory, especially Americans, whose behaviour was often compared unfavourably with the German soldiers who had been


so ‘correct’ in their dealings. However, in political terms, there was no viable alternative to the word ‘liberation’ for describing the end of the war in France. In its symbolic dimension, the term ‘liberation’ provided a legitimising continuity with both the internal and the external movements that fought against the occupation. One of the main Resistance movements had adopted the name ‘Libération’, and its clandestine daily newspaper with the same title was one of the first to appear on open sale after the liberation of Paris. Another took the name ‘Mouvement de Libération Nationale’, and liberation was one of the main watchwords for the Resistance more generally, expressing a shared aspiration and a goal to be striven for. It was also expressed in the formation of Liberation Committees in many départements and municipalities as transitional organs of civil administration towards the end of the occupation. For his part, Charles de Gaulle founded his ‘Order of the Liberation’ as early as November 1940 to honour those who fought conspicuously against the foreign occupation of France and her colonies. In June 1943, the French Committee for National Liberation was founded, with de Gaulle at its head, as the precursor of a provisional government. The word ‘liberation’ echoed the motto of the French Republics: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, which had been supplanted for four years under Vichy,10 and it accompanied the reappearance of republican symbols throughout France. It also coincided with the liberal democratic values that were particularly dear to France’s American liberators. The new French government was happy to emphasise the appearance of agreement between the Allies that the idea of liberation suggested. It tactfully refrained from pointing out how their understanding of it might differ from the Anglo-Saxon armies who saw themselves as the Liberators, bringing France ‘home’ to the community of Western democracies.11 The wider resonances of the concept of liberation are broad and complex. It includes the meaning of being freed or released from restraints or burdens, including captivity. In its legal sense, it carries the specific meaning of judicial release from imprisonment, including provisional release on parole. And in its theological sense, it carries the Christian meaning of mankind’s redemption from sin, and deliverance from evil. The sense of the Liberation as a release from captivity was a widespread theme, not least because of large numbers of prisoners-ofwar held in Germany after the defeat of June 1940, the many French people who were imprisoned for their resistance to the German and Vichy authorities, and the many more, including tens of thousands of


Jews, who were deported. An iconic image of the period was widely displayed as a poster in Paris. Created by the artist Phili, it depicts Marianne dressed in the flag of the Republic, leading a crowd of prisoners out of a dungeon and into the light (Fig. 1).12 Perhaps more surprisingly, the sense of liberation as a religious emancipation is also widely echoed. It can be detected in de Gaulle’s stirring speech at the Paris Hôtel de Ville on 25 August 1944, which celebrated the liberation of Paris and set much of the tone for official discourse on the subject: Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! but Paris liberated! liberated by herself, liberated by her people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and help of the whole of France, of France fighting, of France alone, of true France, of eternal France.13 The themes of martyrdom and eternity are evidently drawn from religious language. More important, perhaps, the emotional incantation of the sacred words ‘Paris’, ‘France’ and ‘liberated’ confer on the event a religious solemnity, which can often be observed at this time. And in this context, there is a strong suggestion that de Gaulle is exercising the power of a priest to confer reality on an event by naming it. The voluntaristic aspect of this nominatory act can readily be seen in the passionate insistence that Paris (and France) is the author of its own liberation, even if he went on later in the speech to acknowledge ‘the help of our dear and admirable allies’.14

Self-liberation The discretion of de Gaulle’s reference to his allies is echoed in the texts and images of the period. Although from August onwards, there were certainly images and acknowledgements of American and British forces being welcomed by liberated townspeople, they were heavily outweighed by the omnipresent képis of de Gaulle’s Free French forces, and by the distinguishing armbands of the partisan Resistance forces. In part, no doubt, this may be attributed to the rapid progress of Allied forces through France and on into Germany during the autumn. But there is no doubting either that liberation is presented overwhelmingly as a self-liberation of the French by the French. The point was forcefully made in a poster, produced at the end of the liberation of Paris, showing what is apparently a scene from the fighting, but heavily laced with recognisable symbols (Fig. 2).15 Colonel


Figure 1

Phili, Libération, 1944


Figure 2

René Brantonne, Paris se libère, 1944


Rol-Tanguy, the FFI commander for the Paris region, and Colonel Fabien, commander of the FTP forces, are shown inset, confirming that they led the liberation of the capital. A mixture of regular and irregular troops is distinguished by a variety of headgear (helmets, caps, berets, bandages). Men and women are there. One woman is brandishing a Molotov cocktail, in the style of the pétroleuses who fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune,16 and echoes both the classical Greek statue of the winged Victory of Samothrace (a prominent exhibit in the Louvre) and Delacroix’s celebrated painting of Liberty leading the people. The caption in capital letters is, ‘Paris se libère’ (Paris liberating itself), and in case anyone might miss the point, ‘se libère’ is set in italics. It was clearly a major symbolic assertion of national independence that the capital should be seen to have been liberated by the French themselves, though the poster goes further to insist that it was freed by its own inhabitants. It carries no trace of de Gaulle, nor of Colonel Leclerc, whose Second Armoured Division entered Paris at the end of the insurrection. Reflecting the struggle for power between the internal and external French forces, it gives even greater force to the sense of liberation as an assertion of autonomy. It is striking that in the words and images of liberation, there is little emphasis on what France was liberating itself from. The face of the enemy is largely absent. It is a well-known principle of propaganda not to give the opposition ‘the oxygen of publicity’, but there are also deeper reasons why the enemy is absent. In the first place, there were not one but two enemies, at least, for ‘La France combattante’ (fighting France), the Free French and the Resistance. One was the foreign enemy, the occupying German forces, but the other was the French enemy, the forces of the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain, based in Vichy, and the paramilitary forces associated with the pro-Nazi collaborators, centred in Paris. In the second place, there were risks in representing either enemy explicitly. If the enemy was identified as German it would let the collaborators off the hook, and would also tend to submerge French efforts in the general war effort, in which the Americans and British clearly played the main roles. If on the other hand the enemy was identified as Vichy and the French collaborators, it would show the war effort to be at least partly an internal French political conflict. That could undermine the national legitimacy, which de Gaulle and the Resistance equally wished to mobilise. Some of the imagery of liberation focused on the suffering of the war rather than on its perpetrators. Even here though, there were dangers, since a proportion of the suffering was also inflicted by Allied military


action. And where a representation of the enemy did occur, it was commonly euphemised as the abstract noun Nazism, or the figure of the Swastika. National identity flourishes well when it can be represented in conflict for its existence, and therefore it thrives in war. But the continuity of national identity is best maintained if the object of that conflict, the enemy, remains unspecified. That is perhaps why Marianne has in recent times been preferred as a symbol of the French state rather than Joan of Arc, who every French schoolchild knows to have been burnt at the stake in Rouen by the English. And how could France have achieved its remarkable post-war rapprochement with Germany if its national symbols strongly marked Germany as the enemy. Over time, the most enduring symbols of the nation are those which leave an empty place which can be occupied by the actual enemy of the moment. Such symbols are transferable and can be used over and over again in different contexts. The word ‘liberation’ crystallised to describe the period beginning in late August, inaugurated officially by de Gaulle’s speech, and carrying a strong suggestion that it was a French achievement. Self-liberation carried a strong corollary of subsequent self-determination, and none of the French participants were prepared to see the national liberation as other than the recovery of national independence. What the notion of liberation succeeded in doing was therefore to assert the re-emergence of the French nation-state after its temporary eclipse. There were strong reasons why this should have been a priority, not least in order to secure the legitimacy of the French provisional government, and to lay to rest the threat of an Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) under American auspices.17 The concept of liberation is a commodious one, and enabled many currents of thought and feeling to come together without feeling excluded by political or religious commitments, and without having to declare a commitment to a specific sense of relationship to the past or the future. Its wide range of meanings and high level of generality was a strength, since it provided a common ground for discussion. In a real sense, the word became an embodiment of national unity. It was a reference point on which there was agreement, and it provided an anchor point to constrain the implications of far-reaching disagreements. In other words, however, much as people disagreed on important issues, they could at least agree on the fact that France was now liberated. This meant that certain principles were put beyond question: that France was a single country; that it should have a single state, representing the


nation; that it should be independent and sovereign; and that all its citizens should value their national identity and culture. This is what it meant to be a liberated country. Much of the subsequent disagreements and conflicts, often bitter and long-lasting, revolved about how well or ill these principles were served by different people, policies or actions, but the principles themselves were not open to question. More often than not, the disagreements and conflicts only served to reinforce the overarching principles, so that they became a precondition of debate rather than a subject of discussion. The strength of this national agreement is reflected in the rapid adoption of ‘the Liberation’ as a generic term to describe the period of transition from the spring of 1944 to the summer of 1945.

Between past and future Viewed in the syntagmatic dimension of what might come before or after it, the notion of liberation carried a message of historical movement. It clearly announced that it put an end to a period of oppression, when freedom had been curtailed or suppressed. It signalled that France had emerged from the ‘années noires’ (dark years) of occupation that followed the defeat of 1940. But it also carried the implication that the occupation had been preceded by an earlier period of liberty, to which France had in some sense returned. One of the many ambiguities of the term liberation was that it tended to imply a blanket rejection of everything that had happened in France in the four previous years. It ignored the complicity of the de facto French state in what had happened, and the varying degrees of complicity shown by many of the population now liberated. The word ‘liberation’ also rang hollow with many groups who found themselves materially disadvantaged as a result of it, losing political or economic support from the state. This was particularly felt in the arts, agriculture, industry and the Church. The notion of liberation suggests regaining the freedom to be oneself, and therefore suggests that France would construct or reconstruct a fundamental historical continuity with an earlier state of affairs, a ‘homecoming’ as de Gaulle said.18 In many respects, it is integral to the sense of being a nation that just such continuity can be affirmed and established. However, few people in France wished to return to the previous status quo, the France of 1939 and earlier. It seemed in any case impossible, in view of all that had happened in the intervening four years. A return to the France of the 1930s appeared


undesirable for several reasons. This was the France that failed to avert the catastrophe of defeat in 1940. It was also the France of economic depression, and of bitter political conflicts. In some respects it was a past from which liberation might also release the country. The notion of liberation does contain suggestions of being unleashed and throwing off constraints in order to move forward and embrace change. This was, however, not so straightforward in 1944. While liberation enabled France to cast off its immediate past of occupation, the attraction of fundamental change was tempered by several factors. First, the demand for major change was itself very much the language of Vichy, which in 1940 had launched its own National Revolution for that purpose. Second, the peculiar conditions of the occupation had been fertile ground for many important developments that were not in themselves undesirable. France’s international isolation, especially from Anglo-Saxon influences, had proved a spur to the growth of leisure industries (including thriving cinema production and bande dessinée), youth movements, educational and cultural initiatives, and a new dynamism for religious activities (including the founding of the worker-priest movement). And third, there was a widely held desire not to abandon the positive aspects of the experience of resisting the occupation. The need to maintain the values and aspirations of the Resistance and of the Free French forces was strongly felt in many circles, and the underlying structure of post-war political relations were substantially rooted in the wartime experience. Hence, France in 1944 was faced with the two conflicting imperatives of continuity (with pre-war France) and change (to a new order). If it was unanimously agreed that France was undergoing a liberation, there was little agreement over what it should lead to in the future or what it should retain from the past. In this sense, the liberation was an open question, in which the answers were at least temporarily suspended. Constitutionally, there was an interim arrangement with a provisional government, and in almost every aspect of life, temporary arrangements were the norm. ‘Nous vivons dans le provisoire’ (we are living in the provisional) was a familiar cry, implying a certain permanence of the temporary as well as the idea of living hand-tomouth and day-to-day. Camus, for example, extended this to the notion of a provisional morality, recalling that of Descartes, and declared that ‘the people is searching for a morality . . . they are still in the provisional’.19 The problem then was to define the nature of what was clearly a moment of transition, and therefore to envisage what it was a transition from or towards.


Approaching the issue paradigmatically, a survey of French writings from the period reveals a large number of terms used to describe the transitional situation of France. Many of these terms do not have simple or direct equivalents in English, but their meanings include: crisis, rebirth, renaissance, remaking, reform, revolution, new beginning, beginning again, reconquering, rebuilding, becoming again, standing up again, regeneration, lifting or picking oneself up, restarting, renewal, repair, restoration, re-establishing, return, refinding oneself, coming back, starting up, getting moving, evolution, modernisation, rejuvenation, getting oneself together again and renovation.20 This is a substantial lexicon, capable of conveying many nuances of interpretation. Some terms had more currency than others, but with many alternatives available, there was ample scope for choice. Conversely, the use of a particular term carried with it an implied commitment to the perspective it embodied. Those speaking in a public or representative capacity were only too well aware of the linguistic minefield they trod, and they frequently had recourse to commonplace euphemisms, referring to ‘current conditions’, ‘present circumstances’, ‘today’ or ‘at present’. But these terms themselves point to the fundamental problem. By focusing on the present moment they suggest that what was euphemistically evaded, and the major issue at stake at this moment, was its relation to the past and the future. Each of the terms available incorporates a syntagmatic structure, and each therefore suggests a link with the past and the future, differentiated by whether the relationship is one of continuity or of discontinuity. Consequently, the terms can be gathered into four broad groups, each of which betokens a specific historical stance. They may be summarised as revolution, rebirth, rebuilding and modernisation. In signalling a relationship to the past or the future, they correspond to four different conceptions of what the Liberation should achieve, and consequently to four political strategies.

Talk about a revolution The most ostensibly radical concept of transition was revolution. This notion accepts a continuity between the present and the past, but looks forward to a discontinuity with the future. In addition to the word revolution, similar meanings are conveyed by the aspiration to remake or reform the country, despite the traditional opposition between reformists and revolutionaries in the French labour movement.21 Although it appears to be the most politically aggressive position,


revolution was not advocated by the communists, but was most frequently articulated by the political Centre. These were represented in France in 1944 by the social democrats and Christian democrats, who were doing as much as they could to return France to something resembling the Third Republic. Perhaps its best-known expression was in the daily newspaper Combat, which carried the subtitle ‘From the Resistance to the Revolution’. It first appeared as a clandestine publication in 1941 and then after August 1944 as a major national daily. In its early years, the paper was edited by Albert Camus, who was already an admired novelist and playwright close to the existentialists, and became one of the most influential commentators of the period. Despite his personal atheism and his earlier interest in communism, Camus was comfortable in the Catholic-dominated milieu of the Combat movement. Like most of the Centre-Left, Combat drew its rhetoric from the young intellectual movements of the 1930s, which had diagnosed a crisis of civilisation and called for a comprehensive revolution to remedy it.22 The revolutionary approach was forcefully proposed by the Catholic personalists of the review Esprit, the first monthly review to reappear, with tacit government support. It spoke to an educated Catholic readership and was widely followed in both socialist and Christian democratic circles. Emmanuel Mounier set revolution firmly on the agenda in his opening editorial in the December 1944 issue: Whether it is called a revolution or a crisis of development, a vast and radical transformation is at work in the world. We announced it in France when no one believed in it. 23 And in the body of the review, Mounier offered his view of what he hoped this revolution could be directed to achieve: By revolution we understand a set of transformations deep enough really to abolish the real ills of a society which has reached a stalemate, rapid enough to leave no time for these dying ills to poison the country by their decomposition, and measured enough to allow time for those things to mature which only mature with time. 24 This measured approach was intended to support far-reaching change, but without undue haste. By vocation, Esprit pitched its mission above policy, at the level of civilisation as a whole. Its opening editorial when it was founded in 1932 was entitled ‘Remake the Renaissance’,25 and it continued to seek to influence the entire moral and intellectual climate


of France, or the ‘conception of Man’, as they put it, rather than the day-to-day politics. However, the notion of historical change implied in this concept of revolution was on the scale of centuries, and tended to present the transformations of 1944 as an episode in the ‘Revolution of the Twentieth Century’. As Mounier put it in his later Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme? (1946): The twentieth-century revolution must provide contemporary man with a rational technical instrument and a just social organization. But it also has the role of restoring to him a reason to live and die, beginning with a certain solidity.26 In this context, Mounier was particularly criticising what he saw as the existentialist tendency to nihilism, but reiterating his concept of a revolution that combined moral and social concerns. He was fond of quoting Charles Péguy’s maxim that the Revolution must be moral or fail, adding that the moral revolution must also be economic.27 Though a severe critic of Christian democracy’s shortcomings, Mounier was an influential voice in the circles of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), and his concept of revolution no longer aroused the fear it had done in the 1930s. A revolution which would be the task of a whole century seemed a manageable aspiration, substantially deferred to a future date, but also proclaiming that the ‘old’ world which they sought to transform could be criticised en bloc whatever the nature of the regime in place. Despite their avowed atheism, the existentialists largely shared the Catholic personalists’ rhetoric of revolution, which permeated Sartre’s opening editorial in Les Temps modernes, with the same dual emphasis: We are on the side of those who want to change both the social condition of man and the conception he has of himself.28 Sartre denied that this had anything to do with transforming people’s souls, a job he was content to leave to those who had a specialist clientele, a barbed reference to people like Mounier. There was a great deal of mutual sniping between atheist existentialists like Sartre and Catholic personalists like Mounier, but they and other advocates of revolution were broadly in agreement that it should be both a socioeconomic and moral-intellectual revolution. Their ‘revolutionary humanism’ was forcefully articulated in Sartre’s ‘Matérialisme et révolution’ of 1946, which criticised Marxist materialism for its failure to


acknowledge the values of subjectivity. Sartre insisted that the revolution should embrace the entire range of social classes.29 Taken together with its long time scale, this ensured that the humanist revolution would remain more radical in its rhetoric than its practice.

A history of revolutions In France, the idea of revolution is inseparable from the idea of the great French Revolution of 1789. There are numerous examples of explicit parallels being drawn between the events of 1789 and 1944. A controversial poster produced by the artist Paul Colin at the same time drew an explicit link between the revolutionary movements of 1789, 1830 (the July Monarchy), 1848 (the Second Republic), 1871 (the Paris Commune) and 1944.30 It was immediately banned by the provisional government, thereby confirming Maurice Thorez’s perception that his communist party needed to avoid revolutionary rhetoric. But in less insurrectionary spirit, the first issue of Mounier’s Esprit drew specific parallels with 1789. Mounier pointed to the lessons that could be learned from the ineffectual shilly-shallying of the moderate, well-meaning Girondins and the zealous excesses of the virtuous, intransigent Jacobins. The rancorous controversies over the punishment of traitors, the Épuration or Purge, lent themselves particularly well to the analogy, with the communists casting themselves, and being generally cast, in the role of the Jacobins in general, and Robespierre in particular. Then as later, the French Revolution provided a ready metaphor for contemporary issues, and a recognisable code within which debate could be conducted, albeit at the price of a great deal of historical interpretation. In this way the political centre of gravity was articulated largely in terms of broad ‘projets de civilisation’ and great moments in French history. The projects rarely connected explicitly with actual events, which tended to be viewed as disappointing or even mediocre by contrast. No doubt this can be attributed to the very constrained circumstances of the mid-1940s, when France’s room for manoeuvre internationally was quite exiguous, and when the material conditions of life domestically were grindingly oppressive. But the lack of an explicit link between fine revolutionary rhetoric and grim reality should not be taken at face value. For what rapidly emerged was a highly coded discourse in which historical figures were readily translated into modern equivalents, and resounding philosophical phrases were understood almost as euphemisms for quite specific political positions. Hence when Sartre declared in the first


issue of Les Temps modernes that ‘we are on the side of those who want to change both the social condition of man and the conception he has of himself’,31 it was, quite apart from any philosophical content, a coded statement that he wished to situate his review somewhere between the communists (who wished to change social conditions) and the social and Christian democrats (who were concerned with the conception of man). Talking about revolution in 1945 was a heavily coded matter. While it had a specific political meaning for communists, who spoke of it sparingly, it had quite a different set of connotations for most people who talked about it. If it was far from being a call to armed insurrection and seizure of state power, it was nonetheless something more than bluster. In particular, it translated a longer-term commitment to a different kind of society from that which was visibly in process of reconstruction. The time scale was undoubtedly long, and the action was no doubt at the level of faith rather than works. But then France had just emerged victorious from a dark period in which the faith of the Resistance and of de Gaulle, against the evidence, had been gloriously vindicated by historical events. Why should not a more farreaching social transformation be a feasible prospect, once the immediate problems of restoring France’s political and economic fabric and her position in the world had been completed? Perhaps the ‘freezing’ of national and international relations in the Cold War was answer enough to France’s utopian dreams. Certainly the prospect of a revolution faded as the shape of the ‘new world order’ became clearer with every passing month. But the dreams did not perish with it. Instead they remained in the mythical realm to which the ‘projets de civilisation’ had been consigned. Just as the early Christians adapted to a Second Coming that never arrived, so the French Centre-Left adapted to a revolution that never came. It became a fixed part of an institutionalised cosmology, a Godot for whom they were perpetually waiting, an almost empty signifier ready to receive new generations of signifieds.

Crisis and rebirth Perhaps the most perplexing notion of transition is that which sought to dissociate itself both from the past and the future, and was summed up in the terms crisis and rebirth. The notion of ‘crisis’ was a familar one, with a long history. It had been current throughout the 1930s, and had been adopted by both right- and left-wing groups


to describe a range of events and phenomena. These included economic crises such as the economic slump, following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, domestic political crises such as the Stavisky affair and failed coup d’état of February 1934, international political crises such as the Munich agreement and subsequent German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and cultural crises such as the perceived long-term decline of Catholic belief. With its meaning of a turning point, or moment of danger or suspense, the term ‘crisis’ well conveyed the sense of discontinuity from the past without proposing any certain relationship with the future. It was therefore compatible with a range of possible outcomes, without pre-empting any of them, but including a prolonged period of irresolution. It was particularly consistent with the traditional communist view that capitalism had entered into a prolonged period of crisis in 1917, from which it would only emerge through socialist revolution. Anything short of this would, they argued, merely prolong the crisis. The French term ‘renaissance’, which conveys both rebirth and renaissance, rendered the same stance more positively.32 It presented the current difficulties as opportunities, and harked back to the flourishing humanist culture of the Renaissance period. It also had a more specific force, since the French Communist Party (PCF) adopted it as a coded form of reference. Though the PCF usually presented itself as the party of revolution, it avoided references to revolution in the context of 1944, preferring to speak of rebirth. It abandoned the idea of revolution in large measure because Stalin had ruled out a communist revolution in France for the time being. There were compelling geo-political reasons why Russia could not afford to encourage a revolutionary uprising, and Maurice Thorez, the PCF leader exiled in Moscow, was left in no doubt about the position. At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin confirmed this by agreeing with the Western Allies that he would not support communist revolution in their spheres of interest, which included France. For communists, the idea of revolution meant a Bolshevik-style revolution, and had they used the term in 1944, it would inevitably have been interpreted to mean an impending attempt to seize power, which some of the more euphoric party members hoped for. It was an open secret that there were many communist militants who saw the institutions of the Resistance as an embryonic Soviet structure, poised to carry France from an insurrectionary Liberation to a communist Revolution. These were the people who, like Colonel Ravanel in Toulouse, resisted the transfer of power from the French


Forces of the Interior and the Committees of Liberation to de Gaulle’s newly established Commissaires of the Republic.33 Yet in the official discourse of the PCF, there is only a distant echo of these aspirations. On his return from exile at the end of November 1944, Thorez promulgated a very clear line, from which he did not deviate. In essence, he understood that revolution was not on the agenda for France in the foreseeable future, and held that the communist role was to re-establish national independence and democracy. In a broadcast of 24 August on Radio-Moscow, celebrating the liberation of Paris by the Parisians, Thorez urged all French people to participate actively in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and declared that ‘national unity will be the condition for a genuine rebirth of France’.34 Rebirth was the watchword, much repeated by Thorez after his return to Paris, by which time the patriotic militias had been disbanded and the Forces of the Interior had been incorporated into the regular army, so finally rendering an armed popular revolution impossible. Thorez conspicuously avoided speaking of revolution, and there were profound ambiguities in the term rebirth. The sense of a new beginning also contained a suggestion of continuity. Alluding to the fifteenthcentury Renaissance, it suggested sweeping change and the inauguration of a new age, but in a sufficiently abstract form to suggest that the new age was to be marked by cultural change, as distinct from changes in the economic and political fields. In this respect, it chimed well with the humanism that the party was now espousing.35 By the party congress of June 1945, the cultural dimension of renaissance had entirely absorbed the other meanings of rebirth, as Thorez suggested in evoking the ‘immense effort of moral and intellectual renaissance’ that France required.36 His call was taken up by the communist and fellow-travelling press, calling for a Marxist-led national regeneration.37 One of the major projects of this effort, linking Renaissance and Enlightenment, was the production of a new Encyclopaedia of the French Renaissance, set under the direction of two senior French scientists, the physicist Paul Langevin and the psychologist Henri Wallon, and co-ordinated by the philosopher Henri Mougin.38 With a social and intellectual scope comparable to Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s great Encyclopédie of the eighteenth century, it was intended to assert the ability of the Marxist framework to encompass the whole of human knowledge, where other philosophies could not attempt such a totalisation. However, the project ran into material difficulties, compounded by the deaths of Langevin and Mougin in 1946, and foundered in the deteriorating political climate. The rhetoric


of rebirth and renaissance faded at the same time, with the growing isolation of the communists within French political life. In other respects, Thorez’s language was in striking agreement with that of de Gaulle, no doubt partly influenced by his position as Minister for Transport. He frequently echoed the theme of ‘redressement’ (straightening up), and spoke of economic recovery, ‘redémarrage’ (taking off again), or ‘remise en marche’ (starting up again). When he spoke of political change it was in terms of ‘renovation’, ‘extension of democracy’, or ‘rejuvenation of the Republic’.39 His celebrated interview in the London Times, in November 1946, defined his project in distinctly moderate terms as ‘a democratic programme of national reconstruction, acceptable to all republicans’.40 Undoubtedly, Thorez held long-term aspirations for radical change, but revolutionary prospects had been ruled out by Stalin. So Thorez put the immediate emphasis firmly on the nation and on reconstruction, with all that they implied in terms of historical continuity. The only radical change on the agenda was perhaps in the cultural field, but even there, the new French renaissance was firmly wrapped in the national flag, with its implications of tradition and continuity. And when the communists looked back on this period under the cold light of the Cold War, their self-criticism focused on the point that their efforts had largely amounted to claiming Descartes and Diderot as the fathers of Marxism, at the expense of Marx, Engels or Lenin.

The language of rebuilding The largest of the four groups of terms to describe the process of transition is that which indicates a break with the immediate past and looks forward to the new state of affairs continuing into the future.41 Like the term ‘liberation’ itself, very often these terms suggest a return to a previous state of affairs. The terminology of rebuilding, renewal, reconstruction and restoration was widely used by all currents of opinion, though it was frequently left unstated which aspect of the immediate past was to be set right. At the very least, reconstruction had to involve repairing the physical destruction resulting from fighting during 1944–45, much of which was directly caused by Allied action. For most people, reconstruction had also to undo the social and political damage caused by four years of enemy occupation. But for a significant number, reconstruction had to address a longer time frame, and reverse the moral and social decline that had preceded the war, and had perhaps contributed to France’s military humiliation.


General de Gaulle particularly favoured the discourse of restoration. No one used the language of restored continuity more determinedly than he. When he was invited to proclaim the Republic on 25 August 1944, he declined to do so, arguing that ‘the Republic has never ceased to exist. So why should I go and proclaim it?’42 For him, France’s return to life was also a return to order, as he made clear in a radio broadcast of 29 August: The French people has seen everything, over the two thousand years of its unfolding History, and this people has decided by instinct and by reason, to satisfy the two conditions without which nothing great is ever achieved, and which are order and passion. The republican order, under the only legitimate authority, that of the State, and the concentrated passion which enables us to build, lawfully and fraternally, the edifice of renewal. 43 The legitimacy claimed from two thousand years of history was invested in the Republic, or at least in the idea of the Republic, suggesting a return to long-standing arrangements, dating back to Roman times. But without doubt, the main accent was on order, as a more tangible guarantee of the legitimacy of his regime. His characteristic term was ‘redressement’, or recovery, with its implications of standing up, straightening out and setting right. He told the people of Nancy in September 1944 that ‘France bruised, France abused, France oppressed has at last risen to her feet and gathered herself into a single will and into a single hope’.44 The message is that the nation has returned to claim her own, in what might be called a ‘back to the future’ scenario, conveyed vividly in the poster by Phili (Figure 1) which was issued in August 1944 by the information secretariat of the provisional government.45 Under the single word ‘Libération’ it depicts Marianne draped in the French tricolor lifting a massive stone rectangle and emerging into a sunburst, leading behind her a group of emaciated but exultant captives she has freed. The emergence out of the darkness of captivity into the bright light of day is a triumphal return to life, though it is noticeable that here, Marianne is not herself afflicted by the marks of suffering, unlike Paul Colin’s contemporaneous version.46 After ‘redressement’, the weight of state rhetoric shifted to rebuilding and reconstruction, which was less politically charged, but no less redolent of a return to previous conditions. Its importance was emphasised in an official portrait of de Gaulle, distributed in 1945, bearing the caption, ‘The great task, the sacred task, the national task is called RECONSTRUCTION’.47 As well as the importance of reconstruction, the


caption forcefully emphasises the naming of it. The recapitulatory nature of the enterprise was also underlined by the planning targets which emerged, focusing typically on the achievement of economic performances equal to the last pre-war year. This was not a negligible ambition, since in the event it took seven years and considerable funding from the American Marshall Aid scheme to achieve it. But the targets confirmed the tendency to retrospection, which was widely publicised, for example in the posters of the ‘Retroussons nos manches’ (Let’s roll up our sleeves) series, one of which depicted a graphic table of industrial output (trains, rolling stock, bridges, trucks, electricity generation, shipping and mining) comparing the three years 1939, 1944 and 1945, and showing the progress made towards equalling the earlier year.48 The same feeling was also reflected in the popular culture. A typical example of retrospection is the song ‘Fleur de Paris’ (Flower of Paris), which was sung by Maurice Chevalier, among others, with a celebratory refrain: It’s a flower of Paris, of old smiling Paris, for it’s the flower of return, return to happy days. For four years, in our hearts, she kept her colours, blue, white and red, with hope she blossomed, flower of Paris.49 This theme of ‘happy days are here again’ caught a popular mood in the early days of the Liberation, though it concealed layers of meaning which did not take long to surface. The happy days did not really apply to the material and economic conditions of life, and as the postwar hardships deepened, the tone easily became ironic. Moreover, memories of the immediate pre-war period did not generally recall feelings of prosperity, but rather of unemployment and depression. But the political import of the song was particularly double-edged, not least in the mouth of Maurice Chevalier, whose wartime record was at the least ambiguous. The song begins: My grocer kept it under his counter, The tax man kept it in his drawer.50 The words go on to suggest that the flower in question is the tricolour national flag, and that it was kept safely hidden throughout the war by the grocer, the revenue inspector, the pharmacist, the demobilised soldier, the farmer, the priest and the Resistance fighter. The blanket


absolution offered to all these categories of people implies that with the return of the happy days, it would be churlish to pry into what they did publicly during that period. And so by an ironic reversal, it is the ordinary activity of French people during the occupation that is now put away in some place of concealment to enable the reconstruction or restoration to proceed. The song’s evocation of this concealment, under the counter, in a drawer, or in the pharmacist’s preserving jar, offers a series of metaphors for the Freudian mechanism of repression which ensures that what is repressed will remain fresh whenever it is plucked out of concealment. If French national pride could remain fresh through the occupation years, it is not so surprising that the national shame that was repressed in 1944 should remain similarly fresh for the many occasions on which it has been plucked out in the following sixty years. Despite the rhetoric of return to the past, de Gaulle sought to bring about more change in the political system than almost anyone else. He sought energetically to prevent a return to the party political system of the Third Republic, preferring to work towards a structure of national unanimity, expressed, naturally, in his own person. The parallels with Marshal Pétain’s conception of his own role did not go unnoticed. But de Gaulle also recognised that the state would have to assume new roles and new forms of organisation, not only in respect of nationalised industry but also in respect of strategic planning initiatives. Consequently, he spoke regularly of the ‘edifice of renewal’, of building ‘the new France’ or a ‘new and rejuvenated France’.51 At least, these were the terms he used in the early months, but more and more the language of building and rebuilding shaded from the figurative to the literal, as the enormous task of reconstructing the devastated infrastructure and shattered economy dominated French life. At most, he would add a comment about a broader ‘rénovation’, referring to a better, purer, more fraternal country, but also to a greater, more powerful one on the world scale. ‘Renovation’ or ‘renewal’ then became his standard terms for describing the entire process of moral, political and social recovery of France during his presidency, which ended in January 1946. Renovation, or renewal, is in many respects a conservative representation of change, suggesting a process of repair or strengthening of what already exists. But de Gaulle’s allegiance was not to any pre-existing France, and certainly not to the old Republic, whatever his comments on 25 August. The prospect of a Fourth Republic that too closely resembled the Third prompted his shock resignation in January 1946. Rather, his allegiance was to what he notoriously called ‘a certain idea of France’, a


notional Republic, which enjoyed independence, originality, prestige, universality and immortality.52 The renewal he looked for was less a matter of France changing than of France coming to resemble herself more closely, or at least coming to resemble more closely his idea of what she had always been. It was from this dialectic of the real and the ideal that de Gaulle’s conservative radicalism drew so much of its persuasive power.

Modernisation The notion of modernisation encapsulates a conception of the Liberation as a period of transition in continuity with both past and future.53 Though not initially the most exciting, the language of progressive change became increasingly prevalent, with a discourse of evolution and reconciliation, getting things moving, renovating, rejuvenating and modernising. Though the Gaullists increasingly adopted this discourse, it was at first most identified with the social elites that were close to the Vichy regime. Despite a small number of dramatic cases where notorious collaborators were ‘purged’, most of the administrative and business elites remained substantially in their previous positions, though they were constrained to extreme discretion if not silence about their role during the occupation. Perhaps surprisingly, the work of post-war reconstruction was officially begun in 1941, by a Vichy government department, the Délégation Générale à l’Équipement National, established for the purpose. It kept discreet contact with London, and continued its work uninterrupted at the end of the war.54 This inter-ministerial group initially had responsibility for rebuilding and re-equipping France after the wartime destructions of 1940, to which were subsequently added the destructions of 1944–45. It took its remit to include urban and industrial planning, and passed on its ideas, and much of its personnel, to its successor bodies, Jean Monnet’s Planning Commission (Commissariat Général au Plan), and Raoul Dautry’s Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning (Urbanisme). Modernity was a prominent theme of the culture of the period, exemplified by the title of the review Les Temps modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1945. Though the name was taken from the pre-war Charles Chaplin film Modern Times (1936), it did not propose a critique of industrialised society but rather a new political, literary and intellectual avant-garde. Sartre’s opening editorial makes no mention of the term ‘modern’, and it was not a term he commonly used at this time. However, the concept was more widely invoked by Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, who largely associated it with science and industry, as did most contemporary com-


mentators. It was also apparent, as the reference to the Chaplin film suggests, that to a large extent, the concept of modernity was identified with America. Modern attitudes and modern people were typically associated with the latest technological advances, especially in décor and equipment, and with liberal moral and social values, exemplified by the American way of life.55 A succession of writers and artists, including Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, made their pilgrimage to witness this in person in the immediate post-war period, and it was the essence of the vogue for American novels and jazz music which swept through the Latin Quarter and beyond, before the confrontations of the Cold War made America a focus of political partisanship. On the social and economic level, the project of modernisation became a dominant theme of post-war France, especially in the 1950s, encapsulating the drive to economic growth and industrial development within a context of political and institutional stability. In 1945, it was particularly attractive to the professional, technical and managerial strata who for the most part had adapted well enough to Vichy and were now happy to grasp the opportunities which the post-war reconstruction promised, without wishing to rake over the details of their past activities. Modernisation conveniently combined an aura of dynamic change with an underlying continuity, a stance which became increasingly popular as war receded into the past and the project of modernisation could be set more firmly in the context of ‘longue durée’, long-term evolutionary change, without implying a relationship to particular governments or regimes. All the terms of transition have recognisable symbolic dimensions, evoking traditions and precedents in French history. Among others, they variously suggest parallels between the immediate post-war situation and the fifteenth-century Renaissance, the French Revolution, the reconstruction after the First World War, and the Popular Front government of the 1930s. Each of these had its specific resonances, generally felt as positive at least by the group which it was intended to encourage, and serving as a reassuring anchor point for the painful and confusing situation they faced in the mid-1940s. Each of the historical precedents also represents a form of change, corresponding broadly with the strategies available to France in 1944. In practice, however, the opportunities for major social or political change were extremely limited, as a result both of France’s own depleted condition, and as a result of the post-war division of the world into Eastern and Western spheres of influence. Consequently, the two strategies ostensibly breaking with the past (rebirth and


rebuilding) were unable to articulate the precise nature and extent of the break, while the two strategies offering future change (rebirth and revolution) were unable to articulate its precise time scale and direction. They rapidly transmuted into moral or cultural aspirations, appearing as ‘projets de civilisation’ rather than as programmes for government. This forced displacement is certainly one reason why the governing political parties (Gaullists, socialists, communists, Christian democrats) chose, as Andrew Shennan points out, to focus their attention ‘both above and beneath policy: either on large doctrinal issues . . . or on tactical issues raised by the party’s participation in . . . Government’.56 It is also a reason why post-war France proved so energetic in producing cultural and intellectual innovations decoupled from the more prosaic conditions under which people lived their daily lives. The strategy of continuity with the past and into the future, modernisation was in the end left as the only strategy that could be formulated in terms of specific policies. Of the four, it had the least resonance within the symbolic domains of national memory, being rather associated with America as the epitome of modernity. And it is noticeable that the policies and programmes of modernisation were largely formulated outside the directly political sphere, especially through the mechanisms of Monnet’s Planning Commission, which commanded an all-party consensus at least to the extent of taking its role in economic development largely out of party politics. The language used to describe what was happening in post-war France was highly coded. It expressed a range of alternative options, each with its chains of implication, and patterns of social resonance in paradigmatic, syntagmatic and symbolic dimensions. The coded language also communicated what was not said, and where the discrepancies lay between what was said and what was done. In that perspective, it might be that the real achievements of post-war France are not to be found by asking how far the more ambitious projects were put into practice, but rather by asking what was done in practice under the shelter of that highly coded umbrella. If symbols by their nature articulate both presence and absence, they not only invite a lament for the absence which they present, but also suggest a continued quest for presence, elsewhere, to which they point. This dynamic combination of anguish and energy came to be embodied in different conceptions. The Gaullists emphasised ardour and fervour, the communists stressed tenacity in struggle, the personalists confessed a tragic optimism, and the existentialists espoused an active pessimism. Between them, they ensured that in the midst of hardships, the hallmark of the post-war French elites was active engagement rather than paralysis and despair.

3 Finding the Symbols

Symbols and national identity In the relative absence of economic and political resources in the immediate post-war years, symbolic actions and images assumed great significance for the management of the state and of public responses to the events of the day. In particular they enabled the French political and cultural elites to overcome the serious difficulties of re-establishing national unity and dealing with the complex aftermath of catastrophic wartime events. The importance of symbols is a familiar part of everyday experience in the twenty-first century, with the pervasive presence of the audio-visual media and the endless repetition of significant images, vested with enormous symbolic power. It now seems evident, for example, that the image of an aeroplane flying into the World Trade Centre condenses a multitude of issues, attitudes, people and events. But this obviousness is achieved by long months of repetition on a global scale, in many media, and in a wide diversity of contexts. For France in 1944, symbolic images had a more limited national context, and a less diverse range of possible meanings. But their action was no less powerful within their context. The symbolic domain assumed greater than usual importance in the management of the state and in the shaping of public responses to the events of the day, not least because economic and political resources were in such painfully short supply at the end of the war and for several years following. The material resources for cultural activity were also rationed, from supplies of paper and ink to the electricity needed for broadcasts or the petrol and vehicles to distribute publications. Because of their relative scarcity, the words and images that did circulate may have had relatively greater impact, and significant 59


public actions may have acquired greater resonance. The identity of the imagined French national community was reconstructed largely by the mobilisation of the symbolic resources that were available. Much of the process was a struggle for symbols, affirming or denying the past or the future, and presenting images by which the lives of French people could be directed and shaped. Whether cast in words or in images, symbols were an important battlefield, an ideological and cultural terrain, on which the struggle for control of post-war France was conducted. The efficacy of symbols in building social identities is recognised in many fields of study, including linguistics, theology, philosophy, literature, ethnography and sociology. The many accounts of symbols and how they operate can contribute a range of insights to shed light on how symbols operated in France after the war to rebuild national identity. Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the symbolic dimension of language points to the importance of the social and historical context in understanding the meanings of words, while Roland Barthes’s concept of myth and mythologies helps to uncover the veiled connotations of words and images in a wide range of media.1 The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests that symbols function by providing a structure for understanding social experience, and are often constructed through ‘bricolage’, a process of assembling new symbols from the existing store of disparate cultural elements.2 Extending the analysis to narratives more generally, Fredric Jameson argues that narrative is a socially symbolic act. Adopting some insights from the theory of interpretation, he seeks to restore the buried traces of social conflict that inhabit all narratives, the ‘political unconscious’ of stories.3 Pierre Bourdieu approaches the same set of issues from a sociological perspective, agreeing that the symbolic power of words, images and actions is exercised in a sense unconsciously. He goes further to argue that the apparently magical power of symbols depends on a process of ‘misrecognition’, in which those who exercise symbolic power and those who are subject to it must both avoid acknowledging that an act of domination is occurring.4 Jean Baudrillard adds a further level of complexity to the relationship between the image and its social context. In his theory of the ‘precession of simulacra’, he argues that the social interpretation of images moves through four stages. It sees the image first as the reflection of reality, then as the distortion of reality, third as a mask for the absence of a corresponding reality, and finally as a simulation unrelated to any reality, a pure simulacrum in its own right.5 Baudrillard’s vision of the eventual death of reality,

Finding the Symbols 61

murdered by the image, is excessively pessimistic, but he contributes the valuable insight that the relationship between an image and a social content is dynamic and changing.

The struggle for symbols The importance of the symbolic dimension in France at the end of the war was articulated by several key figures of the time. Their perception of symbols was diverse, but the range of diversity can be judged by two examples, which lie at opposite ends of a spectrum that stretches from simulation to representation. At one end, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre saw symbols primarily as a token of the reduced reality of France at the period. Describing life in occupied Paris, he suggested the war had opened a gulf between reality and symbol. A symbol: this hard-working angry city was no more than a symbol. We used to look at each other and wonder whether we had not become symbols too.6 In the context, he was describing the wartime isolation of Paris from the rest of France and from the rest of the world. Writing for a British and American audience, he emphasised the debilitating effect of losing political autonomy and of being cut off from a sense of the future. Paris became literally and figuratively empty, the capital of France in name only. It had slipped into Baudrillard’s third stage of precession, and had therefore in Sartre’s eyes become a mere symbol. He saw the symbol as an increasingly empty simulation, which served to remind him of the real absence of Paris’s power and glory, which could now be presented only in the imagination. His fear was that the lives of individual Parisians might also have lost contact with reality and that they (and he) were becoming meaningless simulacra. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a more positive perception of the symbolic dimension emerges from the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. Describing his thoughts and feelings as he walked in triumph through liberated Paris, he reflected on his own symbolic status. Since each one of the people there has in his heart chosen Charles de Gaulle as succour for his pain and symbol of his hope, he ought to be able to see him, familiar and fraternal, and thereby see national unity shining forth.7


The determined optimism of de Gaulle’s interpretation does not conceal the painful ambiguity of the symbolic, which includes both presence and absence in a dialectical interaction. But de Gaulle saw the symbol as a form of representation, which is able to make present imaginatively something that cannot be presented in reality. He saw his own role as an active attempt to reverse the movement of precession, so that in due course reality could be made to live up to what was asserted in the symbolic domain. Both of these examples are based on retrospective assessments: Sartre looking back several months and de Gaulle looking back several years. For that reason, neither of them presents a simple view of the immediate post-war situation, but they do provide two different readings of the enhanced role of symbols. In Barthes’s terms, Sartre offers a reading from the perspective of the critic, focusing on the signifier full of meaning in its own right, and attempting to unveil the hidden connotations that it has been made to carry.8 Cutting through the myth of Paris, he discovers an imposture. De Gaulle, on the other hand, offers a reading from the perpective of the myth-maker, focusing on the signifier as empty and available: his role is to make it the appropriate vehicle for the meanings he wishes to convey. Looking for a bearer of national unity, he builds a myth of his own person as the embodiment of the nation. In either case, making and breaking myths and symbols was an important part of the struggle to rebuild a French national identity. De Gaulle’s approach was remarkably successful, at least in the short term, because it recognised that one of the most urgent tasks facing French people in general and their political and intellectual leaders in particular, was to find a way of articulating what was happening to them and devising means to take control of events. This was by no means straightforward, since the experience of those months was ambiguous and confusing. Clear articulation was a challenge, a significant and fragile achievement, often as much wishful thinking as lucid appraisal. Sartre confirmed this in reflecting on the experience of occupation: Since the Nazi poison slipped even into our thoughts, every right thought was a victory; since an all-powerful police force sought to compel us to silence, every word spoken became as precious as a declaration of principle; and since we were hunted, each of our gestures had the weight of a commitment.9 In one sense, this is a tribute to the determination and heroism of the Resistance. But in another sense, it is also a recognition of how many


people must have fallen short of this dauntingly high standard of thought, word and deed. Heroes are always a double-edged asset, since they reveal by contrast the disappointing conduct of the ordinary people around them. Was it only Nazi propaganda that slipped into people’s minds? What was the sign of a right thought? If the police compelled people to silence, what of those it permitted to speak? And likewise if every gesture carries a commitment, what of the gestures of daily complicity? Sartre was as aware as anyone of the de facto cooperation with the German and Vichy authorities, which continued up to a few weeks before he wrote those lines. If evidence were required of the deep dualities of the period, it can be found in comparing the crowd who cheered de Gaulle’s arrival at the Hôtel de Ville on 25 August 1944, and his victory walk along the Champs-Elysées the next day, with the crowd who came out to welcome Marshal Pétain at the Hôtel de Ville four months earlier, on 26 April 1944. It seems likely that some Parisians at least were present on both occasions. Their thoughts, words and deeds on each occasion are unlikely to be exhausted by a simple interpretation.

Symbolising the state Amid the complexities and uncertainties of regime change, one of the most urgent tasks of the emergent French government was to rebuild the French state.10 In a practical sense, the state apparatus continued to function, very substantially in continuity with the previous administration, even if it laboured under severe material shortages. But the previous form of the state, Marshal Pétain’s État français, had collapsed, and needed to be replaced. The incoming provisional government, as yet unrecognised by the Allies, needed to establish itself as the legitimate embodiment of the French state. To some extent, this was ensured by the agreement of the Allies, who refrained from imposing their own military administration, earlier prepared under the AMGOT plan.11 To some extent the Free French army ensured legitimacy, providing a military guarantee for the new government, represented by the arrival of Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division at the end of the liberation of Paris. And to some extent, the new state was installed through the cadre of French officials loyal to the provisional government, who were put in place as the liberating forces advanced through the country. But the early moments of the new state were inherently fragile. The agreement of the Allies was not irreversible, and President Roosevelt in particular needed a good deal of convincing that the new


government would be a sufficient bulwark against communism. The Free French army was not the only French military force, and many armed Resistance units were more enthusiastic about a revolutionary uprising than about joining forces with the regular army. And likewise, many Liberation Committees around the country were strongly committed to local democratic government, and hostile to the imposition of a prefectoral regime of Commissaires, governed from Paris. In the circumstances, therefore, de Gaulle needed to mobilise all the symbolic resources at his disposal to secure public acceptance of his new state. De Gaulle’s intuitive grasp of symbolic gestures has often been acknowledged. For most of the war, he had few means at his disposal beyond speeches, broadcasts and personal appearances, but used all of these to great effect. No one was more aware than he was of the importance of style. At the end of July 1944 he sent instructions to his representative in occupied Paris, Alexandre Parodi, which included the following: I advise you always to speak very loudly and very clearly in the name of the State. The forms and the many actions of our admirable Resistance movements are the means by which the nation struggles for its salvation. The State is above all these forms and all these actions.12 Parodi was careful to carry out this advice and succeeded in securing for de Gaulle the allegiance of Resistance movements who neither expected nor received any tangible return. The style of state power was often the only force he could deploy, but skilfully handled, it was sufficient to translate the symbols into the reality. Much the same might be said of de Gaulle’s general conduct of French affairs from London and Algiers in the period leading up to the liberation of Paris. With decidedly slender means, he represented France as if it was a major power, and managed to sustain that posture, against all the evidence, until eventually reality fell into line behind the symbols. De Gaulle exemplified Bourdieu’s point that the apparently magical power of symbols depends on a process of misrecognition. In working through symbols, and speaking on behalf of the state, he avoided explicitly acknowledging, or compelling his audience to acknowledge, that an act of domination was occurring. The misrecognition was particularly vital since de Gaulle largely lacked the material means to enforce his domination if his bluff had been called. His advice to Parodi shows that he understood the nature of symbolic action, and


the mechanism of misrecognition. It also suggests that the success of symbolic action depends on the complicity of participants, but does not require that they should be unconscious in the fuller sense of being entirely unaware of the power struggles taking place. After the Allied landings of June 1944, de Gaulle was particularly aware of the importance of Paris, whose liberation would inevitably be highly symbolic. He made detailed arrangements concerning the roles that particular bodies and individuals should play in the liberation process, agreeing, for example that ‘symbolic buildings’ (les immeubles à caractère symbolique) should be freed by combined operations between regular security forces and Resistance fighters.13 As the liberation of Paris approached, he made all possible efforts to ensure that Leclerc’s division would arrive promptly in the capital, and that he himself would be there at the earliest possible moment. He landed in Cherbourg on 20 August and visited several towns that had already been freed, reaching Rambouillet a few miles south-west of Paris three days later. On 24 August, Leclerc’s division entered Paris to complete the liberation of the city, and the following day de Gaulle himself entered Paris. The itinerary of de Gaulle’s entry into Paris was primarily governed by his determination to make a symbolic assertion of the new state, and of his own sole legitimacy, as he made clear in his memoirs.14 Entering by the Porte d’Orléans, he was expected to travel north-eastwards, passing through the Latin Quarter and crossing the river to reach the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall). The Hôtel de Ville is the traditional seat of government for the city. The Resistance forces had occupied it, and were waiting for de Gaulle’s arrival. But rather than go to the City Hall and receive an investiture into office by the Resistance, de Gaulle chose instead to drive north-west, meeting up at the Montparnasse railway station with Colonel Leclerc, who had just received the formal surrender of the German military commander in Paris, General Choltitz. He congratulated Leclerc on his success, but signalled his displeasure that the colonel had allowed a Resistance representative, Rol-Tanguy, to co-sign the surrender document. From there, he drove to the War Ministry, which he found entirely unchanged since he had left it in June 1940. As he put it in his memoirs: There was nothing missing there, except the State. It was for me to put it back there. So first of all I settled myself in there.15 De Gaulle made a point of making himself at home in a national ministry building, rather than beginning with the city administration. It


emphasised the priority of the nation over the city, and the legitimate state over the de facto civilian administration. The War Ministry was a subtle choice, since it set the liberation of Paris in the context of the broader war effort, and emphasised the close connection between the government and the regular army. It was also the Ministry in which de Gaulle had worked until the defeat of 1940. His return there was a reminder of his own legitimate position within the former French administration, and also asserted a sense of continuity with it. In evoking his arrival at the War Ministry, de Gaulle makes it clear that he saw himself as the symbol of the state, and there is perhaps also a suggestion that the state itself is substantially symbolic. It does not consist of buildings and furniture, or even of people who work in it, but rather in the existence of a person who symbolises its authority. De Gaulle’s conception echoed the Catholic notion of transsubstantiation. In the Catholic celebration of Mass, the key symbols of bread and wine are considered to be transformed into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ. In a similar sense, de Gaulle considered that he was not only a symbol, but in a real sense the incarnation of the French state.

De Gaulle’s style of history De Gaulle appears to have relished the irritation of the Paris Resistance leaders on learning that he had not come directly to them, since it confirmed his view that his major symbolic battle was to establish a separate legitimacy for his authority and for that of the state. After the War Ministry, he drove eastwards along the Seine, making a further stop on the way to inspect a formal police parade at the Prefecture. He then walked the short distance to the Hôtel de Ville through jubilant and cheering crowds. Despite the postponements, de Gaulle’s arrival at the Hôtel de Ville was the moment everyone, including himself, had been waiting for, and the moment that history has largely remembered as the most significant. Standing in a reception hall of the Hôtel de Ville with the leaders of the Parisian Resistance, de Gaulle expressed the ‘deep and sacred emotion’ which gripped all those present, to realise that Paris had risen and liberated itself, and declared that ‘These are minutes which transcend each of our poor lives’.16 With great solemnity, he was marking the event as a historic moment, and the beginning of a new period in French history. The point of the reception ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville was to ensure that this moment was etched deeply into


the national narrative. Jacques Fauvet, who for a long time was editor of Le Monde, gives one of the best-known accounts of it: On 25 August 1944 there began a new chapter in the history of France: General de Gaulle arrived in Paris. A little after seven o’clock in the evening he was received at the Hôtel de Ville. An enormous crowd cheered him for a long time. A detachment of the French Forces of the Interior paid him military honours. M. Marrane greeted him ‘in excellent terms’ in the name of the Paris Liberation Committee. M. Bidault then read him a ‘most solemn address’ in the name of the National Council of the Resistance. Then de Gaulle spoke: ‘France has come back to Paris, she has come home …’ It was a great day full of warmth and style.17 Fauvet shared the view that this was a historic event, beginning a new chapter in French history, but his retrospective style emphasises that the moment was deliberately constructed by its participants to be historic. The same point emerges from de Gaulle’s memoir account of the episode, in which the ceremony ends with the General going to the window and waving to the crowd, who ‘proved by their acclamations that that was all they wanted’.18 For de Gaulle, the importance of the moment consisted in the affirmation of a new embodiment of the eternal French State, which was only confirmed by the popular acclaim. As de Gaulle recognised, the very notion of the ‘historic’ moment suggests that in some respects, the present is already viewed as part of the past. The staging of the event in a symbolic building with its own long and much-chronicled past helped to locate the moment in History, that is, as an important event comparable with other previous events that are widely acknowledged as contributing to the national narrative. The strong collective will to make this a historic moment is apparent from the detailed descriptions of events. The differences of outlook and aspiration between de Gaulle and the Resistance were not allowed to mar the atmosphere. It is clear that all the participants chose their words and gestures with considerable care, so that no discordant note was struck. In effect, the meeting was a collective ritual, which marked what everyone present felt to be a momentous occasion. The ritual propriety was not even upset by a conspicuous disagreement. Georges Bidault, on behalf of the National Resistance Council and the Paris Liberation Committee, invited de Gaulle to proclaim the Republic. The General responded that the Republic had never ceased to exist, since it


had been embodied by the successive institutions of the Free French and now by the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), of which he was President. There was therefore no reason for him to proclaim it now. He therefore merely went on to the balcony to greet the crowd assembled outside, and understood from the rapturous reception that the crowd did not expect anything else. De Gaulle’s speech to the group assembled in the Hôtel de Ville was resonant and served to embed the notion of liberation in national history, confirming that the liberation of Paris was the culmination of French war efforts.19 The symbolic non-declaration of the Republic not only left de Gaulle without any performative words to speak or anything to inaugurate, but also emphasised the paradox of the Republic that both existed and did not exist. This was no longer the Third Republic, but not yet the Fourth. The day of 25 August was only one moment in the liberation of France, and in purely military terms something of a sideshow. It was not the beginning, which could be better dated to a number of earlier events, among them the Normandy landings of June 1944, the liberation of Corsica in August 1943, the French and Allied action in North Africa before that, the emergence of the Resistance movements, the formation of the Free French forces, or the broadcast of de Gaulle’s call to arms from London on 18 June 1940. Nor was 25 August the end, since the German army was not driven back across the Rhine until the winter, and it still occupied key French ports until its final surrender in May 1945. The importance of that day was therefore essentially symbolic, or as Barthes would say, mythical. The event acquired its ‘historic’ nature at the very moment it occurred, signalling itself instantaneously as significant rather than emerging as significant in hindsight. The materiality of the event is swamped by the meaning attaching to it, its historic, symbolic or mythical meaning. The event itself disappears under its burden of representations What is at work may be explained in the ‘tourniquet’ or wicket-gate effect, described by Barthes.20 Since every image or utterance is heavy with connotations, second-level meanings that overlay the first level of meaning, the potential for many conflicting meanings is always present, especially between the two levels. But at every moment the conflict is resolved in favour of one meaning to the exclusion of others. As a result the attention of the reader, or recipient of the mythical image, oscillates constantly between the denoted meaning and the connoted meaning or meanings attached to it. This provides a framework for understanding how social and political connotations always


overlay even the most innocent-looking images or events. The apparently natural and easily legible words and images carry with them a quantity of cultural baggage, and the reader or spectator sees alternately image and baggage, as if observing a wicket-gate or revolving door which reveals only one face at a time. This analysis helps to elucidate the auspicious events of 25 August 1944, in which there is very little which could be described as innocent. The parading and speech-making were not only heavy with symbolism, they were clearly intended as symbolic and had no substantive function other than the symbolic. The leading participants were there specifically to represent their organisation or institution (the provisional government or sections of the Resistance) and their actions were aimed at exhibiting their representativity rather than at transacting any business. In that sense, it was all style and no substance; though in this case style was extremely substantial.

Calling on religion In their heyday, both the Third Republic and the État français were able to embody the nation in the symbols of the state: flag, uniforms, ceremonies, the person of the head of state, and similar representations. The provisional government of de Gaulle found it a more difficult task in the immediate circumstances of the end of the war. They were obliged to turn to a range of other symbolic systems in support of the state symbols, in order to represent the nation adequately. The national community, which was only weakly imagined at this time, had to be strengthened by an intensive mobilisation of its imaginative resources, channelled towards the single aim of reimagining the French nation. In the process the state undertook a major work of bricolage and called on the entire spectrum of identities to give weight and gravity to the cultural restoration of the national identity. It drew its resources in the first instance from the religious domain. Early in his reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson points out the ways in which, since the eighteenth century, the institutions of nationhood have assumed many of the functions of religion, constructing themselves sacramentally as entire cultural systems. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes


another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation.21 The principal function of national systems of cultural representation, he argues, is that of making sense of the ‘fatalities’ or inevitabilities of human life, among which death and suffering are perhaps the most irreducible. The situation of France in 1944 brought this crucial function into sharp focus, as the scale of death and suffering loomed darkly over the country and the capacity of the nation to imagine itself as a community was stretched almost to the limit. How the nation reconstituted itself, by drawing on religious approaches to transfiguring death and suffering, illuminates both the complexity of the task and the power of France’s self-imagining. The roots of French national identity in religion are evoked in de Gaulle’s classic profession of national faith at the beginning of his war memoirs, published some ten years later: All my life, I have formed a certain idea of France. It is inspired in me by feelings as well as by reason. That side of me that is emotional naturally imagines France, like the princess in the stories or the Madonna in mural frescoes, as bound for an eminent and exceptional destiny.22 The stories and frescoes confirm that his images of France are culturally constructed, though the princess and the Virgin Mary belong respectively to the literary and religious domains. De Gaulle imagines France as a person rather than a community, but it is in both cases a lofty and symbolic person, who is also a woman. In this respect, de Gaulle’s retrospective reflections are a close echo of the many female representations of the French nation in the post-war period and since. The reference to the Madonna evokes the two significant moments in the Christian story at which she is most commonly depicted, namely the birth and death of Christ. Her consequent role in recognising human sorrow is a particularly strong feature of Catholic piety, and resonated strongly with French people attempting to recover from the death and suffering of the Second World War. Death and suffering are integral to human experience in every age and country, and are never more prominent in public awareness than after a war, with the human and material damage that accompanies such conflict. The scale and causes of suffering are specific to each conflict and


to each community affected. But in each case the community, especially the national community, must find ways of recognising the experience and integrating it into its own identity. And conversely, to the extent that the nation succeeds in this task, it confirms and strengthens the bond that unites the national community. France emerged from the war with half the level of destruction suffered during the First World War.23 Nonetheless, the experience of death haunts the period after 1944. Death and suffering figure prominently in its narratives and images. For example, it is visible in the painting of Picasso and the sculpture of Giacometti; the films of Marcel Carné: Les enfants du paradis and Les portes de la nuit; the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus: Huis clos, Morts sans sépulture, Le malentendu, Caligula; the novels of Simone de Beauvoir: Tous les hommes sont mortels, Le sang des autres; the poetry of Éluard and Aragon; or the songs of Edith Piaf and Juliette Gréco. 24 Coincidentally, the high points of the Paris theatre season of 1944–45 were T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, and Strindberg’s Dance of Death, both directed by Jean Vilar. Looking at some of the texts and images of the period, it is striking how far religious themes are interwoven with the rebuilding of the nation.

Resurrecting the nation One of the most striking wall-posters distributed around Paris at the moment of the insurrection and eventual liberation of the capital was by Paul Colin, dated 17 August 1944. It depicts Marianne, symbol of the Republic in her Phrygian bonnet, standing and shielding her eyes as she looks into the distance (Fig. 3).25 She may be shielding her eyes from the heat of a blazing building or from the rays of the sunrise. Printed in colours suggesting the French tricolour, she wears a tunic patterned in a way that suggests the shells of ruined buildings, and her hands are scarred in a way that recalls the stigmata of Christ crucified. The symbolism is simple and immediate, but also rich and complex. At the immediate level, it presents as Colin’s fellow affichiste Raymond Gid says, ‘a tricolour image, with a cloud-free sky blue’ in which ‘France, with her hands crucified until only yesterday, lifts her gaze beyond her ruins towards the future’.26 This is an inspiring image to mobilise the population to rise up against the occupying forces, and no doubt was not read or intended in any other way. However, it conceals further implications that emerge on closer reading. The conjunction of Marianne and Christ is unusual, not least because of the traditional enmity and de jure separation between the Roman Catholic Church and the secular Republic.


Figure 3

Paul Colin, Libération, August 1944


However, these were heady days of reconciliation and Colin’s bricolage no doubt helped to encourage the process. The implicit transgression of gender distinctions is not wholly unprecedented, and Joan of Arc is an obvious association, but the tradition of women exhibiting Christ’s stigmata is rather specific to Catholic spiritualism. Whereas Marianne initially appears as France crucified, there are therefore residual echoes of her merely simulating the signs of the Passion. Calling up the connotations of Christ after His physical death and resurrection, passing on to a higher plane, the poster may also suggest that the new France would be significantly different from the old, a point which would resonate with both the internal Resistance movements and de Gaulle’s Free French. Ruined buildings appear on the tunic like an image on a shroud, suggesting the extent of the physical destruction incurred. But at this time, such images also carry the suppressed point that a large part of the destruction was actually carried out by France’s Allies, who may therefore be complicit in the crucifixion. The poster does not otherwise identify either enemies or Allies, as in much of the French iconography of the period, as distinct from the Allied equivalent. Colin’s poster is in one sense highly specific to its moment, the beginning of the week in which Paris was liberated. Appropriately, Marianne has just emerged from the tomb and is looking around, perhaps a little bewildered at the confused action which awaits her, and of which she is a symbol. She would not belong in the earlier period of preparation for liberation, nor the later period of consolidation of the nation-state. But in another sense, the poster is emblematic of a much longer period. The symbols of the state and of religion are assembled together in an attempt to give meaning and purpose to destruction and death. What emerges from the ruins is hope, which is directed towards a newly reconstructed France rooted in universality and transcendence. Death, though real, is conquered. The same terms are echoed in de Gaulle’s speeches at this period. Speaking at the Hôtel de Ville in Cherbourg on 20 August 1944, a week before the liberation of Paris, he declared: We are well aware that the Calvary we are climbing is the greatest and hardest ordeal in our history. But we are also aware of the abyss from which we are emerging and of the summits towards which we are rising.27 Evoking Calvary, the hill on which Christ was crucified, the particular ordeal to which he was specifically referring was the destruction


wrought in the battle of Normandy, and by extension that which could be expected in the continuing battle to liberate France. However, the image of France climbing her own Calvary suggests not only that the worst part of the ordeal is yet to come, but also that it must be undertaken to expiate past sins. The ascension from the abyss to the heights can only be achieved at the cost of suffering freely accepted. France must take her own sins upon herself and atone through suffering and death for the ignominy of the années noires. The idea curiously echoes the rhetoric of Vichy in 1940, when the defeat was depicted as a punishment for the sins of the 1930s, and France was called by Pétain and the Church to admit this in a collective mea culpa, the ritual Catholic confession of guilt. After the liberation of Paris, the notion of atonement was largely banished from French discourse, though it continued to linger in implicit connotations. Sartre described the ‘secret shame’ of French people during the occupation, which extended even to those held captive in prisoner-of-war camps, who were unable to have pity for themselves: ‘Their sufferings were dry and bitter, unpleasant and tainted by the feeling they had of having deserved them.’28 To a large extent Sartre attributes this sense of shame to the military defeat, reinforced by the subsequent feeling of powerlessness and daily compliance with occupying forces. But the worst of this suffering, he argues, was that for most people it was felt as being deserved, but not as providing any redemption, even if some joined the Resistance to try to redeem their country. Sartre’s view is that ‘this minority which offered itself in martyrdom, deliberately and without hope, amply suffices to redeem our weaknesses’.29 What is perhaps most striking about this analysis is the ease with which Sartre, a confirmed atheist, articulates a theology of redemption, making it clear that what is redeemed is France. It is also striking that the ‘enfant terrible’ of existentialism had no difficulty in speaking for the nation, as a priest for his people.

The long suffering of the people The sense of national unity in suffering was a widespread theme, but by no means a universal one. It was widely felt that the hardships of the post-war period were not shared evenly, and that the burdens fell most heavily on the working class. This feeling is expressed in Francis Gruber’s painting, ‘Job’, which was shown at the high-profile art exhibition, Salon de la Libération, in October 1944 (Fig. 4).30 It depicts a naked man sitting in a contemplative posture on a stool in a back yard


Figure 4

Francis Gruber, Job, 1944

beside a broken fence. The darkened face and hands suggest a worker, but the allegorical force is underlined by a sheet of paper at his feet, which carries the scrawled inscription, ‘Maintenant encore, ma plainte est une révolte, et pourtant ma main comprime mes sanglots’ (And still now, my groaning is a revolt, and yet my hand chokes back my sobs), taking up a verse from the Old Testament in the Book of Job.31 Unlike


the Colin poster, nothing directly evokes the state. Instead the religious symbolism is attached to an image of civil society, suggesting the long suffering of the people, who have laboured under all manner of deprivation but remain staunch in their faith. Since the title and text are from the Old Testament, the persecution of the Jewish people is an obvious connotation. There is an exegetic tradition that sees in Job a precursor of Christ, viewed as the suffering servant. It is through suffering rather than death that his apotheosis is achieved, suggesting perhaps that whereas the state has died and must be resurrected, the people have endured and must be lifted up. Ambiguities crowd around the image. No doubt Job was eventually lifted up, but here his suffering shows no sign of ending. No one would claim that the restoration of the French state was synonymous with the restoration of civil society, and in the meantime Job sits in mute reproach. It is hard to resist the feeling that the state is the implied object of the stifled revolt. The biblical Job’s God is painfully absent and inscrutable, unwilling or perhaps unable to help his faithful servant. This is no doubt an appropriate metaphor for the French state in the difficult autumn of 1944. It recalls Lucien Goldmann’s analysis of the seventeenth-century French writers Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine in his study The Hidden God.32 He suggests that their tragic vision of man’s relation to God is analogous to the precarious dependence of the court aristocracy (noblesse de robe) on the favour of the king, which could be withdrawn at a whim. Applied to Gruber’s painting, a similar analogy might suggest that the working class, having accepted a strategy of restoring the French nation-state, is immobilised in the face of a provisional state on which its future depends but from which it derives little tangible benefit at present. In political terms, Gruber is doubtless also reflecting the position of the French Communist Party, of which he was a member. It was committed, not least by instructions from Moscow, to supporting de Gaulle in 1944, despite the deep suspicion with which the General regarded them. The Party was constantly called upon to prove its loyalty despite its members’ serious reservations about the government’s objectives or scope for action. The process closely matches Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, in which subordinated groups are impelled to defend the system that perpetuates their subordination. The combination of religious and political representations of death is likewise presented in Raymond Gid’s widely distributed poster of 1945, ‘Retour à la France, retour à la vie’ (Back to France, back to life) (Fig. 5).33 It depicts the survivor of a concentration camp, rising from


Figure 5

Raymond Gid, Retour à la France, retour à la vie


the darkness into the light with tricolour heart beating luminously. Politically, it clearly contains an urgent appeal for solidarity with returning deportees. The emaciated body and the strands of barbed wire betoken the concentration camp, though the figure does not wear the striped uniform, which was widely depicted at the time as the emblem of prisoners in concentration camps. The naked body is not clearly gendered in anatomical terms, though the posture perhaps suggests masculinity. The religious associations, more confidently masculine, call up Christ rising from the dead, but also suggest the figure of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead by Christ in one of his miracles.34 The heart, which beats for France, is borrowed unmistakably from the Sacred Heart iconography of Catholic piety. Ambiguities are not lacking. Whereas Lazarus returned to life, Christ’s resurrection appears as a transformation into a new spiritual being rather than a return to the life before death. And the Sacred Heart belongs to his reigning in Glory. The stylised figuration combines with the suggestion of transfiguration to render the returnee a vivid symbol of dehumanisation, leaving it open to question whether their humanity could ever be recovered. The returning prisoners were therefore implicitly cast as returning from death in spiritual glory. But clothed in this radical Otherness, they could not easily be assimilated back into the normal life that for most of them would have been their most fervent desire. The fact that many returning deportees were Jewish adds further ambiguity to the message.

A usable symbolism It is not surprising that Christian and especially Catholic religious motifs were mobilised to recognise the suffering and the deaths the war had brought. The population of France was at the time predominantly Catholic. But it is nonetheless remarkable that the use of religious symbolism spans the entire political spectrum, including secular republicans and communists, who were not believers, let alone practising Christians. In pre-war France these would have shunned such overtly religious forms of expression. The French state, under the Third Republic, had been separated from the Church for forty years, and had been generally careful not to depart from its secular role. The aggressive reintroduction of Catholic principles into the state by Marshal Pétain was one of the elements that Vichy’s opponents were most anxious to reverse.35 And since the war, the separation of religion from the state has been the focus of passionate advocacy.36 The question


therefore arises why the combination of state and religious symbolism should have commanded such widespread unanimity among the disparate forces seeking to reimagine the nation. One reason was the shortage of secular symbolic systems within which individual or collective disaster might be articulated. Before the war, the ritual and rhetoric of the republican state were the predominant framework within which death should be publicly marked. For example, the war memorials erected throughout France after 1918 were systematically devoid of religious symbols.37 In due course the republican symbols did return, but in the summer and autumn of 1944, and for some time afterwards, the French state was too fragile to carry the symbolic burden of the nation’s dead: it was still insufficiently established in French territory, in French minds, or on the world stage. In these conditions religion provided a usable array of symbols. But even this was of qualified efficacy. There are always risks in adopting existing symbolic systems. They have their own structure and associations, which cannot easily be modified to new purposes. The story of the crucifixion and resurrection is probably more firmly structured and richer in associations than any other narrative available in France in 1944, and a fertile source of unbidden meanings. Moreover, the position of institutional religion was every bit as precarious as that of the state. If its symbols were widely and easily understood, they also had a past to live down. The Vichy regime had been aggressively Catholic at times. The Catholic hierarchy at least had been fervently Pétainist, and in some cases ostentatiously collaborationist. Pétain’s National Revolution had drawn heavily on the imagery of saints, crusaders and churches. It was true that these had been contested and that the clergy included staunch Resistance figures, but any suggestion of confessionalism would arouse quite discordant associations. The images of crucifixion, resurrection and transfiguration could well be read as general affirmations of transcendent values, but not comfortably as specific affirmations of Christian doctrine. The delicacy with which the bricolage of Catholic and state symbolism had to be approached was famously demonstrated by de Gaulle’s triumphal progress from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame on 26 August 1944. Arriving finally at the cathedral, he declined to be greeted by Monsignor Suhard, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, who was widely considered to have supported the Vichy government and maintained uncomfortably close relations with the Germans. Instead, de Gaulle was greeted by junior clergy, including the Dominican Father Bruckberger, who had served as a chaplain for the Resistance. And rather than the tri-


umphal Te Deum, traditionally sung for heads of state in thanks for their victory in war, the choir sang the Magnificat, traditionally sung as an expression of the Church’s joy at a particular event.38 In this way, the Church was able to give its symbolic support to de Gaulle, without excessively overstating the political or military strength of the provisional government. Conversely, de Gaulle, on behalf of the state, was able to claim the symbolic rewards of religious support without incurring the penalties of appearing to endorse the official Church’s political record under Vichy. Even if a strong state or religious framework had been available, as it was in 1918, it is by no means certain that it could adequately have symbolised the deaths of the Second World War, so complex was their pattern.39 As against the 1.3 million young French men who died in combat in the Great War, the 600 000 people who died between 1939 and 1945 included people of all ages and sexes, military, paramilitary and civilian. A majority of the 170 000 soldiers who died in action were killed in the spring of 1940 during the ignominious defeat. They had been mourned discreetly and with attenuated pride. Some 80 000 Free French and Resistance casualties died in the successful campaigns of 1944–45 to liberate France and occupy Germany. Civilian casualties were almost as high as total military losses. Both groups were outnumbered by those who died in prisons and camps, including between 70 000–100 000 Jews who were France’s shameful contribution to the Holocaust. These different groups called for different types of mourning and commemoration. A significant minority of the French casualties died at the hands of, or through the agency of, their own compatriots, whether in fighting, in prison or in executions, and their memory was inextricably bound to the ‘Franco-French war’, which cut across aspirations to national unanimity. A significant number of people died under the ‘friendly fire’ of Allied bombardment, which was not always accepted as rigorously justified by the necessities of war. And there were further complexities, such as foreigners dying for France and French people dying for Germany, with the overall result of a broad and contradictory profile that would set a daunting challenge to any processes of symbolic representation. This was all the more difficult at a time when the French symbols themselves could be listed among the casualties of war.

Symbolic alliances A more positive reason for the successful linking of religious and secular symbols was the practical and ideological alliance which had


been forged between Catholics and non-Catholics in the Resistance. This had been driven by the belief that national unity should bring the plurality of French traditions together in the task of liberating their country. Believers and non-believers worked and fought together, and for a brief period at least, the ideological barriers were overcome. Aragon’s celebrated poem, ‘La rose et le réséda’ (The rose and the mignonette), though written during the occupation, became a liturgical celebration of this unity in the post-war period, and is also a potent example of the support given by religious symbols to the secular state. The poem begins by establishing the link between Catholics and non-Catholics in patriotism: He who believed in heaven He who did not believe in it Both loved the beautiful maiden Held prisoner by the soldiers40 The allegorical equivalence is maintained as the two heroes (Catholic and non-Catholic resisters) attempt to rescue the damsel in distress (France), are wounded, imprisoned and executed. The poem concludes with the assurance that their spirit and their sacrifice will inspire others, uniting all French people as: One runs and the other has wings From Brittany or from the Jura And raspberry or mirabelle plum The cricket will sing again Say flute or cello The double love that burned The skylark and the swallow The rose and the mignonette41 The spirit with wings, the high-flying skylark and the fragrant greygreen mignonette, sometimes used to decorate churches, clearly symbolise the Catholic, while the running spirit, the low-flying swallow and the (red) rose of the socialist and communist movements symbolise the non-Catholic, especially of the Left. But the poem also develops other oppositions, including those of region (Brittany in the west, the Jura in the east) and class (the peasant flute, the orchestral cello) to emphasise the unity in difference, which is created by the overarching fidelity to the nation. What is


perhaps less clear is the nature of the ‘double love’ which burned the symbolic birds and flowers. It may simply be taken as an acknowledgement that the love was shown by two allegorical characters, or it may be seen as a reference to the parallel between the love of a woman and love of France, a theme which figures elsewhere in Aragon’s poetry of the period. 42 However, a more complex reading might take the love itself to be double, suggesting that two characters combined their love of France with their commitment to a religious or secular ideal. In this perspective the affirmation of national identity is supported by the religious or secular identities, in a process that may well be reciprocal. The poem presents the believer and non-believer as equally motivated by their respective faiths, the light which guides their steps (‘cette clarté sur leur pas’). Whether or not the secular figure is identified as a communist militant, as the epigraph would suggest,43 it is clear that the desired national unity is shown to draw its strength from the religious or quasi-religious fidelities that are subordinate to it. Commenting on his extensive use of Christian themes and Celtic legends, Aragon made no apology for using whatever symbolic materials would contribute to national unity: Myths set back on their feet have the power not only to make people dream, but also to make them act, and to give to the action and dreaming of our people that cohesion, that unity which seemed then, in 1941, so highly desirable.44 Aragon’s tone of nostalgia for a time when national unity was such an urgent task may conceal a regret at the uses to which the cause of national unity was later turned. But the procedures he described for constructing action-oriented mythical structures can certainly be more generally applied. Aragon confirms the importance of the symbolic or cultural dimension in the construction of the nation, but whereas he is inclined to reduce the Christian themes in his work to the manipulation of myths, he perhaps underestimates the extent to which he is himself caught up in the religious momentum that he claims to master. At the very least, as Benedict Anderson’s analysis would suggest, Aragon’s national fervour is itself a quasi-religious experience, and it might also be that his communist commitment, the other half of the ‘double love’, is also in a sense religious. Aragon held unrivalled prestige as the ‘national poet’, whose poetry had played a significant role in the cultural mobilisation of Resistance.


His membership of the Communist Party did nothing to diminish this. After the war, the published collections of his wartime poems, especially Le Crève-coeur and La Diane française, helped to cement national pride. They provided an opportunity to relive the heroic moments of the Resistance for a wide audience, few of whom would have had access to the poems during the occupation. As a later chapter demonstrates, the result of this process was a reconstituted humanism, rooted in Christian democracy and socialism, which became the broad ideological framework for the post-war reconstruction of the French nation and state. Communists and socialists, throwing their weight behind the patriotic consensus, found their ecumenism rewarded by access to a rich and potent mythology, which they were not slow to mobilise. France’s political and cultural elites were therefore faced with a daunting task of mobilising all possible symbolic resources to rebuild French national identity, and at the same time rebuilding the country’s damaged symbolic systems. They formed unlikely alliances, especially between religious believers and non-believers. And they engaged in a cultural bricolage, bringing together whatever symbols they considered usable in the effort to foster national unity. This is not to say that the artists and writers who produced the words and images were acting consciously as agents of the re-emerging French state. Some were, but others were not. In either event, wittingly or unwittingly they were mobilised as symbol-makers, and in due course as symbols themselves, contributing to the overriding task of reconstructing the nation.

4 Workers and Intellectuals

Class co-operation The major national upheavals of the late twentieth century have pivoted on shifts of allegiance in workers and intellectuals. These two groups have been the focus of attempts to rebuild nations after war or revolution, in such diverse contexts as the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, post-apartheid South Africa and post-intervention Iraq. Workers are crucial to economic life, and can generate material recovery and prosperity. Intellectuals are crucial to cultural life, and can generate a sense of common purpose and identity, including an attractive face to present to the outside world. Conversely, oppositional movements among workers, and dissident movements among intellectuals, may both create conditions of instability in which the future of a country is placed in jeopardy. Rebuilding the French nation after the Second World War, the imperative of national unity was accepted by both workers and intellectuals, most of whom were persuaded that the interests of the nation should override their sectional interests. These interests were traditionally reflected in the class-consciousness of workers, and in the intellectuals’ sense of professional autonomy. Both gave way, at least temporarily, to a sense of their duty to serve, or represent, the nation. Neither was easily achieved, or painless, but the willingness of both groups to subordinate themselves to the greater national good was a defining characteristic of the reinvented post-war France. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France has been acutely conscious of its class conflicts. The decade that preceded the Second World War was one of the most class-conscious periods in its history. To a large extent these conflicts were forcibly suppressed during the occupation, and they continued to be repressed by common 84

Workers and Intellectuals 85

consensus at the Liberation. The extent to which class identities were subordinated to national and ‘human’ priorities is one of the most remarkable features of the period, and when class conflicts re-emerged with renewed vigour in 1947, they continued to bear the traces of their subordination. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing in the first issue of Les Temps modernes, articulated the logic of the consensus: In the France of 1940 and now, national feeling (which is not to say chauvinism) is revolutionary. That does not just mean that it is opposed in fact to the immediate interests of French capitalism and that Marxists can use it as a pious ruse to benefit their own struggles. It means that the historical conjuncture liberates the national reality from the deadweight of reactionary purposes to which it was mortgaged, and permits proletarian consciousness to become part of it again.1 Merleau-Ponty argued that the experience of war and occupation had revealed the limitations of a purely class-based understanding of history, and had revealed the progressive face of patriotism, or at the least had provided circumstances in which French patriotism was undeniably progressive, or, to use his term, revolutionary. Whereas pre-war nationalism had been aggressively bourgeois, leaving the working class alienated from the nation, he suggested that the war and especially the Resistance had now enabled workers to become part of it again. His view that the postwar circumstances permitted proletarian consciousness to become part of national reality (‘autorise la conscience prolétarienne à l’intégrer’) uses the word ‘intégrer’ which in expressions such as ‘intégrer son pays’ has the special meaning of ‘returning home’ as well as the general sense of integration. The spirit of national reconciliation therefore has suggestions of the working class returning to its spiritual home in the nation, and thus finding its rightful place, alongside all the other particular interests that are subordinated to the overriding national interests. It recalls the verse in Aragon’s ‘La rose et le réséda’: When the corn is under hailstones Only the fool will put on airs Only the fool remembers old quarrels In the midst of the common fight.2 When the crops are threatened by storm, all differences between neighbours must be set aside, and though the poem points first to setting


aside old religious differences, the same logic applies to old class differences. Aragon’s appeal to a rural image of ‘la France profonde’ has distinct affinities with the idealisation of the countryside under Vichy, distilled in Pétain’s slogan ‘la terre, elle, ne ment pas’ (‘the earth, the land, never tells lies’). But it suggests that a reconciliation of town and country is also part of the necessary programme of national unity. The allegory works on two levels, both of which are revealing. On the literal level of denotation, Aragon cites the overriding common interest of country people to save the harvest which all depend on, and on the allegorical level of connotation, he appeals to the interest of all French people to save their nation. Both levels reinforce each other. The ostensible argument from rural emergency to national emergency enables the foreign occupation to be presented unambiguously as a result of force majeure, imposed on the country by forces external to it. The rational response is a sinking of relatively minor differences to combine forces for the good of the country. National unity is thus portrayed as an imperative that ultimately overrides all differences, even if it takes exceptional conditions to reveal this. However, the argument is implicitly reversible, since it reveals other differences as minor, even when, outside the time of emergency, they may be perceived as major. This is close to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, in which the maintenance of a system, in this case the nation, takes precedence over the interests of any particular part, and especially commands the assent of those who are dominated. The attraction of this mechanism is displayed in Aragon’s use of a familiar theme of edifying narrative, in which protagonists discover their true selves or their true priorities in a common struggle against adversity. Once the discovery has been made, it necessarily transforms their lives. The implication is that once class struggle is set aside in the national interest, it cannot be restored to prominence without incurring accusations of threatening the national interest. Class co-operation was a familiar theme of the Resistance legacy. It was expressed in the opening verse of the Resistance anthem, ‘Le Chant des partisans’, with its call, ‘Hey there, partisans, workers and peasants, this is the signal’.3 Written by Gaullist writers Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon in London, it became first the theme song of the Free French and then the quasi-official anthem of the struggle for national liberation. It recognised the workers and peasants as the core forces of the internal Resistance movement, calling on these two classes to ‘come up from the mines and come down from the hills’, and engage in the clandestine struggle for national liberation.4


The communists and the people The call for class co-operation in the national interest was taken up by the communist-dominated Front national movement, whose title specifically contrasted with the Front populaire (Popular Front) of the 1930s. This ‘National front for the independence of France’, launched in 1941, was based on working-class and communist activists, but was also designed to attract Left-leaning intellectuals, the liberal professions and even business people, among whom Resistance activity had begun to emerge. It rapidly broadened its scope to attract Gaullists and Catholics, with the aspiration of encompassing the entire Resistance movement, and it served as the political wing of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) movement, the largest of the armed Resistance movements. For a brief period in 1944, the Front national aspired to become the basis of a broad political movement, in which differences of class and ideology would be submerged in a consensual project of national progress. This prospect was swept away by the reconstitution of separate political parties in the winter of 1944–45, though the aspiration to class co-operation lingered for many months afterwards. The point was not that classes or even class struggle had ceased to exist or to be recognised, but rather that they were subordinated to higher considerations. This was very clearly expressed in the public language of the communists, who were considered to be the most class-conscious political grouping of any significance in France. Maurice Thorez’s speech to the PCF’s tenth congress in June 1945 both set and reflected his party’s tone.5 His most explicit reference to the working class came in an extended quotation from the Catholic review, Temps présent. He quoted with approval their view that for the past five years it was the working class that had suffered most from the occupation, in forced labour, deportations and malnutrition, while at the same time providing the leadership of the Resistance.6 But elsewhere in his speech, Thorez systematically associated the working class with ‘the people’ and with France. In a typical reference, he declared: Our Party has always been to the fore in the fight against reaction and fascism, against Hitlerism. Our Party has passionately served the cause of unity, the unity of the working class, the unity between all Republicans, the unity between all good French people.7 Unity was the overriding message, and even the relatively scattered references to working-class unity were always set in the context of the broader


national unity. He stressed the broad membership of the party, including ‘workers, peasants, tradesmen, civil servants, small entrepreneurs, and some of the greatest intellectuals and scientists’, adding up to the very expression of ‘thinking and working France’,8 a party ‘in the service of the people of France’.9 If the ‘trusts’ and the ‘profiteers’ were identified as the face of the class enemy, the assault on them was primarily justified by the good of the nation. While the existence of class struggle was not denied, it was firmly located within the national framework. The key concept in this approach was ‘the people’. Thorez had already consecrated the term in his autobiographical work Son of the People (1937), a reflection of the ethos of the Popular Front.10 Following his triumphant return to France in November 1944 from his exile in Moscow, he made energetic use of the term to express the continuity of his party’s strategy with that of 1936. ‘People’ was one of the most frequent words in Thorez’s vocabulary, greatly overshadowing ‘class’. Only the words ‘Party’ and ‘France’ were more frequently invoked.11 Within communist discourse, ‘people’ had the specific meaning of all working people, under the leadership of the working class (proletariat), and including the intellectuals, liberal professions and small business people, but excluding big business, especially nationally based monopoly capitalists (‘trusts’) and international firms (‘cartels’). This was the sense in which the Popular Front was intended as a coalition of the people against big business, which was regarded as favouring fascism. Hence Thorez argued that: The peoples [of Europe and elsewhere] are pleased with every step towards the consolidation of peace. But on the contrary, political reaction – and the monopoly trusts and international cartels that are its economic foundation – are not resigned to the defeat of Hitler.12 At this time, the war in the Pacific was not yet over, and Thorez’s words were compatible both with the demand that businesses which had supported Hitler should be expropriated, and with the view that big business was always reactionary and likely to support fascism. Either way, the people appeared as the legitimate defenders of the nation, though in the first case the people might include even big business which had not engaged in support of Hitler. Nuances of meaning attend the various forms in which ‘people’ appears: the people, as popular masses, distinct from the elites; the people of France or the German people, as the nation itself; the peoples of Europe, as nations or countries; colonial peoples, as oppressed populations. In all political


discourse, the notion of people is likely to hold more demagogic than cognitive value, and its incorporation in a communist theory of strategy and tactics did not attenuate its ambiguity. The notions of people and nation became virtually interchangeable. Consequently, the communist discourse on the French nation and people became indistinguishable from the ambient French nationalism to all but the most initiated listener. And while Thorez might hope to imply a leading role for the working class, and therefore his own party, his ‘popular’ nationalism served mainly as a mechanism for subordinating classbased identities to the overriding national imperative. In doing so, he was undoubtedly responding to many pressures: the prevalent mood in France, and in his own party; the specific instructions of Stalin, concerned to secure the post-Yalta international settlement; and the calamitous economic situation, which required steep increases in production rather than labour disputes. The latter point subsequently became a major preoccupation for Thorez as a minister in the coalition government between 1945 and 1947. And as leader of the Communist Party, he played an important role in securing acquiescence in a national hegemony from those whose strong class identification could potentially have disrupted it. His conception is echoed in André Fougeron’s image on the front cover of the PCF daily newspaper, Ce soir on Bastille Day 1945 (Figure 7).13 It depicts a woman, part Madonna, part Marianne, suckling her child and supported on the shoulders of a soldier and a worker, surrounded by French tricolour bunting and the flags of the Allies. It speaks of the duty of the working class to support the nation. The worker’s class is clearly identified by his cap, overalls and spanner, and unlike the other two figures, he is not marked with the national colours, though he stands against a red and blue background. He is thus not a symbol of the nation himself, but is shown helping the soldier, who perhaps represents the state, to hold up the woman and child, who certainly represent the Republic, and perhaps also the people. Together, this modulated Holy Trinity make up the nation, which is announced in the blues and reds of the background. The emphasis is on unity, but clearly putting the worker in a supporting role, consistent with the declarations of Thorez at the party congress two weeks earlier.

Class and nation At the opposite end of the political spectrum from the communists, General de Gaulle was also promoting class co-operation. He made this


clear in his important speech at the Palais de Chaillot in September 1944: We know how much we are lacking in relation to all that there is to do. But we know equally what are our land, our sub-soil, our Empire, what we can do, when we really want to, as farmers, workers, traders, technicians, bosses [patrons], inventors, thinkers, if only we can march together, in fraternal ranks, in the willing discipline of a strong people.14 Without identifying specific conflicts, de Gaulle saw all classes and categories as potential factors of division. Much like Thorez, he argued that they needed to transcend their purely sectional interests, however pressing these might appear, and pull together for the benefit of the nation as a whole. He was inclined to use the notion of ‘the people’ as a synonym for the nation, and as this passage makes clear, he firmly incorporated the captains of industry in that idea. More than Thorez, however, he viewed the nation as an ideal and as the sole source of legitimacy, rather than as collective construct. He deprecated the ‘coalitions of interests’, whichever side of industry or commerce they might represent, and while calling on all kinds and conditions of people, stressed that their particular interests must always be compelled to yield to the general interest of the nation. In this respect, de Gaulle drew on a long republican tradition of citizenship, in which the citizen is presumed to have an unmediated relationship with the state. Under this tradition, intermediary bodies, classes, groups or communities, with their purely sectional interests, can exercise no rights or privileges. In compliance with the rules of symbolic violence, they must all bow to the universal legitimacy of the nation expressed in the state, whether or not they derive particular sectoral benefits in the process. The patriotic message of Thorez and de Gaulle was echoed throughout the intellectual and political circles of France. Merleau-Ponty, more preoccupied with theories of class and class struggle than most philosophers, argued not only that national sentiment was revolutionary, but that: Class struggle is masked. The moment in history at which we find ourselves is equivocal, neither capitalism nor proletarian revolution are now fighting openly face to face.15 He considered that the war and its ending had put class conflict in abeyance, in the name of national interest. Though he criticised the


conservative conception of national interest that prevailed, for example among the socialists, he regarded it as a matter of fact that national rather than class conflicts were determining the course of history at that moment. His perception that this situation was ambiguous rested on the belief that it was exceptional, and that in due course the ‘normal’ long-term pattern would reassert itself, of opposed classes locked in struggle. However, he conceded that at the level of consciousness, there was no inevitability that different classes would become self-aware, and assert their identity. Translated into Benedict Anderson’s terms, those classes had imagined themselves as part of a national community, and this fact would undoubtedly be part of any subsequent class communities they might imagine. Moreover, in the weakened and confused state of the post-war working class, it was conceivable that the habit of class co-operation might stave off classconsciousness in the longer term. Albert Camus also welcomed the long-term attenuation of class consciousness, which he associated with partiality and selfishness inimical to the well-being of the nation. In his criticism of the excesses of the épuration, he emphasised the need for justice to be pursued in the name of the nation, and criticised anything that smacked of class-based judgements. 16 Raymond Aron echoed the same view, pointing to the fact that in Eastern Europe entire classes had been decimated, whereas, in France, despite the wishes of a few dreamers, the purges had been an affair of state rather than of class. 17 For these and most other non-communist commentators, class was one of several contexts which defined human existence. As Emmanuel Mounier put it, ‘We are embarked in a body, a family, a social circle, a class, a country and a period which we have not chosen.’ 18 Echoing the existentialists’ conception of the human being confronted with a situation, he saw class as an aspect of everyone’s situation, which at best might enrich them with values and resources, but at worst might trap them in a narrow pursuit of selfinterest and a reduced vision of their own humanity. The Catholic writer Georges Bernanos saw an even gloomier prospect in which any of the categories of money, race, class or nation could easily threaten to exercise its own dictatorship, but all of them would ultimately be subordinated to the world economic system. 19 What all these writers shared, and what even the communists acquiesced in, was the perception of class identity as a subordinate identity. They did not seek to deny the existence of class, but recognised that it was, and should be, subordinated to the national imperative.


Writers and the state The national imperative had far-reaching consequences for the intellectuals, in the broadest sense of those who were engaged in cultural practices and were the producers of cultural representations. The creation of national unity placed heavy demands on symbolic resources.20 The task fell in particular to ‘symbol workers’, such as writers, artists, broadcasters, performers and directors. Their challenge was to produce the ideas, images and stories which could knit French people together in an imagined community, which they could share, and which could be presented to France’s international partners. In putting their shoulder to this wheel, cultural producers accepted the constraints and benefits of a much deeper involvement with the state. For intellectuals, the shift involved a break with the previous traditions, habits of mind, and self-perceptions, which had cast many of them as independent of the obligations to nation and state, if not in active dissent. Once completed, the new ‘nationalised’ status of the intellectuals became a comfortable background feature, rarely commented upon. But the process of transition was not wholly painless, as can be glimpsed in the writings of 1945. The best-selling poetry collection of the period, Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, has a single reference to intellectuals, in which Prévert warns that ‘Intellectuals should not be allowed to play with matches’. 21 The poem explains that the mental world, left to its own devices, tends to build monuments to itself, under the pretence of honouring other people, in a form of institutional mendacity.22 Metaphorically, the intellectuals play with matches by entering into an alliance with the state, giving them access to a source of power, which the poet believes they will abuse. As a confirmed libertarian, Prévert was deeply suspicious of state power, and here criticised the intellectuals’ pact with it, by highlighting the benefits they will derive. In ostensibly celebrating others in their work, intellectuals covertly promote their own achievement. No doubt, the poem refers to the many writers and artists who were commissioned to write, paint or sculpt on themes of post-war reconstruction, and who used the opportunity to advance their own aesthetic ends and public reputation: erecting a monument to themselves, as Prévert saw it. In addition to criticising the duplicity of intellectuals who abuse power for purposes of self-aggrandisement, Prévert warns of the danger that creativity will be constricted by the obligations of an official role, which requires monuments.


Prévert clearly did not see himself as an intellectual, but his concerns were shared by Jean-Paul Sartre, who in retrospect appears as the exemplar of all French intellectuals.23 In the second issue of his new journal, Les Temps modernes, in November 1945, Sartre published an even sharper warning against playing with fire, in the shape of state power. Literature has never faced such a serious threat: the official and unofficial authorities, the government, the newspapers, perhaps even the leading banks and big industry have just discovered its power, and are going to use it for their own benefit. If they succeed, the writer will have a choice: he can devote himself to electoral propaganda or he can join a special section of the Ministry of Information; critics are no longer concerned with appreciating works but with calculating their national importance and effectiveness; as soon as they can master statistics, their discipline will make great strides. The author will have become a civil servant and, weighed down with honours, he will withdraw discreetly behind his work.24 For Sartre the state poses a threat to literature, and other areas of high culture, such as the theatre. The danger lies in the fact that literature is a valuable resource for the state and its agencies, and he fears that it will be harnessed to social and political purposes, at the expense of the independence and integrity of writers and artists. Sartre entitled his essay, ‘The nationalisation of literature’, referring no doubt ironically to the economic nationalisations. But he presents a careful analysis of the political pressures felt by the Paris literary milieu in 1945, and sustains an argument that a significant shift is occurring. Although the essay is rarely discussed, it illuminates the processes at work in the cultural field, and its argument repays closer scrutiny.

Medusa’s gaze The problem, as Sartre sees it, is that literature is being taken very seriously by the political and cultural elites. It is valued for its dignity, its greatness and the duties it performs. New books are judged by their social importance rather than by their literary merit, and writers are being drawn into official functions, almost like civil servants. He expresses outrage that the actor and theatre director Charles Dullin should be regarded as a national asset.


Someone official said to me one day of Dullin: ‘He is a national asset’. I was not amused: I am afraid they are now trying by a subtle manoeuvre to turn the writers and artists into national assets.25 In the present day, it may be difficult to imagine why anyone should have been surprised, let alone alarmed, that the French state regarded a distinguished actor and theatre director like Charles Dullin as a national asset (un bien national). The notion has become banal. But Sartre’s sharp reaction makes it clear that he felt something new was happening. He similarly objects to the tendency for new book launches to be conducted like official ceremonies, as if they were ‘a voluntary contribution to the festivities of the fourth Republic’.26 He especially objects to books being judged as important, like a speech by Poincaré defining his monetary policy at the unveiling of a war memorial.27 This comparison is particularly laden with meaning, since Poincaré was above all remembered as the prime minister who saved the French franc, and rescued the nation from economic catastrophe in 1926. By implication, writers are similarly expected to rescue the nation from catastrophe. Poincaré notoriously launched his financial measures at the unveiling of a war memorial, and it is now the writers who in Sartre’s view are being transformed into monuments, much as Prévert suggested. Sartre sees ‘monumentalisation’ as a curse rather than a benefit. It arises from the need for instant historical judgement, which enables a work’s ‘importance’ to be measured. It exerts pressure on writers to see themselves as others might see them a hundred years hence. And as a result, it introduces a Medusa’s gaze, which turns its object to stone. The writer is petrified in the form of a public monument, perhaps also betokening the death of Art. Sartre fears that, surrounded by high public expectation, the writer is becoming socialised and regarded as an ambassador. Young writers are showered with recognition and honours in a rush for instant consecration, to the point of extreme literary inflation, as if France had a desperate need for great men. The situation he describes no doubt reflects Sartre’s own rapid elevation to celebrity, but he offers enough examples to suggest that the phenomenon is more widespread. Analysing the apparent causes of the malaise, Sartre points to the difficulties of literary succession. Many senior figures in the literary establishment were discredited by their wartime activities, while others had died or been forgotten. The result of this sudden massacre of the Grand Old Men (‘cette brusque hécatombe des doyens’),28 was an


urgent need to fill the void left behind. In 1945, Sartre suggests, no author could publish without having some link with the Resistance, or at least a cousin in the maquis. Consequently, writers tended to be identified with a particular social group or political movement, and to serve as its public representative. An important factor, in Sartre’s view, was that France had been humiliated internationally as a result of the war, and that its literature was one of the few things for which it was still admired, especially by the Western Allies. On one point only, we have surprised the foreigner: he constantly admires the vitality of our literature. ‘What!’, they say to us, ‘You have been beaten, occupied, ruined and you have written so much!’ This admiration is easily explained: if the English and Americans have produced few new works, it is because they were mobilised and their writers scattered to the four corners of the earth. We, on the other hand, persecuted, hunted, and, in many cases, under threat of death, at least we were in France, in our homes; our writers could write, if not in public, at least in secret.29 The widespread international interest in French literature prompted France to take it more seriously than in the past. Sartre observed wryly that many French people would prefer their country to be best known for military leaders like Turenne or Bonaparte, but for the time being they were willing to settle for poets like Rimbaud or Valéry. As a result, young writers were being boosted into great men, who could be dispatched to London, Stockholm or Washington, to the detriment of their literary development. His response to this threat was to encourage writers not to try to see themselves through the eyes of posterity and not to be fooled into believing the inflated rhetoric, which presents them as great men and ambassadors. Writers should follow their own independent path, he argued, rather than committing themselves to the main roads of national promotion, and they should have the courage to cause scandal and express their anger, when their solitary literary explorations called for it. For his part, he pledged that his journal would do its best to assist in the tasks of damping down this literary inflation and rousing literature from its state-induced slumbers.

Speaking for the nation Sartre’s analysis of the situation was lucid, and he was as well-placed as anyone to attest to the pressures on French writers to play a repre-


sentative role in the nation in 1945. He may also have been right in thinking that premature and excessive public recognition was inimical to the development of young writers. However, his proposed remedy falls foul of the duality that he had already enunciated in the concept of committed literature, and which is well summarised in the conclusion to his opening editorial essay in Les Temps modernes, published the previous month: I remind the reader that in ‘committed literature’, the commitment must not under any circumstances obscure the literature, and that our preoccupation must be to serve literature by infusing new blood into it, just as much as to serve the collectivity by trying to give it the literature that it requires. 30 The coexistence of social and literary responsibilities does not easily permit the writer to reject pressing social expectations in the name of literature. It is difficult to argue that, on the one hand, every individual human being is responsible for everything that happens, but on the other, writers should not speak or act on behalf of the country to which they belong. But in any case, the apparent dilemma was already being resolved in practice. Sartre himself was prominent in the Comité national des écrivains (CNE, the National Writers’ Committee), which was issuing blacklists, and ensuring that writers had the kind of wartime credentials he described. He was also a willing spokesman and literary ambassador on behalf of France. It is not usual to think of Sartre as a representative of his country, but it was a role he clearly adopted at this time. Some of his most moving essays of this period were written on behalf of France, in the role of spokesman. He wrote, for example, a short article on ‘The Republic of Silence’, for the first non-clandestine issue of the underground literary review Les Lettres françaises. It was very widely circulated in France and America, and his solemn reading of it was broadcast on the new French national radio station.31 His evocative description of Paris under the German occupation was published two months later in La France libre, the London-based magazine published by the Free French authorities, with the explicit intention of explaining French affairs to an English-speaking audience. He concluded: And finally, if these pages have helped you to comprehend what our country has suffered, in shame, in horror and in anger, you will think like me, I believe, that she deserves respect even in her errors.32


Addressing his readers in this way, Sartre was already a spokesman for his country, and it was a role he continued over the following months. In January 1945, he and six other journalists went to the United States as guests of the US Office of War Information. During the five months he stayed there, reporting on America for French newspapers, he also interpreted France to the Americans, and did his best to advance France–American relations.33 Since in this way Sartre had spent a large part of 1945 abroad as a cultural ambassador, it is difficult not to conclude that by November, the process of nationalising literature was in his case too far advanced for it to be reversed. Sartre’s essay of that month appears as a last cry of alarm before the end: he was not waving but drowning. Four months later, in April 1946, Sartre was interviewed on French national radio on his return from another visit to the United States. Invited by a deferential journalist, Bernard Montour, to describe his impressions, Sartre enthused about the welcome he had received, and called for more effort to be put into cultural diplomacy, declaring: ‘We must use all possible means to promote French culture in the United States … it is the best propaganda.’34 Sartre was by no means the only intellectual to speak on behalf of France. Albert Camus emerged at the same time as a voice of the nation. His first non-clandestine editorial in the newspaper Combat was broadcast by the BBC from London in August 1944.35 Like Sartre’s ‘Republic of silence’, the broadcast was both symbolic and highly emotional. It was a very formal reading, delivered in a high monotone, with all the religious solemnity of a liturgy. As convinced atheists, neither Sartre nor Camus was seeking to produce a religious experience in the normal sense of the term. But their broadcasts nonetheless carried some of the functions and much of the style of the Catholic mass. Part of this impact is lost in reading only the written text, but the traces can nonetheless be discerned in the structure, the rhythms and even the vocabulary. Readers of Camus’s editorials of the period will recognise the illocutionary stance of the celebrant speaking as ‘we’ on behalf of his listeners.36 They will certainly recognise the cumulative triplets of nouns, verbs or whole clauses, and the balanced antitheses, particularly contrasting the past and the present, or good and evil. They may also notice the encoding in metaphors and euphemisms, and the rhetorical closure, which betokens ritual rather than communication. No doubt to some extent the formal construction and emotional effects should be assigned to literature rather than to religion, but the distinction between the two is far from clear-cut, especially in France, where the


writer was self-consciously a ‘cleric’ (clerc) with quasi-sacerdotal functions. But what the broadcasts and editorials clearly indicate is that, like religion and in very similar terms, literature was enrolled in the task of buttressing the state, offering its symbolic resources to the effort of reconstructing the imagined national community.37 Most writers with an acceptable wartime record were happy to lend their talents to supporting the national reconstruction. Paul Valéry, perhaps France’s most distinguished living writer, offered sonorous support in the last few months of his life. After his death, a state funeral in August 1945 provided the opportunity for de Gaulle and senior political figures to pay their solemn respects in Paris and Sète. Valéry was buried in the cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean coast, the subject of his best-known poem (‘Cimetière marin’), enabling dignitaries to exhibit the indissoluble link between the restored state and the glories of French literature. At the other end of the political spectrum, Louis Aragon, the most prominent French communist writer of the time, energetically built on the persona of ‘national poet’ that he had developed in clandestinity. His wartime poems were widely circulated after the Liberation, and ‘La rose et le réséda’ (‘The rose and the mignonette’) in particular, became a symbol of reconciliation between the previously hostile Catholic and socialist traditions, in a new spirit of national unanimity.38 If the state looked to writers to provide support for the reconstruction of national culture and identity, writers also looked to the state to provide the material means of expression. The acute shortages and rationing of the period meant that government departments closely controlled publication. While the Ministry of Information granted or withheld permission to publish, the Ministry of Industrial Production became a crucial gatekeeper for editors and publishers, who often had to beg and wheedle for vital allocations. For example, when in November 1944 Emmanuel Mounier was attempting to secure the reappearance of his monthly review, Esprit, he wrote to a friend, Suzanne Ulmann, who knew Robert Lacoste, then Minister of Industrial Production, to secure her assistance: The Ministry of Information has taken a big decision. The reviews are a nuisance, it will authorise whatever you want, but you’ll have to sort out paper with Industrial Production. So, you’re going to put on your casual air, your innocent expression, you’ll dance up to papa Lacoste, kiss him on both cheeks for old times’ sake, you’ll talk to him about Mr Eden’s suits, about twilight


evenings in Dieulefit, about the production of apples, and you’ll slip in there an angelic little word for Esprit. OK?39 No doubt the use of this personal link to the socialist Robert Lacoste was only one part of the lobbying that enabled Mounier to publish his review in the following month. But the letter demonstrates how literary and intellectual life was conducted in close association with the state, as part of the material and cultural rebuilding of the nation.

The German intellectual legacy Commentators have often been struck by the Frenchness of the French intellectuals in the dozen or so years after the Second World War. Tony Judt, for example, argues that it is ‘distinctively and unmistakeably a French history’.40 He offers several examples of the self-confidence and uncritical sense of national superiority that French intellectuals often expressed, and highlights their tendency to extrapolate rhetorically from local circumstances to universal principles binding on the whole of humanity. These factors contributed to the enormous international influence that French intellectuals exercised in this period, bolstered by their traditional prestige in French society and the relative absence of cultural leadership from other countries in devastated post-conflict Europe. However, it is a paradox of the intellectual reconstruction that, in the midst of the reasserted national imperative, French intellectuals were strongly drawn to the German intellectual tradition. Vincent Descombes points to the dominance of the ‘three H’s’, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, in post-war France.41 To them must certainly be added Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, as well as figures like Karl Jaspers and Max Scheler. Most of these thinkers had begun to be known in France during the 1930s and in some cases earlier, but their period of real prominence began in 1945.42 It was far from unheard of for German thinkers to become influential in France. Kant had been a powerful presence in the nineteenth century. But the two previous wars with Germany, in 1870 and 1914, had resulted in strong resistance to German philosophy. In 1945, on the contrary, the three H’s and their compatriots took up intellectual residence in France, despite the fact that Heidegger had been politically tarnished by his institutional role in the Third Reich, and that Nietzsche had been adopted posthumously by some apologists of Nazism. The recuperation of German thought by French intellectuals was prepared during the First World War by the distinction carefully defended


in some quarters between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans. It was nourished by the stream of German émigrés, who took refuge in France after Hitler came to power in 1933. They included left-wing intellectuals like Walter Benjamin. Those who refused to distinguish between good and bad Germans were mainly of the nationalist Right, many of whom had participated in collaboration with the German occupying forces. They were largely silent in 1945, leaving the field clear for intellectuals of the Left and Centre, who were happy to see large sections of the German tradition naturalised as French. It was these intellectuals who led the literary and philosophical renaissance in 1945. Their work dominated the decade or so after 1945 in France, and exercised a powerful influence on the culture of the entire Western world. They were by no means homogeneous, and were to be found in the three broad schools of thought that dominated the period: Marxism, Catholic personalism and existentialism.43 The challenging and provocative ideas they generated have been widely studied, but it has less often been observed how extensively they appropriated German intellectual resources. The impact of ideas from Britain and America was by contrast distinctly muted. Each of those two countries had its attractions for the French intelligentsia and the governing elites. At the end of the war, Britain stood for the Welfare State, with the reforming programme of the British Labour government in education, health and social welfare. It also offered an example of social consensus, supported by Keynesian economics, which seemed to offer a humanised form of capitalism. America, on the other hand, was the epitome of modern free market economics, with scientifically organised large-scale production, combined with an ideal of individual freedom. It also offered a glittering world of popular culture from Hollywood films to jazz music. Both countries had their partisans, especially America, but neither was seen to offer the theoretical resources with which to fashion new ways of seeing and living in the world. Germany, by contrast, offered no attractive social, political or economic lessons, but did offer vast resources of theories and concepts, from which new world-views could be fashioned.

Committed intellectuals The growing role of writers, artists, scientists and scholars in speaking publicly for the nation was combined with a broader sense of social and political responsibility, which many of them felt at this period.


Very few were prepared to advocate the radical autonomy of their profession that was expressed, at the limit, in the ideals of art for art’s sake or the ivory tower. On the contrary, many made an explicit virtue of commitment (engagement) in Sartre’s sense, giving their name and their energies to political causes. Others worked publicly or in private to assist the cause of the many groups that were suffering from the hardships of life in the difficult conditions following the war: refugees, families in poverty, returning deportees, widows, orphans, the elderly and others. But despite this upsurge of activity, very few thought of themselves as intellectuals. This is particularly true of those writers who are most frequently identified as intellectuals themselves. The recent growth in historiography of intellectuals has tended to institutionalise Sartre’s later formulation of intellectuals as being writers, artists, scientists and scholars who get involved in public debate outside their area of specialisation.44 But this notion was not available in 1945, and ‘intellectual’ was used as a noun that mainly applied to others, however paradoxical it may seem in a period that, in retrospect, appears rather as the heyday of the French intellectuals. When Prévert criticised intellectuals for playing with matches, he was echoing the stance of writers across the non-communist Left and Centre movements who, when speaking about intellectuals, were not implicitly including themselves. What happened in the course of 1945–46 was that writers gradually internalised the status, and began to ‘come out’ as intellectuals. This is particularly visible in the groups of non-communist writers who are now generally regarded as archetypal intellectuals: the existentialists and the Left Catholics.45 The texts written by the members of these groupings make remarkably few references to intellectuals, and when they do so, it is in the same spirit as Sartre, who wrote pityingly that: Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, who form a race apart, cut off from the rest of the nation, are always dazzled when they find in France men of letters and artists closely involved in the life and affairs of their country.46 It is striking that Anglo-Saxon ‘intellectuals’ are contrasted with French ‘men of letters and artists’: all the more remarkable since the American and British writers of the period would have been even less likely than the French to describe themselves as intellectuals. The collective noun ‘intellectuals’ functions as a purely objective description, applied by a commentator to an external group, much as did the concept of ‘clerk’


or ‘cleric’ in Julien Benda’s celebrated pre-war polemic against the Clerks’ Betrayal, in which he criticised writers who had allowed themselves to be drawn away from their concern with universal values.47 During the period of strong politicisation of intellectuals in the late 1930s, the protagonists who thought of themselves primarily as writers and artists began signing petitions and joining organisations identifying themselves as intellectuals. Although their most radical members belonged to the Revolutionary Writers and Artists Association (Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires), the broad antifascist and anti-Munich groupings took titles that incorporated the term ‘intellectual’.48 Nonetheless, it was still rare in 1945 for the noun ‘intellectual’ to be used with a verb in the first or even the second person. Most commonly, an individual would think of himself or herself as an author, would speak to a colleague as a writer, and would only use the term intellectuals to refer to third parties. Two main factors contributed to the emergence of intellectuals as a self-conscious group: the importance of the Resistance role and the policies of the French Communist Party.

Coming out as intellectuals The role of intellectuals during the occupation was one of the most prominent themes of the post-war debate. Those writers, artists and journalists who had supported Vichy or the Germans had done so recently and visibly in the public arena. Conversely, those who had supported the Resistance now found their clandestine writings republished for a mass readership, which regarded them as custodians of the nation’s honour. The trial and execution of the writer Robert Brasillach, for intelligence with the enemy, made the question of the intellectual’s responsibility into one of the most hotly debated issues of the year. The galaxy of luminaries from the worlds of culture and science, who petitioned General de Gaulle to exercise clemency, made it clear that they fully accepted the responsibility of intellectuals, and the text of their request identified them as ‘the undersigned intellectuals’.49 Writers who had joined the Resistance, for their part, looked back nostalgically at what they now saw as their finest hour. Meditating on this in the first issue of Les Temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty commented: In face of the German army and the Vichy government, where, as in all state apparatuses, social generality was dominant, the resistance offered this rare phenomenon of a historical action that never


ceased to be personal. The psychological and moral elements of politics appeared here almost on their own, and that is why we saw the intellectuals least inclined toward politics become involved in the resistance. The experience of resistance was for them a unique experience, and they wanted to retain its spirit in the new French politics, because it at last escaped the notorious dilemma of being and doing, which every intellectual feels when confronted by action. Whence this happiness in the midst of danger, which we saw in some of our usually anguished comrades.50 Though he describes intellectuals objectively as a group, Merleau-Ponty comes close to a first-person relationship in his reference to ‘some of our comrades’, and it is possible to detect or imagine an acknowledgement of his own experience of the dilemma of intellectuals confronting the question of action. The unique nature of the Resistance experience was a frequent theme for writers, who as Merleau-Ponty suggested, tended to want its spirit to be maintained in the post-war arrangements. In that sense, the identity of ‘Resistance intellectual’ was in 1945 a positive and valorising one, which largely overcame the more stigmatising associations that had previously clung to the term ‘intellectual’. There were counter-examples, in people like Robert Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle and the dozens of writers and artists named in lists of collaborators by the CNE.51 However, for the most part, these were considered as exceptions. Sartre, speaking primarily to an American readership, declared that ‘almost all the intellectuals fought against the occupying power’.52 The proud record of the intellectuals was taken up energetically by the Communist Party. In his report to the Tenth Party Congress in June 1945, Maurice Thorez argued that: While the so-called elites sank into bankruptcy and treason, it was from the people that the new forces arose, which contributed so valiantly to the liberation of our country. The forces of the Resistance, the valorous cohorts of the Free French Forces, the intrepid battalions of the French Forces of the Interior, the obscure and anonymous mass of workers, peasants and intellectuals of France, our own men, women, young people, all these new forces, and only they, can ensure the renovation and greatness of France tomorrow.53 A reader might be surprised to see the intellectuals assimilated categorically into the ‘people’, let alone into the ‘obscure and anonymous


mass of workers, peasants and intellectuals’. However, the aim of the passage was to build on the strong mood of national unanimity and to encourage intellectuals to move more strongly towards a degree of social self-awareness. The hope was that they would come to identify themselves as a distinct social group, in a broad social and political alliance with the workers and peasants, who formed the social basis for the party’s support. The Communist Party played an influential role in highlighting the role of intellectuals in the Resistance, especially those of its own members who had been executed or died in deportation, most prominently Georges Politzer, Jacques Salomon and Jacques Decour (Daniel Decourdemanche), later joined by Danielle Casanova. Initially, the task of mobilising intellectuals was given to the experienced teacher, turned politician, Georges Cogniot, and the young philosopher Roger Garaudy. Their interventions at the Tenth Congress echoed Thorez.54 They saluted ‘all the heroes of our intelligentsia who died for their Country’ (‘tous les héros de l’intelligence morts pour la Patrie’).55 They celebrated the great French artistic, literary and scientific traditions. And they called on intellectuals in all branches of culture and education to put their weight behind the work of national reconstruction, led by the party. Their credentials enabled them to speak in the first person as ‘we intellectuals’,56 though they did so sparingly. Subsequently the same themes were developed with increasing force as the Communist Party recognised not only the symbolic value of prominent figures, but also the importance of intellectuals as a rapidly growing social and electoral group.57 The party set an agenda in which intellectuals were invited to become more aware of their specificity and at the same time to extend their political partisanship into their intellectual activity. From the onset of the Cold War, the intellectual became a prominent part of the French political landscape, and a figure that seemed always to have been there.58 The dissident stance of so many intellectuals during the following decades did not prevent them from being national treasures, however inconvenient they may at times have been for a particular government. De Gaulle was more aware of this than most, and twenty years or so later, when his advisers approached him about one of Sartre’s current skirmishes with the law, he is reported to have commented that ‘you don’t arrest Voltaire’ (‘on n’arrête pas Voltaire’). 59 The fact that Sartre was often compared with this celebrated Enlightenment writer betokens not simply his high reputation in literature and philosophy, but also Sartre’s importance as a


national figure. Recent studies of French intellectuals have largely focused on their struggles for political power or cultural capital within the overall social field. 60 They consider the often difficult relations of intellectuals to this or that French institution, organisation, issue or policy. But underpinning all the battles and controversies is a prior commitment to the primacy of the French nation, as incarnated by the state. This now appears too self-evident to mention, following half a century in which the worst taunt that could be flung at an intellectual is that they are lacking in national commitment. Sartre’s protest against the incipient nationalisation of literature marks a moment of transition. It may now be difficult to imagine what life was like before that time, but an examination of the situation in 1945–46 suggests that it was a crucial point at which the symbolic violence of the nation-state compelled the intellectuals to accept that their allegiance to France took precedence over any considerations of professional autonomy. And in the process, they came to recognise themselves as intellectuals.

5 Regendering the Nation

Nations and gender identities Contemporary efforts at nation building have often taken their most conspicuous characteristics from the way in which they have drawn the relationship between men and women.1 At their most extreme, they have been heavily marked by violence and abuse against women. For example, the subjugation of women in Afghanistan was an important part of the attempt of the Taliban to build a fundamentalist Islamic regime, and also a key issue around which opposition to the regime was mobilised in the West. Similarly, the systematic rape of women by combatant groups in former Yugoslavia or Rwanda was a widespread means of asserting the dominance of one national grouping over another, and also a mobilising theme for their opponents. These extreme examples are both material and symbolic. They are brutally material in that they involve the infliction of physical and mental injury, and they are pointedly symbolic in that they involve the conspicuous demonstration of power and domination. Similar processes can be observed in other less extreme cases, where women have been compelled to undergo oppression or diminishment in various degrees as part of the process of building or rebuilding a nation during or after conflict. Several commentators have pointed out that there was a significant reduction in women’s freedoms in France at the end of the war, in contrast to the importance of their roles in the Resistance movements, and in contrast with their ostensible political emancipation, symbolised by the granting to women in 1945 of the right to vote.2 The re-emergent French state accumulated symbolic power through taking control of the ways in which national identity was constructed, subordinating all other 106

Regendering the Nation 107

identities. The ways in which gender identities were constructed formed an important part of that process. Feminist theory has long held that the subordination of women is a constitutive function of the state. The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan and the socialist theorist Friedrich Engels, in the nineteenth century, argued that the state emerged at the end of the prehistoric era, as a result of the ‘historic defeat of women’, who had hitherto dominated human societies.3 This view became an integral part of Marxist theory in the twentieth century. From a different perspective, Simone de Beauvoir accepted this account of events, but considered that it failed to explain why the invention of bronze tools should have led to women’s subordination. In her view, the status of women as ‘the Other’ in the eyes of men must already have been established before the state was invented to embed it in law and political authority.4 More recent theorists have focused on whether the subordination of women is an inevitable part of the contemporary state. Catherine MacKinnon has argued that the state reflects the unequal power relations between men and women in society. It embodies this inequality in its framework of laws, where male norms implicitly define even the most general standards and rights.5 Pierre Bourdieu shared the same view, and suggested that masculine domination depended on a structure of symbolic violence, in which sexual inequality was constructed by social relations but presented as a fact of nature. He suggested that male domination had become a ‘doxa’, a form of discourse that seemed beyond challenge, was reproduced in all the institutions of society, and was internalised by individuals.6 It is an open question whether male domination is a necessary condition for the existence of state power of any sort, or whether it is a contingent condition that can potentially be overcome. In either event, it seems clear that male domination is the de facto condition of states up to the present day. In these circumstances, it is likely, though perhaps not inevitable, that when the existence of a state is under threat, its defenders will seek to shore up its position by reinforcing the subordination of women. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence also suggests that the attitude of women is likely to be mainly acquiescent. Symbolic violence is the process by which individuals are impelled to defend the legitimacy of the field in which they are operating. They thereby reinforce the position of the dominant forces within the field, even though they themselves occupy a dominated position within it, and may be personally disadvantaged by maintaining it. Hence, women may rally to the defence of their state and institutions even though, in the process, they may be further subordinated to men.


The defence of the state is almost always mediated by adherence to the nation and defence of a national identity. In most respects, national identity serves as the doxa, or accepted common sense, of the modern state. Ostensibly it is an organic ‘spirit of the people’, but in actuality it is an articulation of the ‘rules of the game’ in a social formation dominated by the state. As a doxa, it is at its most effective when it passes unnoticed, and is at its most visible when it is under challenge. Explicit nationalist discourse becomes most prominent when the interests or even the existence of the state come under threat from external aggression or internal division. There are many other discourses and identities, including identities based on gender or sex, and identities based on class, race, religion, region and such like. These identities coexist in relations that are constantly renegotiated. However, it seems that in modern societies, social identity can likewise be considered as a ‘field’ in Bourdieu’s sense, in which national identity ultimately dominates gender and other identities.7 The implications of this interplay of identities can clearly be seen in France after the war, when the country was in effect ‘regendered’. The conditions of the occupation had in some respects empowered women. In the material hardships, they had led the daily struggle for survival, often challenging the German authorities over rationing policies, and finding ways to circumvent the burdensome laws and regulations.8 They were drawn into new forms of employment to make up for the shortage of men in the workforce. Though they took little part in either public or clandestine political activities, they nonetheless took leading organisational and operational roles in the Resistance.9 In contrast, women’s experience of the immediate postwar period was ambiguous.10 On the one hand, they were for the first time given the right to stand as candidates and cast their votes in elections. But on the other hand, the political emancipation resulted in little change for them, and relatively few women were able or willing to enter political life. Instead, they were required to return to the domestic sphere as mothers and housewives. They were driven out of their wartime jobs and responsibilities to make way for men returning from captivity, exile or military service, but they were in growing demand as a low-cost workforce to support the rebuilding effort. Women also continued to bear the brunt of the debilitating material conditions. In the first post-war years, food, clothing and shelter were even more difficult to obtain. Hardships were exacerbated by the severest winters in living memory, and the benefits of post-war prosperity did not begin to flow until the early 1950s. Hanna Diamond


concludes grimly that, apart from the removal of German domination, ‘the Liberation was in no sense a “liberation” for women’.11 On the contrary, the price of rebuilding the French nation was the renewed subordination of French women.

Shorn women: between justice and carnival As in the social and political spheres, so also in the symbolic domain, the urgent requirement to rebuild the imagined national community led to an exacerbated reassertion of male domination. Undoubtedly the most striking example from France at the end of the Second World War is the wave of ritual shearing of women’s hair, as public punishment for their relations, real or alleged, with the departing German occupying forces.12 The first shearings began in June 1943 and were carried out sporadically by Resistance groups as a punishment and as a warning to collaborators. The majority of shearings were concentrated in the summer and autumn of 1944, as the Allies advanced through France, with a second smaller wave after the German surrender in May 1945. It is now estimated that more than 20 000 women were punished in this way, together with a few hundred men. The women were charged with a variety of forms of collaboration. They may, for example, have been suspected of denouncing a neighbour to the occupying authorities, of making excessive profits through commerce with the Germans, or belonging to a collaborationist political or military organisation. But almost half of them were accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’, having relationships with members of the occupying forces. This is the abiding image that has remained of the tondues (shorn women). The shearings rapidly became a standard practice in almost every part of France in the immediate aftermath of the German retreat. They were usually carried out in the days following liberation of an area, under the aegis of the de facto French authorities in the locality, whether the representative of the provisional government or the local Liberation committee. In one case, the Languedoc, shearings were ordered by the Republican Commissaire for the region, representing the provisional government. Members of the police, army or Resistance forces usually supervised the shearings, though a local barber often carried out the cropping or shaving of hair. The British and American forces generally turned a blind eye to the events, regarding them as an internal French matter, unrelated to the war aims. The shearings were generally demanded by a local population, and were in part an attempt


to wipe out the traces of the enemy, by punishing the women who had been associated with them. Specific episodes sprang from a variety of motives. They were sometimes founded on rumours, sometimes arose from personal enmities, and sometimes served to channel violence that might otherwise have led to bloodshed. The women affected ranged in age from 15 to 70, with a preponderance of unmarried women from their late teens to late twenties, and they tended to be from those ‘vulnerable professions’ in the service sector, which had unavoidable contact with the occupying forces. Much of the factual information about the shearing of women has only emerged in the last ten years. Before that, the tondues mainly existed as a series of photographs disconnected from a specific context, and functioning principally at the level of myth, in Barthes’s sense. The work of recent historians in reconstructing the circumstances of the time has, however, helped to locate the connotations more firmly, and clarify some of the previous misconceptions. In the process, it has illuminated the intimate link between national and sexual identity in post-war France. The significance of the wave of shearings now appears more clearly as part of the process of defining the new French national identity, and the balance of gender relations within it. The many photographs of shearings can be read more attentively within this perspective, and a shearing in Gisors in the summer of 1944 provides an example (Fig. 6).13 It is a common misconception that the shearings were spontaneous, disorganised and carried out by civilians. On closer examination, it is clear that while in many cases there may have been a popular clamour for them, they were for the most part carried out by some form of local authority. In the example from Gisors, the photographer’s notes indicate that the woman is held down by two Maquis, a suggestion borne out by the military helmet, armband and cap badges of the men involved. As in this case, the shearing was often performed in a public place, in the presence of an audience, though it was frequently carried out also in an official building such as the town hall or police headquarters. They were not generally isolated cases, and most frequently several women were shorn together, as the quantity of hair on the ground in this photograph confirms. While the shearings were organised and authorised as punishment for collaboration, they certainly fell short of the due process of law. In most cases, there was no formal hearing, and any informal hearings that took place were perfunctory, and followed immediately by carrying out the punishment. Official records were mainly kept, however, and in some cases complaints and appeals were made after the event.


Figure 6

Cropping at Gisors, 1944

In this sense they appeared as a rough and ready form of justice. On the other hand, the shearings were for the most part arranged as public spectacles. Women were often paraded through the streets before or after the shearing, sometimes in trucks and sometimes with drums and fanfares. The shearing often took place in front of an audience and in some cases a large crowd. In many cases, men, women and children can be seen laughing and jeering at the tondues. There was often a playful and jocular attitude on the part of the perpetrators, as the Gisors example suggests, with men smoking cigarettes through the process, and exchanging banter with spectators. This has led commentators to suggest that the shearings were a form of carnival, albeit a rather grim one.14 However, they did lack some key features of carnival. The social relationships were not reversed, since the punishments were generally officially sanctioned and carried out by people in de facto authority. The punishments were not feigned, since the humiliation of the women was real, physical and visible. And the event was not a temporary one followed by a return to order, since in many cases the shearing had long-term consequences for the lives of the women concerned. In short, the shearings fell between justice and carnival,


neither wholly the one nor the other, and with powerful elements of both. Because of this, they open a window into a slippery hybrid domain between politics and everyday life, where individuals slip between their social roles and their personal relationships, where their behaviour slips between solemn ritual and mischievous play, and where social institutions slip between the state and the neighbourhood community.

Scapegoats for the nation The hybrid domain that linked politics and everyday life in 1944 was a privileged site of national reconstruction, on which a certain kind of imagined community was built. The shearings were a clear public assertion of patriotic unity, drawing an agreed boundary between what was and was not part of the nation. Ultimately, the shorn women served as scapegoats to expunge the anger, powerlessness and guilt of the nation as a whole. It was not the only expression of national anger, but it was often the first occasion on which the anger could be expressed publicly in a local community. There were certainly several thousand male collaborators who were executed for their deeds, and tens of thousands more who were arrested, tried and imprisoned.15 But their punishment was essentially private, whether they were summarily shot on capture or tried and sentenced at a later date. The shorn women by contrast were publicly punished, often with great ostentation. They were readily available symbols of the German occupation, and therefore bore the brunt of an anger that could never safely be directed at the occupying forces themselves. Their public shearing was therefore also a symbol of re-empowerment, and the occasion for a local celebration. For the first time in four years, French people in general, and French men in particular, were empowered to impose their will on the lives of their communities, and on the bodies of women in particular. The occasion was savoured all the more since the women punished were seen to have participated in, and benefited from, the imposition of a foreign domination. The tondues also reaped the expression of national guilt, rooted in the humiliation of defeat, but also in daily humiliations of occupation, which required everyday compromises with the occupying power in order to survive. A further dimension to this was the awareness that the major task of defeating the Germans was being borne by British and American soldiers, providing further incentives for French men to demonstrate that they were masters in their own country, at least to the extent that they could punish their erring womenfolk.


The women who had compromised excessively with the Germans were therefore felt to have crossed the line between what was and was not part of the nation. They were visibly punished, and the form of their punishment located the transgression firmly in their body, in their sexuality, and in their appearance. The shearings were not generally accompanied by other kinds of violence against the women, beyond what was required to compel them to submit to visible public disgrace. Shearing was sometimes accompanied by other acts designed mainly to humiliate, such as parading the women in front of jeering crowds, removing their shoes or clothing, marking signs such as the Swastika on their forehead or cheeks, daubing them with tar and feathers, or forcing them to wear or carry signs proclaiming their offence. There was also a great deal of name-calling, still visible in the written signs, and often couched in slang terms, such as ‘poule aux Boches’ (jerrybag),16 which combined the jocular with the belittling. The cropping or shaving of their hair was the centrepiece of the punishment, however, and was seen primarily an act of humiliation, rather than an act of violence. It was certainly also an act of aggression against their sexuality. The relationship between a woman’s hair and her sexuality or physical attractiveness pervades European history, and the significance of shaving off a woman’s hair goes back to biblical times. It is strongly linked to punishment for adultery. In the context of France in 1944, there was undoubtedly a misogynistic dimension to the shearing, expressing contempt for women as such. This is demonstrated by the fact that the punishment was applied to so many women, perhaps a majority, whose alleged crime was not one of sexual relations with the enemy. It is also noticeable that there appear to be no examples of a shearing carried out by a woman. It was essentially a male act, an assertion of male domination and virility, which entrenched the shared understanding that the new France was a man’s country. The enthusiasm for shearing rapidly waned after the end of hostilities. What had seemed right and proper in the heat of liberation came to appear less attractive on more mature reflection. The men who had proudly posed for the camera with their clippers, weapons and insignia soon ceased to boast of their participation. In any case, the establishment of designated courts to try collaborators provided an alternative channel for accusations and grievances. And the re-emergence of more normal Republican legality did not leave much legitimate space for the public display of popular retribution. Nevertheless, the after-image remained seared in the national imagination. The press continued to carry photographs of shearings, which in some ways became emblem-


atic images for the entire period, and crystallised into a myth with a much broader signification than the local circumstances would suggest. The jocular euphemism of ‘horizontal collaboration’ came to be seen as the predominant form of female collaboration, even though it only applied to a minority of the tondues, and ignored the much wider participation of women alongside men in all forms of collaboration. For example, nearly 500 women were summarily executed for their wartime crimes, and women accounted for over one-fifth of the French people subsequently imprisoned for offences related to collaboration. These were effectively masked by the image of the tondue. That powerful image then became one of the symbols of French womanhood, entering popular culture as a permanent warning of the dangers of unbridled female sexuality, and of female independence. It had the advantage of exhibiting both the crime, generally assumed to be sexual, and its punishment. It therefore acted socially as a kind of vaccine, giving a neutralised dose of the offence in order to secure an immune reaction to ward off its recurrence. The shearings seem also to have played an important role in re-establishing the separation of public life from the private sphere. Women were allocated firmly to the private sphere, with a trace of shame and punishment lingering over them collectively. As a result the shearings may well have contributed to the general disappearance of women from public life, and to the failure of women to reap broader personal and social benefits in post-war France.

Representing the nation The shorn woman was not the only female image to circulate at the end of the war, and was not the only one to capture the imagination of French people.17 But it was one of the most powerful representations of women in a public role, carrying implications of national identity. It was difficult for women to achieve an impact on national life, in what was increasingly a man’s world. It is true that women had played a significant role in the Resistance, and some of those who lost their lives, like Berthie Albrecht or Danielle Casanova, became posthumous icons of the heroic French woman. A small number of those who survived, like Edith Thomas or Lucie Aubrac, gained some prominence after the war. But most preferred to slip back into the anonymity of private life. They were encouraged in this by the pattern of official recognition, which largely forgot the contribution of women. They received some 10 per cent of the post-war Resistance medals, though their role had been proportionally much greater, and


of the 1061 people to whom de Gaulle awarded his highest honour, Companion of the Liberation, only six were women, four of them decorated posthumously.18 In April 1944, de Gaulle issued a decree finally granting women the right to vote and to stand as candidates in elections. The newspapers of 1945 carried photographs of smiling women voting and of the first women députés (members of the Assembly).19 The thirty-three newly elected women comprised some 5 per cent of the total number of députés, and increased the following year to 6.5 per cent, a level of representation women never reached again for the following forty years. For the first few months, these communist, Christian democrat and socialist women had a relatively high profile, and drew on their experience to raise a succession of issues directly affecting women, especially the active role of women during the war, the difficulties of food shortages, the plight of the family and public health. But from 1946, a depleted group of women députés were confined to a much lower profile that did not depart from mainstream political issues. One Paris député, Marthe Richard, became the target for a great deal of ribald comment when her name was attached to legislation intended to close all the brothels in metropolitan France, a measure that proved to have little effect on the problems of prostitution. A short while later, an MRP woman député, Germaine Poinso-Chapuis occupied a ministerial post for several months.20 She was bustled out of office in the backwash of a dispute over state funding for Catholic education. Thereafter, the profile of women in national politics declined even further. Perhaps the most conspicuous public face of women at this period was as the embodiment of the French nation. In an idealised form, she was everywhere as Marianne, la Semeuse (the Sower), or Liberty. She appeared for the first time on French postage stamps, initially in Algiers in 1944, but most strikingly on the Victory postage stamps, commissioned by de Gaulle and designed by a London-based artist Edmond Dulac, who was the leading stamp designer of the period.21 Delacroix’s celebrated painting of Liberty leading the people was one of the leading attractions at the Louvre, when it reopened in 1945, with a selection of masterpieces that had been removed for safekeeping during the war. Marianne was the subject of Paul Colin’s remarkable poster ‘La Libération’, which was distributed around Paris in August 1944, at the moment of the insurrection and eventual liberation of the capital.22 Here, as almost always, France is represented as gendered and female, but in this case she bears the marks of crucifixion on her hands and the outline of destroyed buildings on her clothing. The visible suffering


visited on the female body of France raises the question of what might be, or have been, the role of the male gender in the events. It is possible that they suffered with her, but it is equally possible that they inflicted the wounds she exhibits, and certain that they were not there to protect her from injury. The spirit of Colin’s poster is echoed in a prose poem by Gabriel Audiovisio which describes the same week of Liberation: O week stupefied by too many hopes too long contained! Assumption, in the summer, of chimeric expectations. Assumption, virgin of Paris, whose heaven illuminates the sun at last that found its birth of the world’s first days for new men amazed to feel that they would soon live.23 The theme of the Assumption recalls the mid-August Catholic festival, celebrating the reception of the Virgin Mary into heaven. This powerful mother-figure presides over the gestation and birth of the new men, who are astonished at the prospect of their own emergence. The poem also goes on to characterise Liberation week as a pubertal awakening, but the flowing of blood marks it as a female puberty, confirming the identification of national identity with a female principle. There were many Mariannes in the iconography of the period, on posters, savings certificates and other documents, so that she became a kind of presiding goddess over the rebuilding of France. She was restored to her place in mayors’ offices, where a bust of Marianne had been the symbol of the Republic since 1877, but had been replaced for the past four years by a bust of Marshal Pétain. In some respects this transfer is emblematic of the symbolic position of women in post-war France. Whereas Pétain was both a political leader and a symbol of the state, Marianne was a symbol of the state without being a political leader. She was, indeed, not a representation of any actual woman, and therefore close to a pure simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms.24 Individual images of Marianne were sometimes modelled on a specific woman. Dulac’s postage stamp, for example, was based on Léa Rixens, the widow of his friend and fellow painter Émile Rixens. And Pierre Gandon based the next series of Marianne stamps (1945–54) on an image of his own wife. These were largely private arrangements, known to a limited circle, since stamps were not allowed to carry the image of a living person. In later time, the bust in the mayor’s office came to be modelled on well-known actresses.25 But in lending their features to Marianne, these women abandoned most of the link between their own reality and the image. In a precession of simulacra, the image was stripped of


its function of representing a person. Instead, it represented an idea: the nation. This procedure was consistent with the traditions of the Republic, which had mostly eschewed the royal and imperial tendency to present the head of state as the symbol of the regime, a practice reintroduced by Pétain. And it was made easier by the fact that no actual woman could be imagined to occupy a political role that might subvert the tradition, however implicitly. This chimed very well with the social division of labour that reserved the public domain for men and confined women to the private sphere. It was this division of labour that underlay the different social presence of men and women, which John Berger has summarised by saying: ‘men act and women appear’.26 In France after the Second World War, women were more than ever confined to the role of appearing. They could present both the best and the worst images of the nation, the image of freedom and the image of betrayal. But they were not welcome as actors and agents in their own right within the public domain. This was a task reserved for men.

Men’s tasks If women were excluded from action, men were defined by it. While women could represent and embody the nation, men were required to fight for it and then build, maintain and govern it. In both cases, there were prices to be paid, but for men the duty of action brought with it a position of domination within the political and economic domains, and access to a much wider variety of social roles. Men asserted themselves as the norm and standard, and exercised their rule over women as the natural order of things, beyond challenge. This was not necessarily easy to achieve, since French manhood had been severely undermined by the war, and it required the active co-operation of women, who for the most part complied for the sake of the nation, and accepted their own diminishment with little demur. They accepted the ‘symbolic violence’ that impelled them to defend the legitimacy of the male-dominated nation, thereby reinforcing male dominance, even though, as the dominated sex, they were disadvantaged by it. Men, for their part, took this support for granted, as all dominant groups must do if their domination is to be ‘misrecognised’ as the natural state of affairs. Their part of the bargain was to strive conspicuously to defend and build the nation, without begrudging any personal sacrifices they might be required to make. The role of men as agents in society is analysed thoughtfully by Elisabeth Badinter. In her book on masculine identity, she speaks of


manhood as ‘a veritable task to be accomplished’.27 She points out that the rocky road to manhood is marked by duties, ordeals and the repeated necessity to prove himself, to ‘be a man’. Badinter focuses on the individual, from the struggle of the XY chromosome to survive, through the trauma of separation from the mother, to the often brutal rites of passage and initiations into the world of manhood. But her perception of manhood as a task also illuminates the collective construction of masculinity as a social and cultural identity. It is a particularly useful approach to the post-war period in France, since masculine identity was one of the devastated reaches of French life that had to be reconstructed. The failures and reverses of the war made up a bitter catalogue of humiliations, to be laid at the door of French men. Politically, France lost part of its territory and most of its national independence with German occupation. The Vichy government was a constant reminder of the vassal status of the country, and when the occupying forces required more direct control, they simply took it, as demonstrated vividly by the imposition of Pierre Laval as head of the government in April 1942, and the direct military occupation of the southern ‘nonoccupied’ zone in November 1942. Economically, the country was crippled by direct payments to Germany, by constant requisitions, and by the restructuring of industry to support the German war effort. This constituted a super-exploitation that ensured a deepening impoverishment of the country. Militarily, the defeat of 1940 was ignominious, and the country’s subsequent liberation was largely the work of foreign armies, however important the contribution of the Resistance and Free French. Physically, France was drained by mass deportations, labour conscription, arbitrary arrests, torture, executions, and the casualties of heavy fighting. This series of humiliations was to a large extent experienced as a masculine one, as a result of the social gendering of the public domains in which the defeat and occupation had occurred. The economy was almost entirely dominated by men, and since women could neither vote nor be elected until 1944, politics was similarly almost exclusively a man’s world. Failure and shame attached themselves to the men of the Third Republic and of Vichy. Military defeat affected in the first instance the armed forces, which were a traditional male preserve. The 1.8 million prisoners-of-war were male, held in German camps. And although 44 000 women were drafted for work in Germany, there were fifteen or twenty times more French men than women conscripted to the labour force there. Conversely, women and children were a substantial proportion of those deported to con-


centration camps, from which few returned. Male workers dominated the factories, transport and infrastructure in France, and many of them were therefore working directly or indirectly for Germany. They were largely deprived of their own means of organisation and expression, particularly the trades unions, which were predominantly institutions of male solidarity. The problem of masculine identity in France in 1944 had two dimensions. On the one hand, French men had been humiliated in the activities which they most valued, notably work and war. On the other hand, they had conspicuously failed to protect their country, which all the symbols identified as feminine, or to protect and support their womenfolk. The fact that women had played a significant role in both economic activity and in the Resistance movements compounded the problem more than it alleviated it, emphasising the lack or inadequacy of men. This no doubt fuelled the reluctance of many men to give women access to political life, and the reticence of many women to claim credit for their wartime activities. Having failed to achieve their major tasks for most of the war, French men found their identity plunged into crisis. However, any identity based on the carrying out of tasks is generated from pursuing a task rather than from completing it. So long as failure is not final, the identity can always be regenerated. And ironically, the final completion of a task may precipitate as much of a crisis as a final failure. In this sense, the dialectical interaction of task and identity is potentially never-ending. A task is always required, and the greater the task the stronger the identity which it generates. As Camus famously pointed out: ‘The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’28 The punishment of Sisyphus, in Greek mythology, was that in the realm of the dead, he was forced for ever to roll a block of stone up a steep hill, and to see it tumble back down when he reached the top. There were many reasons why Camus chose Sisyphus as his model of the absurd hero, but the sense of identity he derives from this apparently futile task was clearly one of them. So paradoxically, the rebuilding of France appeared as a quintessentially male task, a Sisyphan labour offering a golden opportunity to reassert male identity. But before that could occur, two substantial difficulties had to be overcome. First was the crippling legacy of humiliation weighing on manhood, which could potentially hamper his rehabilitation. And second was the assertion of a female participation in the task, which would vitiate its effect on male identity. In the event, a simple strategy presented itself, which enabled men to have their cake and eat it: the humanist turn.


Male humanism The discourse of humanism operated by framing male achievements and catastrophes as human ones, while retaining the male form as convenient shorthand. Georges Rouault’s painting Homo homini lupus (1944) exemplifies it, depicting a man hanging from a gibbet, exemplifying ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ (Plate 8).29 David Rousset’s moving account of his experience in a concentration camp offered a similar perspective. Describing a ragged and emaciated inmate, he recounts that: He told me he was a lawyer in Toulouse, and I had all the trouble in the world not to burst out laughing. It was just that the social image of the lawyer no longer fitted this wretch at all. The comparison had irresistible comic power. And it was the same for all of us. Man was slowly dismantled in concentration camp inmates.30 The inhumanity is real and concrete, and it is the destruction of social identities that is felt as the most dehumanising effect of the camps, leading ultimately to ‘a complete debacle of man’. 31 While this conception of man emerged from the experience of a group of male prisoners, a similar suggestion of the predominant maleness of humanity is to be found in Raymond Gid’s poster, Retour à la France, retour à la vie, which depicts a stylised naked figure emerging from the barbed wire of a camp (Figure 5). 32 Though in appearance it could conceivably be male or female, the tricolour heart confirms its masculinity by reference to the familiar Catholic iconography of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Georges Bernanos adopted a similar idea, identifying the recent conflict as Hitler’s war against mankind, and arguing that: Great Germany in 1932 deliberately wagered against Man, and if I may express myself in a language that comes more naturally to me, I declare that it is certainly the most substantial venture that has ever been attempted against the Redemption, that is, against human nature justified and deified by Christ.33 Couching the point in two idioms, one secular and one religious, Bernanos confirms the ideological charge with which the notion of Man was invested. Maurice Merleau-Ponty made the same point in more mythological terms, suggesting that ‘the hero of today is not


Lucifer, it is not even Prometheus, it is man’.34 The philosophy of humanism was also urged by a fellow existentialist: One of the domains where the intrusion of philosophy is most intensely rejected is the political domain: political realism should not, so they say, burden itself with abstract consideration. But if one looks more closely, one quickly notices that political and moral problems are indissolubly linked. In any case, it is a matter of making human history, making man, and since man needs to be made, he is in question: this is the question that lies at the source of both action and truth.35 Like her colleagues, Simone de Beauvoir in this and many similar analyses adopted the discourse of man, without apparently noticing or objecting to its ethos of masculinity. The task of reconstructing male identity could therefore be subsumed under the generic task of rebuilding human identity: ‘refaire l’homme’. Something like Barthes’s tourniquet then operated: a ‘turnstile’ effect, which enabled the stigma of wartime humiliation to be occluded. It appeared as a generalised condition no longer attaching specifically to the male, while at the same time the fruits of post-war reconstruction, though also generalised, were associated with firmly masculine connotations. The post-war hyperinflation of humanism formed an important context for the recreation of a masculine identity, which included all of the major political and ideological movements. The assent of Beauvoir to the humanist operation may appear surprising, but reflects the highly convergent pressures that it exerted on all social identities in France. Humanism aimed to suppress a wide range of differences, not only in national identity but also in class and gender identity. In particular, it produced a one-sex model of gender which Beauvoir, writing in 1945, articulates unambiguously: ‘Man is one, the world in which he lives is one, and he commits himself in his totality in the action he carries out throughout the world’.36 The unity of humanity, so forcefully propounded by the existentialists, carried with it the implicit assumption that the male was the norm. The point is vividly exemplified in the inaugural editorial for Les Temps modernes. Expounding the human situation, Sartre declares: For us, what men have in common is not a nature, but rather a metaphysical condition … they constitute undecomposable totalities, whose ideas, humours and acts are secondary and dependent


structures, and whose essential character is to be situated, and they differ among themselves just as their situations differ. The unity of these signifying wholes is the meaning they demonstrate. Whether he writes or works on an assembly line, whether he chooses a wife or a neck-tie, man always demonstrates: he demonstrates his professional background, his family, his class and, finally, since he is situated in relation to the whole world, it is the world he demonstrates. A man is the whole of the earth. He is present everywhere, he acts everywhere, he is responsible for everything, and his destiny is played out in every place, in Paris, in Potsdam or in Vladivostock.37 The totalising ambition of what Sartre called his synthetic anthropology is centred on a vision of the human being as someone who works on a production line, chooses a wife or a tie, and takes responsibility for world affairs. A more masculine vision would be difficult to imagine, and its very vigour in conflating man and humanity was no doubt partly responsible for the awakening that led Simone de Beauvoir to call it into question: A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex: it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality, the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man [les hommes] to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity… It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones.38 Beauvoir focuses primarily on the implications of the humanist sleight of hand for female identity, but in the process points to the loss of specificity that it entails for men. In particular they may not locate their identity in sexual or physiological difference. But in order for the tourniquet to operate successfully, it must secure an affirmation of


masculinity within the envelope of humanity. The signs of the masculine-human, which may not be represented as physical or sexual properties, are therefore represented as social functions, as Rousset’s text has indicated.

Division of gender identities In the same way as, in Beauvoir’s words, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’,39 so one is not born, but rather becomes a man. A man learns the gender identity that is constructed for him to occupy in society.40 As part of the learning process, a man will be introduced to the distinguishing social activities of the male, which may be characterised as work, ownership, and the exercise of power, including military and sexual power. These male markers are to be found in every part of the culture of the Liberation period, across the entire political spectrum. In the scenes of shorn women, just as women are forced to exhibit their abjection, so men are proud to exhibit their physical and social power. Two men restrain the woman being shaved in Gisors. One of them looks directly at the camera as if signalling his mastery of the situation. The woman averts her gaze. A few moments earlier, she had been reluctant to submit to the ordeal, and the man in a military helmet had joined his comrade to hold her arms. 41 They both demonstrate their physical power. And whereas she is only identifiable as a woman, a number of the men are identifiable as members of the Resistance, probably the local Maquis, with their military power indicated by badges and elements of uniform. Perhaps too, the cigarettes between their lips are assertions of power, especially since smoking in public by women was socially frowned upon at the period. As was noted earlier, the shearings were all carried out by men, and served to assert male domination and virility, so undermined by the events of the previous four years. They confirmed that the new France was a man’s country, and gave some men their first taste of direct power over women. The social power wielded by men is easy enough to demonstrate, since it is not difficult to point to examples of people in different positions of social power, and to observe that they are in fact all or almost all men. Gatherings of political or business leaders, senior civil servants, officers in the armed forces, trades unionists, church leaders, journalists, writers, artists, academics and other groups all exhibit a similarly overwhelming predominance of men. It was certainly visible


in post-war France, and it has been frequently observed that in many respects the situation has changed relatively slowly in France and in many other countries. What is more difficult is to demonstrate where the specifically masculine character of this social power lies, since the power is rarely identified explicitly by reference to sex or gender. In reality, it may not be useful to seek a masculine marking specific to forms of social power, since the demarcation is structured into society, and may even be constitutive of the social structure. In this respect, an image by André Fougeron provides a surprisingly explicit mapping of regendered France in 1945. Published in colour on the front of the 14 July 1945 issue of the communist daily Ce soir, it depicts a woman suckling her child, supported on the shoulders of a soldier and a (male) worker (Fig. 7).42 The woman wears the red Phrygian bonnet over shoulder-length hair, and a diaphanous robe loosely wrapped to reveal her full breasts. Cradling her baby in the crook of her right hand, she looks directly at the viewer and accumulates the mythical associations of the Virgin Mary and Marianne. The two men supporting her carry the masculine marks of their social functions. The worker wears overalls and a cap, and a spanner protrudes from his belt or pocket. Hairy arms and large, lined hands also mark his physical strength and masculinity. The soldier wears a helmet and uniform. He carries a rifle, with bayonet attached, and the identification bracelet on his wrist serves as a reminder that he risks his life in battle. The trio are surrounded by red, white and blue bunting and emblems of France, and by the flags of the British, American and Soviet Allies. Compressed into the picture are symbols of politics, religion, the nation, the state, class, and the family, orchestrated in terms of femininity and masculinity. The woman is raised up, representing the nation and its future, but she is firmly in the private sphere. The men are supporting and protecting her, but equally firmly located in the public sphere of war and work. The composition of the image emphasises the unity of this holy family, and its placing in a PCF paper spells out though the headlines that this is an image of how the French Renaissance must build on the Republican traditions of the Revolution of 1789.43 In view of its party-specific setting, the image might not have appealed to all sectors of opinion, but Fougeron probably reflected a broad consensus on the respective roles of men and women in the new France. Fougeron’s image bespeaks the importance of work still to be done and battles still to be fought. The men do not abandon their uniform and overalls even for a national festival. And indeed, tasks and battles


Figure 7

André Fougeron, Renaissance française, July 1945


were not lacking. Apart from the suppressed conflicts arising from the occupation, there were new ones, or new versions of old ones, arising from the post-war situation. Class conflicts re-emerged openly as the hardships of the reconstruction process weighed increasingly on the working population. Political conflicts intensified with the sharpening of party differences and the onset of Cold War polarisations. Military conflicts continued as the French army of Liberation set out to reconquer its lost colonial possessions in Indo-China. And gender conflicts simmered as the newly enfranchised female electorate were shepherded into their dual role as ‘les mamans de France’ (French mums) and as a growing proportion of the lower-paid echelons of the workforce. But far from undermining the humanist-masculine synthesis, these new and potential conflicts and contradictions confirmed and supported it. As Henri Lefebvre pointed out: Whoever says contradiction also says problem to solve, difficulties, obstacles – therefore struggle and action – but also the chance of victory, of steps forward, of progress.44 If solving problems, struggling against obstacles and striving for victory were the ethos of post-war France, then it clearly offered every opportunity to reconstruct a masculine identity embodying Badinter’s conception of it as a task to be accomplished. As Fougeron’s picture also suggests, this was the world of the post-war baby-boom.45 The child suckling at the mother’s breast may be a boy or a girl, though the echoes of the Virgin and Christ Child would suggest a boy. Either way, the child belonged to the baby-boom generation, and would be a young adult in the 1960s, possibly a student during the events of May–June 1968. His or her involvement in the subsequent transformation of gender identities would also be a struggle against what they had imbibed with their mother’s milk: a male-dominated France based on the clear division of social labour between a public realm reserved for men and a private sphere to which women were confined. The same generation will still be active and in many cases will occupy influential positions in public life for several years after France passes the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. For this reason, the sharp regendering of French national identity in 1945 is an event that will continue to pervade French life and culture for years to come.

6 The Humanist Moment

A common framework of values After conflict, the task of rebuilding national identity requires that all areas of culture should be mobilised. In this, an important role falls to the domain of ideas, beliefs and values. Very frequently, the aftermath of conflict has been accompanied by an upsurge in the role of religion as a key organising framework within which issues confronting the nation can be articulated. In recent years, religion has played this role in European countries such as the components of former Yugoslavia, emerging from civil war. This echoes the experience of countries such as Poland and Lithuania emerging from communism. Conflicts in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa have similarly been followed by an increase in the practice of Islam. In these cases, religious movements have been adopted as a common framework of beliefs and values around which a nation could unite. In France, a similar phenomenon was apparent after the defeat of 1940, when the Vichy regime mobilised Catholic piety in support of its National Revolution. But with the collapse of the regime, the credibility of Catholicism was severely damaged, and the French political and intellectual elites had to look elsewhere for a unifying ideological framework. Although they succeeded in assembling a bricolage of secular and religious symbols and in finding a common vocabulary to articulate the circumstances of the time, they still needed a framework of values to underpin them and provide a degree of coherence. This was the context in which humanism emerged suddenly and unexpectedly as the uncontested framework of values within which the debates and struggles of the period were expressed. The phenomenon has passed virtually unnoticed by subsequent commentators, yet it provided the ideological adhesive for 127


French national unity, a precious and fragile field in 1944, and defined the parameters of what was thinkable, or at least speakable. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘rules of the game’ is useful for understanding how this came about.1 He suggests that any field of activity is structured by a set of rules which are accepted, usually implicitly, by all the participants. The rules determine what actions are legitimated and how a participant or group of participants may gain ascendancy within the field. In France in 1945, the field of ideas acquired a new set of rules, or at least an extensively revised set of underlying values. These values defined what could be said or thought, and how writers and thinkers might gain recognition. They were presented explicitly as a framework of humanism. Humanism in the French sense is a somewhat eclectic notion, which has proven to be more persuasive the less closely it is analysed, and most persuasive of all when it is taken as an unstated assumption. In this it bears some resemblance to the force of gravitation, which is not strong enough to be observed in small-scale interactions but exerts a bonding effect at a large scale. Normally, humanism is not clearly visible in the detail of intellectual debate, but functions nevertheless to hold the cultural field together. In the France of the immediate postwar period, when the cultural field was radically disrupted, the French political and intellectual elite expounded humanism explicitly, finding in it a consensual means of rebuilding a measure of cultural unity. Like much of the ‘new’ thinking of the time, its elements were largely to be found in the 1930s, where they had emerged in a marginal and diffuse form. The circumstances in which the war ended then provided the environment in which the elements could be brought together and could flourish.

The humanist voice French humanism was, and remains, largely distinct from the humanist movements in Britain, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries, which seek to offer secular alternatives to religious belief, and in some cases promote militant atheism. On the contrary, the French advocates of humanism sought to include the main religious movements within it, and drew extensively on traditions of spirituality. The main features of French post-war humanism were represented in a collection of lectures delivered in 1946 under the auspices of ‘L’Amitié française’, a cultural association established by Catholic review Temps présent. Published under the sonorous title Les grands

The Humanist Moment 129

appels de l’homme contemporain (The Great Appeals of Modern Man) it brought together a number of intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds, and reviewed the different humanist traditions currently present in France.2 It identified humanism in several guises: scientific, secular, Nietzschean, Marxist, Sartrean, and Christian. While each lecturer had a different view of the particular solutions that might resolve the various problems faced by modern man, they largely concurred in what they saw as the main preoccupations of humanism at this period. Taken together with other writings of the period, they offer a profile of French humanism of the 1940s, and its characteristic preoccupations with Man, the Individual, Society, Culture, Science, and History. Humanists take the concept of Man, or Humanity, as the touchstone by which projects and achievements must be judged. For them, the measure of a humane civilisation is its aspiration to universal human brotherhood and the unity of all Mankind. But they wonder whether human values should in turn be measured against something beyond them. This may involve reference to a spiritual transcendence or aspiration to higher ideal. It may also require an acknowledgement of the social and political effects to which human values may give rise. Humanists are concerned with the position of the Individual or the human person. In particular, they recognise that the natural, social and spiritual (or ideological) worlds have grown in scale and complexity. This growth may have overtaken individuals’ ability to make sense of the world, or to situate themselves within it. They consider it important that a person should be able to find a sense of identity as a subject with purpose, meaning and value. This enables them to build relationships, function actively in undertaking projects, and confront issues of life and death. But they wonder how to protect the scope for individual human freedom. Humanists are concerned about the future of Society. They observe that it has become a place of incessant struggle against alienation, oppression and inequality. They enquire how happiness is to be pursued, and wonder whether it must be conceived as a collective endeavour, and whether it will require revolutionary changes to achieve it. Literary, artistic and intellectual Culture are accepted as a national treasure, which the present generation has received in trust. Humanists oppose barbarism in various forms, which might include fascism, communism, capitalism or the modern world more generally. They fear that barbarism, in whatever guise, has dealt brutally with the European tradition of learning and letters, which can be traced


back to classical antiquity and more recently in Europe to the Renaissance. They wonder how culture, and the humane values and historical identities it embodies, can be safeguarded and passed on to succeeding generations. Humanists respect Science, and believe that logic and rational enquiry have demonstrated their power, for good or ill. The pace of scientific and technological advance is visibly accelerating, bringing many benefits, but also dangers. In particular, the use of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War demonstrated the potentially apocalyptic implications of science for the future of the human race. They may wonder whether progress is always worth the price that is paid, and whether science has outstripped the moral and political means of controlling it. Humanists wish to learn from and influence the future course of History. They accept that the development of human enterprises over time brings great upheavals. They see that two world wars have brought suffering and death on a vast scale, including unspeakable crimes against humanity. They wonder whether the relentless cycle of war and peace is inevitable, or whether mankind can prevent the catastrophe of war in future, preparing an era of peace and progress for all humanity. While these themes do not comprise a comprehensive list of humanist concerns, they do encapsulate the language, the main assumptions and the consequent questions which structure humanist discourse at this period. They may therefore serve as a broad profile of humanist tones in what Roland Barthes called the Voice of Knowledge (Voix de la Science), the cultural codes which convey an important strand of meaning in any text, and refer to the bodies of knowledge or wisdom they invoke implicitly or explicitly.3 It is not surprising that this summary of received ideas appears somewhat stereotyped: the space of the codes of a period forms a sort of scientific vulgate, which one day it will be worth describing: what do we know ‘naturally’ about art? – ‘it is a constraint’; of youth? – ‘it is turbulent’, etc. If all of these portions of knowledge, all of these commonplaces, are gathered together, a monster appears, and this monster is ideology.4 All ideology, in Barthes’s account, operates most effectively by being implicit. It was constructed by accretion and sedimentation rather than coherently and systematically, and is rarely seen in an articulated form. If it is spelled out it appears monstrous. Barthes focuses on the debased


form of ideology, exemplified by Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas (Dictionnaire des idées reçues), the epitome of everything stupid, vulgar and stereotyped. But the ‘monster’ of ideology may also appear in an exalted form, in which familiar commonplaces may be transfigured by faith or imagination into mysteries and eternal truths. In either perspective, the immediate post-war period was a rare occasion on which the truths or platitudes of humanism were openly discussed, and were embodied in the images and narratives of the period.

Images of Man A reading of two images from the period will reveal their humanist underpinnings. Georges Rouault’s oil-painting of 1944–45 entitled ‘Homo homini lupus’ is one of the most explicit (Fig. 8).5 It presents the crudely outlined figure of a man hanging from a gallows, while behind him the full moon shines wanly over a landscape in which a house, or perhaps a village, appears to be burning. The main humanist themes are clearly present. The concept of Man is explicitly present in the title, which evokes Man’s inhumanity to Man, and is painted in a distinct caption at the bottom of the canvas. The figure of the hanged man combines both Man in general, facilitated by the lack of realism or detail in the depiction, and the notion of the Individual, upon whom the depredations of conflict ultimately fall. Society is figured both as a victim, in the burning village, and as executioner, in the gallows which are erected by the repressive apparatus of the state. Culture, and particularly classical culture, is signalled by the Latin inscription, inspired perhaps by Plautus.6 And while Science is only indirectly implied in the technology of execution and destruction, History’s recurrent convulsion in war is indicated by the scene of destruction and repression, and by the suggestion in the caption that the scene depicted has been replayed since classical antiquity. The lack of detail that would assign the event to a time or place, combined with the presence of the moon, emphasises the general significance of what is portrayed and discourages any specific or partisan interpretation. There is also a suggestion of religious imagery, which emphasises the admonitory or morally didactic function of the painting, such as might be found in a Catholic church, in a stained-glass window or at a Station of the Cross. Rouault’s image is elegiac in its impact, inviting the viewer to pause and share Robert Burns’s lament that ‘Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn’.7 Mankind’s ability both to perpetrate and suffer cruelty is the implied target, rather


Figure 8

Georges Rouault, Homo homini lupus, 1944–5


than any specific instance of inhumane behaviour which might invite punishment, revenge or even an attempt to prevent its recurring. In another genre, and at the other end of the ideological spectrum from Rouault’s devout Catholicism, a similar humanist inspiration presides over many of the political propaganda posters of the period. A clear example is the pair of posters issued by the French Communist Party in 1945 to promote reconstruction and increase production. Designed by Denis Thébault, the posters depict a male worker against a background of the rebuilding of a factory (Figs 9 and 10).8 The first, showing work beginning in the ruins, has the slogan, ‘Depuis un an, ça va déjà mieux …’ (‘Over the past year, things have got better’), and the second, showing the rebuilding well advanced, has, ‘Retroussons nos manches, ça ira encore mieux!’ (Let’s roll up our sleeves, things will get even better!). The image of Man is conveyed by the healthy and enthusiastic worker, painted in an idealised style reminiscent of Soviet socialist realism. His legs are firmly planted apart on the ground as he bestrides the scene, towers over the reader, and exhibits his selftranscendence in transforming the world by his labour. A powerful Individual, he is shown to be in control of his work and able to make a difference in life. In one poster he is reaching up to attach a pallet-load of bricks to a crane hook, while in the other he is cheerfully rolling up his sleeves to set to work, and looking directly out at the viewer in encouragement to follow suit. Society appears implicitly in the paraphernalia of construction work, and also in the man’s work-mate, whether the unseen crane-driver who is lowering a hook or the visible worker stripped to his vest and digging in a trench. Society, as well as the particular viewer, is also implicitly addressed in the exhortation of the slogans. Culture is barely present here, unless it is in the statue-like figure of the worker who in pose, shape, texture and colour could easily be cast in bronze. But popular culture is perhaps signalled in the colloquial tone of the slogans. Science and Technology are abundantly evident in the cranes and gantries, which rise from the rubble. It is technology that conquers, in the second poster, sweeping away the destruction that fills the first. The scene of destruction, with gutted buildings and shattered industrial plant, carries the mark of History, the aftermath of war. And while the progress of technology erases that mark, the passage of time still inhabits the slogans with their reference to a past already overcome and a future which promises prosperity. The bright blue sky emphasises the idealised nature of the scene, and also helps to bridge the temporal distance between the worker and the background in both posters. In the first, the worker is located in the


Figure 9

Denis Thébault, Depuis un an ça va déjà mieux, 1945


Figure 10

Denis Thébault, Retroussons nos manches ça ira encore mieux, 1945


present loading up new bricks, while the visible scene shows only uncleared rubble, presumably one year ago. In the second, the worker, again in the present, is rolling up his sleeves to begin work, while the backdrop shows a newly built and fully operative factory, presumably at some time in the future. The impact of the posters derives directly from their implicit humanist ideology, which enables a general message to be carried by an image with very particular class and gender connotations.

Humanism in the 1930s 1945 was a high moment for humanism, the time at which it appeared fully formed in heroic self-affirmation. But it was the product of a long gestation. Humanist values have been implicit in the French republican tradition since the Enlightenment. They are enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, and have given a sense of secular religiosity to the institutions of successive Republics.9 The positivist philosopher Auguste Comte even founded a religion of Humanity.10 But from its coining in the middle of the nineteenth century up to the late 1920s, the term ‘humanism’ in France most often meant the rediscovery of classical learning that took place in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.11 During the late 1920s and early 1930s, intellectuals like Charles Andler, a socialist professor at the prestigious Collège de France, argued for a renewed concept of general education that might sustain a new programme of popular education.12 Catholic and liberal intellectuals took up the debate, motivated in part by the increasing integration of Catholics into the largely anti-religious state school system. A group of prominent writers argued for a ‘new humanism’ that could be translated into a curriculum of classical and modern humanities.13 The philosophical importance of humanism was advanced by two of the leading Catholic intellectuals, Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, both of whom were seeking a new intellectual framework to replace that of the right-wing Action française, which had dominated Catholic thinking until the late 1920s. Mounier’s editorial in the first number of his review Esprit (1932) was programmatically entitled ‘Remake the Renaissance’ and espoused a humanism which would not be explicitly Catholic, but would be open to ‘that which is outside and above Man’. 14 Maritain, for his part, proposed a thoroughgoing renewal of Christianity. He expounded its temporal and spiritual principles in his Humanisme intégral (1936), a text which immediately


became something of a catechism for the small Christian Democratic movements of the 1930s, and a classic statement of Christian humanism frequently reprinted after the war.15 Humanism, he argued, was the aspiration to extend human potential by opening it up to dimensions of the world beyond Man. In that sense it is ‘inseparable from civilisation or culture, these two words being taken as synonymous’.16 Both Maritain and Mounier therefore saw the new humanism as the spirit of a (future) civilisation. A somewhat less assertive version of humanism had long been present, at least intermittently, in the socialist movement. Derived from Ludwig Feuerbach and the German social democrats, humanism was a current of ethical socialism that was professed by leading intellectuals of the French socialist party, such as Lucien Herr, Charles Andler and Jean Jaurès. Jaurès named the party newspaper L’Humanité. Ethical socialism was given a considerable theoretical impetus in the 1930s by the publication of Karl Marx’s early writings, especially the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, which were strongly marked by Feuerbachian humanism. A number of young communist intellectuals were drawn towards a humanist Marxism as a result, including Henri Lefebvre, Georges Friedmann and Norbert Guterman. 17 In the two years before the election of the Popular Front government of 1936, the Communist Party adopted an overtly humanist discourse, drawing on the work of leading Left-wing writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, and encouraged by the new Comintern policy formulated by George Dimitrov. The party’s spokesman on intellectual matters, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, editor of its daily paper L’Humanité, promoted this humanist approach. He was ably seconded by major writers like Louis Aragon and André Malraux, who frequently repeated Stalin’s slogan, ‘Man, the most precious capital’, which introduced humanist notions into the Second Five-year Plan (1933–37). The humanist approach was well adapted to building a national movement on a broad platform of anti-fascism, even if there were attempts on the Right to formulate a fascist humanism.18 The general aspiration to ‘save Man’ and protect human rights was widely repeated, often in the perspective of perceived decline in the West and the threat of barbarism and racism.19 The flagging League of Nations attempted to develop a ‘New Humanism’ through its intellectual co-operation programme, and its 1936 meeting in Budapest on this theme assembled luminaries like Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Georges Duhamel, Johan Huizinga and Jean Piaget.20


However, the humanist tendency was far from uncontested. Not all communists were convinced of its worth, and one of the leading communist intellectuals, Paul Nizan, attacked its deceptive universalism: Historically, humanism has been essentially a mythology. It made promises to a universal Man who was but a figment of the mind, promises which could not be kept; there was among the humanists a duplicity which was less a matter of their intentions than of history’s recalcitrance.21 Humanism as a purely rational construct could not, in Nizan’s view, deliver genuine improvements to human life. As a result it was unreal, taking for reality a universal brotherhood and co-operation which could only be achieved, if at all, by a long process of struggle and conflict. This remains the classic argument against ideologies of universalism: wittingly or unwittingly, they slip from the aspiration to achieve universal well-being into a presumption that everyone must be treated in the same way. Nizan’s close friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, expressed a similar scepticism from a non-Marxist standpoint in his novel La Nausée (1938).22 The narrator sardonically recalls the variety of humanists he has known. They include the liberal who is fond of civil servants; the ‘Left-wing’ humanist who does not join a party but has a sentimental sympathy for the humble people, and for higher mammals; the communist who has loved mankind since the second Five-year Plan and cherishes his duty to be severe; the Catholic humanist who has lately discovered the angelic beauty of ordinary people, and writes edifying novels for them; and others besides, all of whom hate one another and hold mutually incompatible views. They all share an ability to integrate all human attitudes into their schema, even anti-humanism. The narrator concludes: I don’t want them to integrate me, I don’t want my fine red blood to help fatten this lymphatic beast: I won’t be so foolish as to call myself ‘anti-humanist’. I just am not a humanist, that’s all.23 Although the character may not directly represent the author’s views, he presents a withering critique of humanism’s potential for loose thinking and self-serving opportunism. But at the same time, there is a grudging recognition that these qualities contribute to its integrative power.


Humanism during the war The French defeat of 1940 muzzled most of the proponents of humanism, at least at a public level. The National Revolution of Vichy and the New Europe of the pro-Nazis were programmes of exclusion. The cultural and ultimately physical eradication of whole sectors of the population could not sit easily with a broadly inclusive humanist discourse, though there were some attempts to project Hitler’s racialist conception of the ‘new man’ as a kind of humanist ideal. The one branch of humanism which did retain a public voice was Catholic humanism, whose presence was decisive in preparing the post-war ethos. Taking advantage of the regime’s ambiguities, influential humanist-inclined pre-war reviews continued to appear, at least for a period, under Vichy. These included Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit, and Stanislas Fumet’s Temps présent, which was renamed Temps nouveaux. Both appeared in Lyon and were eventually banned in 1941. The influential Jesuit monthly Études and its presumed successor, Construire, moved in a similar direction.24 A new review of Catholic social studies was launched by a group of Dominicans in Marseilles in early 1942 under the title Économie et humanisme. The title reflected the increasing recognition of humanism as a legitimate dimension of Catholic social thought, and the review played an influential role in developing Catholic pastoral theology in the post-war period. The Catholic humanist vision was popularised among a wider audience through literary works, especially the novels of Antoine de SaintExupéry, whose Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras, 1942) was an extended meditation on the relationship between Man and the individual.25 These ideas were disseminated through some of the youth movements that Vichy fostered, and which rapidly became conduits for Catholic humanism. They included the Chantiers de la jeunesse, which organised work-camps for young people; Jeune France, which organised an ambitious programme of cultural activities; Compagnons, which was a uniformed youth movement loosely based on the boy scouts; and the Écoles des cadres which provided a system of leadership training schools. During the early months of Vichy, the humanist Catholics exercised considerable influence within the Youth Ministry. As the war progressed, though, they were gradually pushed out by their more collaborationist rivals, especially Charles Maurras’s Action française, but not before they had made a significant mark on the rising generation, many of whom took their humanist ideals into the Resistance during the latter stages of the occupation.


In partial or complete clandestinity, the internal Resistance movements took up the socialist and humanist ideas generated during the Popular Front period. They provided not only a common discourse, but also a powerfully motivating one. The anti-fascist ideas of the 1930s were greatly magnified by the presence of the Nazi repressive apparatus, and the call to arms on behalf of ‘l’homme’ or ‘les hommes’ proved capable of inspiring extremes of dedication and heroism. Significantly, the first coherent movement of Resistance was the one based in the Museum of Mankind (Musée de l’homme) in Paris. This distinguished anthropological museum and research centre produced the first Resistance martyrs. Resistance poets developed lyrical humanism as an effective rallying call. A particularly powerful example is Louis Aragon’s clandestine poem of 1943, ‘Prélude à la Diane française’ (‘Prelude to the French reveille’). It begins: Man where is man man Man Swindled beaten wounded bruised Contempt now his native land Branded like a steer and like A steer to slaughter led26 The four-fold repetition of ‘man’ in the first line turns the word into a slogan, and the linking of man with his native land (la patrie) in the stanza is characteristic of the close interweaving of humanist notions with the themes of national liberation and national unity. The poem ends by evoking the battle of Valmy, a much-repeated symbol of the victorious French nation, since at that battle in September 1792 the French Revolutionary armies overcame the Prussian and Austrian armies for the first time, to shouts of ‘vive la nation’. The text also carries discernible Christian connotations, and Aragon, a communist, was not the only writer to call up the imagery of Christ’s crucifixion to depict the sufferings of mankind in general and France in particular. He subsequently defended his use of Christian themes on the grounds that all available myths and symbols needed to be mobilised in the struggle to save the nation.27 However, at the same time, Sartre was arguing in his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943) that humanism was inseparable from a religious belief: Each time we use ‘we’ in this sense (to designate suffering humanity, sinful humanity, to determine an objective direction for history,


considering man as an object which develops its potentialities) we confine ourselves to indicating a certain concrete ordeal, which has to be undergone in the presence of an absolute third party, namely God. Thus the limit-concept of humanity (as the totality of ourselves-as-object) and the limit-concept of God both imply each other and are correlative.28 His argument is that the notion of humanity is contradictory. Any group needs a third party so that it can think of itself in the first person, as ‘we’, in distinction to others. To think of the whole human race in the first person as a single group necessitates a non-human other. But there is no such third party, apart from God, who in Sartre’s view does not exist.29 Hence, he concludes, to believe in Humanity requires us to believe in God. The argument is a powerful one, and offers an explanation for the mystical associations of even the most secular forms of humanism. Following Sartre’s logic, it would be inevitable that even a communist humanism would have a religious dimension. Aragon’s use of Christian symbols could therefore be seen as a logical consequence of his humanist stance, rather than a purely opportunistic poetic device. It may be, however, that Sartre gave too narrowly theological a content to the ‘absolute third party’. The aspiration to humanity as an imagined community must no doubt secrete the notion of a transcendental Other, but in the circumstances of the 1940s at least, that Other also took on the face of the French Nation, conceived as eternal and universal. The elaboration of a common doctrine of man, leading to an agreed programme of action for the post-war period, was a constant preoccupation of the various clandestine movements, pursued through various study groups, one of which took the name ‘Humanisme et Action’. The enterprise was eventually taken up by Free French groups associated with Gaullist circles in London and Algiers.30 The most elaborated attempt was produced by André Hauriou in his wartime book Vers une doctrine de la Résistance: le socialisme humaniste, published in Algiers in 1943.31 An academic lawyer by profession, Hauriou represented the metropolitan Resistance at the Provisional Consultative Assembly in liberated Algiers, and attempted to synthesise the collective attitudes of the internal Resistance towards the future rebuilding of France. He called for an end to old quarrels and a cleansing of the nation leading to a programme of reform and renewal. He argued that the intellectual dimension of the Resistance was organised around the two themes of freedom and socialism. And he suggested that these should be the guiding principles of a new path for France, which would stand between the capitalist West and


the communist East, transcending them both with a creative synthesis of what was best in each. His detailed policy proposals were concluded with a rousing quotation from Charles Péguy: Mother, here are your sons who have fought so hard, they are ready, once more, for the finest battle of all, the battle for freedom and human brotherhood.32 The reference to Péguy was partly polemical, challenging Vichy’s attempts to annexe the poet to its brand of Catholic nationalism. It asserted the compatibility of his Catholic socialist vision with the Resistance’s aspiration to both national liberation and social progress. But in its connotations, there is a tableau of the humanist patriots, the sons, presented to an ‘absolute third party’, their mother, who is both Mary the Mother of God and Mother France. It was a confirmation of the merging symbolic functions of the Church and the Republic, which featured so strongly after the war.33

An inclusive humanism The extent of the post-war humanist upsurge can be seen in the plethora of books published with some variant of l’homme or l’humanisme in their title. A handful of such books in 1945 was followed by three times as many the following year.34 The vogue was noted by the Rennes University professor, Fernand Robert, writing for the learned Association Guillaume Budé35: At the end of the Second World War, the word humanism is a fashionable word. Honouring the human person, and basing morality and politics on the respect due to him, is one of the strongest leanings of public opinion, and consequently one of the main themes in all the programmes of parties and sects. 36 Robert recognised the almost universal adoption of humanism and its characteristic preoccupations, but considered that the term was by now so overused that it had been appropriated by the entire political and religious spectrum. He regretted the evacuation of meaning and remarked acerbically that: with a modicum of rhetorical ingenuity, it is possible to dress up almost any doctrine as a humanism, simply by showing – and one


can show this about all of them – that it concerns Man, and that it is important to Humanity. 37 His suggestion that any ideas could be tricked out in humanist garb reflected the general hyperinflation of humanism, which occurred in the immediate post-war years. Robert himself would have preferred to confine humanism to a classically based approach to education, but his scholarly lament confirms, however acidly, that humanist discourse provided a flexible code into which almost any beliefs could be transcribed. He takes for granted that people across the entire ideological spectrum should choose to use the code, without asking why this was so. It was perhaps a condition and mark of its success that humanism should appear as self-evident. The existentialist philosopher Jean Beaufret was similarly perplexed by the popularity of humanism, and in the same year addressed a celebrated enquiry to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, asking ‘How can a meaning be restored to the word Humanism?’38 Heidegger’s answer, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, was also revealing: This question proceeds from your intention to retain the word ‘humanism’. I wonder whether that is necessary. Or is the damage caused by all such terms still not sufficiently obvious? True, ‘-isms’ have for a long time now been suspect. But the market of public opinion continually demands new ones. We are always ready to supply the demand.39 In response to Beaufret’s assumption that humanism was self-evidently needed, Heidegger argued that, like all ‘-isms’, it was public opinion rather than philosophers who needed it. He gently pointed out that the original concept of humanus in Latin had referred to educated and cultured citizens of the Roman republic as distinct from the uncivilised barbarians. The crux of his response was that all forms of humanism are fundamentally metaphysical, and therefore presuppose some interpretative framework, but do not address the true nature of being. Heidegger’s argument was characteristically intricate, but challenged humanism’s ability to have its presuppositions accepted unexamined, and strikingly confirmed the link between humanism and national culture. He also suggested that any criticism of humanism, including his own, would incur charges of denying humanity, logic, values, the meaning of the world, transcendence and God. In this respect he pointed to some of the principal features which humanism claims to defend.


The post-war humanist hegemony was a product of the ideological conditions prevailing in the summer of 1944, dominated by the need for an inclusive frame of reference to which all parts of the nation could relate. At its heart was the humanist vision articulated by the Resistance, with which social democrats and Christian democrats could feel at home, and to which other forces, particularly communists and nationalists, could broadly subscribe. Once this vision was publicly proclaimed, it carried both conviction and legitimacy in the absence of an articulated alternative. On the other side of the ideological divide, the supporters of collaboration degenerated into an increasingly destructive and self-destructive rhetoric, amply reflected in the deeds of their military and paramilitary wings. Vichy, reduced to a rump, split into die-hards and opportunists. The opportunists, a substantial majority, fled for the most part under the copious skirts of Mother Church. There they joined the attentistes, who had adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and ‘workers of the eleventh hour’, who had joined the fight for national liberation at the last moment. They found that Christian humanism had kept a foot in both camps and offered a very convenient lifeline. Hence, at the end of the war very little ideological adjustment was required, and the blossoming discourse of Man was echoed by humanists of every ilk, eagerly seizing their opportunity. The first few weeks after the liberation of Paris, in late August and through September, were dominated by urgent political and military concerns. But as the sense of emergency receded, the need for a stable post-war settlement took greater priority. Two problems were especially acute during the autumn of 1944: the punishment of traitors and the rebuilding of democratic institutions. All components of the provisional government were publicly committed to both objectives, but both were complex and they did not always sit comfortably together. There were conflicts between justice and reconciliation, and complex political agendas underlying them.40 It was not easy to manage the aftermath of a near civil war, or to construct a viable political system from the wide spectrum of competing forces who claimed the right to a place in the new order. The French political and intellectual elites therefore had an urgent need for a common framework of agreed values, within which the issues could be debated and resolved. Neither the Church, nor the state, nor any other social institution could offer a value system that was sufficiently inclusive for the purpose. Over a period of a few weeks in late 1944, a tentative process of conceptual bricolage produced a viable version of humanism.41 It rapidly emerged as the common framework of discussion, and all the main forces


agreed to work within it. In this sense, humanism played a crucial ideological role in rebuilding unity and a sense of national identity at the end of the war.

Left humanism The humanist ideas that had been developed in the think-tanks of the Resistance had not been widely circulated, though they carried the prestige of clandestinity. They also had a number of influential advocates, most active of whom were the members of the Catholic Left, who now played a leading role in establishing the humanist perspective. The review Témoignage chrétien (Christian Witness), which had been the most prominent Catholic voice in the Resistance press, came out of clandestinity in August 1944 as a weekly paper with a strong commitment to national unity. Its editor André Mandouze declared this policy under the headline ‘we have made a break, we shall be able to unite’, a reference to the fact that as Catholics they had joined the Resistance in the teeth of official Catholic support for Vichy.42 Shortly afterwards, the paper carried a homily by Monsignor Saliège of Toulouse, the only senior prelate with a significant Resistance record. The Archbishop spoke of France’s vocation in humanist terms: To increase man’s responsibilities, to enable him to accept them for himself, and master them, that is the true humanism.43 ‘Man’s responsibilities’ were implicitly contrasted with the responsibilities of the state, and it was suggested that ‘Man’ rather than the state should take responsibility for the development of human capabilities. Put in clear language, the archbishop was signalling that the Church would resist extensive state intervention, especially in the form of education reforms which might take back into state hands too many of the powers which Vichy had bestowed on Catholic schools. By asserting his position as a ‘true’ humanism, he was appealing to a Catholic interpretation of humanism against competing secular humanisms. But he was also accepting that the discourse of humanism provided the code, the discursive framework, within which important issues were discussed, and in particular issues involving continuity with Vichy. Esprit, the first monthly review to reappear, had a foot in both the social democratic and Christian democratic movements. Its director, Emmanuel Mounier, launched a debate on the rewriting of the Declaration of Human Rights.44 This was a humanist gesture by any


token, and one which harked back explicitly to the founding document of the First Republic. It also referred back to the Resistance study groups, with which Mounier had been associated. He was at pains to point out that an early draft of the document had been prepared for the clandestine Comité général d’études, an important advisory group with which he had been associated. The draft had in fact been a key piece of evidence in Mounier’s trial in 1942, after he was arrested and imprisoned for being a member of the Resistance network, Combat. Temps présent, directed by Stanislas Fumet, had much in common with Esprit and Témoignage chrétien, but also had strong links with traditional nationalism. Charles de Gaulle was a paid-up member of the ‘Friends of Temps présent’ before the war.45 Highly defensive about the Church’s wartime activities, it argued for the inclusion of Vichy loyalists in the nation, and for the building of national unanimity, a project which it tried to implement by forming a broad organisation, L’Amitié française, in early 1945. Though less proselytising in its ideology, the review accepted the humanist discourse and put Man at the centre of its recommendations for rebuilding.46 In broad sympathy with this position, Jacques Maritain’s works on human rights and humanist politics, written in New York, were also made available in France.47 Though the Catholics took an early lead in spreading the humanist gospel, they were soon joined by writers and intellectuals of almost every persuasion, especially those of the Left. The autumn and winter of 1944 saw the widespread distribution of writings originally produced in clandestinity, and like Aragon’s Diane française, expressing the same concern for Man and men. Socialist humanism was enthusiastically advocated by Centre-Left groupings such as the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN) which was attempting without much success to create a broad non-party coalition of former Resistance movements.48 The MLN launched a collection of books and pamphlets under the title ‘Défense de l’homme’, echoing the title of the Resistance movement ‘Défense de la France’. The symmetry of the titles clearly showed how far the discourse of Man was predicated on a discourse of French nationalism. Echoing Robert Hauriou, they argued that their socialist humanism was the authentic spirit of the Resistance. Not to be outflanked, the SFIO socialists claimed prior ownership of the notion of socialist humanism.49 The assistant general secretary of the party, Robert Verdier, declared that ‘Le socialisme traditionnel est pour nous assez “humaniste” pour qu’aucune révision doctrinale ne soit nécessaire’ (‘Traditional socialism is in our view sufficiently


“humanist” for it not to need any doctrinal revision’).50 Their claim was emphasised by the publication of A l’échelle humaine (On a Human Scale, 1945), which Léon Blum, the Popular Front prime minister, had written mainly during his wartime imprisonment.51 Blum’s trial at Riom by the Vichy authorities, and his subsequent deportation, gave him a powerful Resistance credibility, and the SFIO was quick to claim the label ‘issu de la Résistance’ (‘born of the Resistance’) which many groups adopted to emphasise not only their patriotism but also their recent emergence, uncontaminated by the stains of the État français or of the Third Republic. Much of the impetus behind socialist humanism was provided by the Esprit group, and in particular by Jean Lacroix, a prolific contributor, who was also the philosophy columnist for Le Monde. As a philosophy teacher in Lyon, he had played a key role in building bridges between intellectuals on the Catholic and non-Catholic Left. Through the spring of 1945, he encouraged a series of articles in Esprit by leftwing spokesmen who included the Communist Party’s Pierre Hervé, the MLN’s Philippe Viannay, the SFIO’s Robert Verdier, and the independent Pierre Stibbe.52 Summarising the issues in a short book the same year, Lacroix argued that socialism, rejuvenated by humanism, could bring together such diverse strands as Christian humanism, humanist Marxism, travaillisme (labourism) and liberal socialism in the style of Camus’s Combat newspaper.53 While the socialist component of this new synthesis was concerned with common action in the social and political fields, he saw the humanist component as an aspiration for broad access to culture, and more specifically to national culture. Now, culture is precisely what we receive from the nation, which can thus be defined as a cultural environment. If socialism wants to be humanist, it has to begin by demanding culture for everyone.54 The relationship between humanism and national unity is here presented in terms of participation in a national culture. Lacroix argued that ‘outside culture, one cannot be a man’.55 He conceded that it was necessary to discover the more universal and transcendent dimension of the national culture in order to aspire to humanism, but thought that national culture was the only means to fulfil humanist aspirations. In many respects, Lacroix’s logic prefigured the strategic shift embodied in the creation of a Ministry of Culture some dozen years later. Established by de Gaulle, with André Malraux as its first minister, it crystallised the increasing recognition by the French state that culture was one of the


principal bearers of national identity, and became a spearhead of France’s presence in the global markets of the late twentieth century. Taken in the abstract, it would be easy to equate Lacroix’s view of humanism with nationalism. Concretely, socialist humanism provided the core of a new dominant ideology for post-war France. Although the term ‘socialist humanism’ itself scarcely survived the year 1945, it provided an ideological space in which the two central political forces of post-war France, social democracy and Christian democracy, could cement their alliance and draw the movements to their Right and Left into a consensus.

Catholic humanism The advantages of humanism were quickly recognised in the broader Catholic community. They could adapt the position of Jacques Maritain, echoed by Mgr Saliège, to argue that a thorough-going humanism (‘humanisme intégral’ in Maritain’s phrase) necessarily involved a transcendental, spiritual dimension in order to be complete. Jean Mouroux’s much reprinted book The Meaning of Man (1945) put this in theological terms: the Christian mystery is streaming with divine love for man, that it is able to explain his destitution and his greatness, to heal his wound, and to save him by making him divine.56 From this standpoint, humanism could be used as a virtual synonym for Christianity. René d’Ouince, editor of the Jesuit review, Études, argued that in the midst of the present crisis of civilisation, Christianity offered a vision of a terrestrial society of free beings united by love, and concluded that: Truly, no doctrine is as ambitious for man as Catholic doctrine, which venerates in man the image of God.57 Clearly this was a form of humanism that would not necessarily require fundamental changes in Catholic thinking, a point illustrated by Paul Alpert’s book Économie humaniste (Humanist Economics, 1945), which was a modest reworking of well-known Catholic social encyclicals.58 Moreover, if Catholicism were accepted as a real humanism, then it immediately became possible to criticise other currents of thought for being insufficiently humanist. This was done particularly in the cases of


Marxism and existentialism, where it was argued principally that an atheist humanism was unsustainable. The main point of reference in this argument was an influential study by the Jesuit theologian and later Cardinal Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944). It demonstrates the intellectual leap made by mainstream Catholics in 1944–45.59 Written during the war and published in the early part of 1944, the book examined a number of atheistic writers, concentrating particularly on the French positivist Auguste Comte, and the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach. Nietzsche was largely treated as the guiding spirit behind Heidegger and existentialism, while Feuerbach was largely treated as a substitute for his ‘disciple’ Karl Marx. Lubac argued that they represented the three philosophical tendencies that were fundamental to all the major currents of modern thought. He argued that while they each contained insights from which a Christian could learn, each was vitiated by an inherent atheism, which deprived it of a transcendental dimension. The thrust of Lubac’s argument against ‘atheistic humanism’ was that humanism was inherently inadequate because it was atheistic. An attack on humanism was entirely compatible with the conservative Catholic ethos of Vichy under which it was written, and it was perhaps even brave to discover some redeeming features in it. However, in the post-Vichy climate in which it was eventually published, his book lent itself to an alternative interpretation. This was proposed by his fellow Jesuit theologian, Jean Daniélou, who summarised the book’s message as: Atheist humanism is self-destructive. There can be no real humanism without a foundation in something beyond man.60 Rather than attacking humanism as such, the book could thus be presented as arguing that while atheistic forms of humanism were inadequate, a Christian humanism could remedy their insufficiency by providing the transcendental dimension. This interpretation was generally adopted by the book’s large readership (it went through four editions by 1950), though Lubac himself was more reserved. While he was happy to elaborate a theological account of Man, he was reluctant to label his own position as humanist, and continued to insist that: There is a question as to whether a Christian humanism exists. More than one Christian disagrees, for reasons which must be taken seriously.61


Lubac’s position was always expressed within a careful context of balanced theological argument, but his nuances did not transfer well into the public arena and the tidal wave of humanism largely overrrode his reservations. His Christian attack on humanism was turned into a powerful defence of the Christian variety of humanism. From a practical point of view, the humanist label provided an ideological umbrella for many Catholics of a more traditional stamp. Those whose wartime situation had been, like that of the Church itself, highly ambiguous, were given a moral language in which to express attitudes which could not be stated politically. Hence, without making a potentially dangerous political defence of Vichy and collaboration, it was possible to offer a defence on moral and human grounds. Even if such a defence did not exonerate past activities, it could at least abate the various forms of sanction they might incur. In this way, humanism opened the door to allow people who had ‘backed the wrong horse’ under the occupation to be reintegrated into the nation. Part of the price was that humanism was often a flag of convenience, cynically invoked. But more positively, the humanist orientation also provided a point of contact between Catholics and the political and intellectual movements of the Left. Over time, it permitted many rapprochements which eventually bore fruit, not least in the rethinking of Catholic theology and social doctrines in the light of Marxism

Marxist and existentialist humanism The other main currents of thought in France were rapidly drawn into orbit around the socialist and Catholic core of humanism. The shift was particularly visible on the Left, among Marxists and existentialists, though it was also noticeable within the liberal and nationalist currents of thought to the right of the MRP, especially in General de Gaulle’s milieu. As they moved from the periphery towards the Catholic and socialist core, movements presented their humanist credentials in a series of ‘me too’ gestures, which signalled their desire for inclusion. This was well exhibited in Sartre’s pamphlet L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946)62 and the riposte from the communist Jean Kanapa, entitled L’Existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme (Existentialism is Not a Humanism, 1947).63 Apart from the sharp polemics, which were characteristic of relations between the different intellectual movements, the exchange is remarkable for selecting humanism as a source of legitimacy, to which both writers laid claim. Their differences were fought


out within a humanist framework, although in both cases, that position was contested by important voices within their own circles. Among the Marxists, there was a powerful impetus to maintain the unity of the former Resistance partners, drawing heavily on the humanist spirit of the Popular Front. It was expressed in the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre, whose text of 1939, Le Matérialisme dialectique became a post-war best-seller and a standard primer of Marxist theory. Lefebvre’s Hegelian approach presented Marxism as a struggle against the processes of alienation, with a final goal of realising l’homme total (Total Man).64 A similar perspective informed Georges Friedmann’s exploration of industrial alienation,65 and Auguste Cornu’s historical work on the early Marx.66 Even in the official discourse of the French Communist Party (PCF), humanism was espoused as part of its project for an intellectual renaissance. Georges Cogniot, then responsible for intellectuals, declared to the party congress of 1945 that France was the ‘humanism’s own country’.67 Not all communists agreed with this approach, and the rationalist-oriented review La Pensée was inclined to dismiss dewy-eyed humanism as a mystification, promoted by the Church for largely reactionary ends.68 Pierre Hervé suspected that the aggressive advocacy of humanism was a manoeuvre to exclude the communists from the national community: They talk about humanist socialism. Fine, so long as it is understood that Marxism is a humanism … But every time they talk of socialism as humanist, French, liberal etc., you get the distinct impression that there is an unspoken polemic. The truth is, they are aimed against communism.69 His response to the evident pressure was to assert that Marxism belonged to the humanist (and therefore national) community, adopting the ‘me too’ position rather than attack humanism itself. Like Cogniot, or for that matter the Catholic Jean Lacroix, Hervé was concerned to defend the unity of the nation, based on a common culture, and whether he liked it or not, this aspiration had to be channelled through humanism. For communists, this was both a political strategy of national unity, and the price of their own acceptance into the nation, an acceptance which was never uncontested, as Blum’s jibe about the PCF being a ‘foreign nationalist party’ was echoed by conservative Catholics.70 Notwithstanding the spirited resistance to humanism by Sartre in his pre-war novel, the existentialists marked out their post-war positions


on the basis of l’homme. The watchwords of L’Être et le néant were assertions about man: man as the being through which nothingness enters the world, man condemned to be free, man as a futile passion. The existentialist monthly review Les Temps modernes, which began appearing in the autumn of 1945, continued the same language in its keynote articles. Sartre’s opening editorial declared that: Far from being relativists, we affirm solemnly that man is an absolute. But he is absolute at his own time, in his own environment, on his own soil.71 He went on to spell out a vision of man as an individual person, committed to the pursuit of freedom: ‘This is how we conceive man: total man. Totally committed and totally free.’ 72 This conception of man was the touchstone for judging the ideas, people and events of the day, and was expressed lyrically by Francis Ponge in ringing phrases: ‘Man is a god who does not know himself’ and ‘Man is the future of man’.73 Simone de Beauvoir echoed these sentiments in exploring the moral and political implications: To reconcile morality and politics is to reconcile man with himself, to assert that at every moment he can totally accept himself. But that demands that he must renounce the security that he hoped to achieve by enclosing himself in the pure subjectivity of traditional morality or in the objectivity of realist politics.74 Beauvoir attempted to steer between Catholic spiritualism and Marxist materialism towards a new vision of man as an ambiguous being eternally torn between ethical idealism and political realism. Without invoking the term itself, humanism was writ large on her text, as on Ponge’s and Sartre’s. It was not a difficult step to acknowledge it directly, as Sartre soon did. In large measure, this was a defensive move, to counter criticisms, notably by Catholic commentators, that his ideas were morally degrading. 75 His declaration of humanism was presented in a celebrated lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris, immediately published as L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. 76 Though Sartre subsequently went to some lengths to disown that text, it undoubtedly reflected the ideological pressure that in 1945 whipped even an independent mind like Sartre’s into the humanist camp. Some of his supporters were undoubtedly disappointed by this volte-face on humanism. Michel Tournier later


recalled the sense of betrayal he felt. 77 And Merleau-Ponty still had hard words for socialist humanism, which he regarded as ‘precisely the disguise which Western imperialisms must adopt if they want to claim an historic mission’. 78 The role of humanism in endorsing a commitment to French culture was clearly capable of being extended to the ‘civilising mission’ which legitimised the French colonial enterprise, and which was energetically pursued by de Gaulle and his successors as an integral part of the post-war reconstruction.

A discreet hegemony In this way, and with surprising unanimity, post-war French humanism served as a bonding agent for the bruised and divided French nation, enabling it to reconstruct national unity within a broad ideological consensus. There was no broader basis available for consensus than humanism, since it ostensibly excluded no major strand of opinion and identity, other than fascism and those who had supported it during the period of occupation, but who were now constrained to silence. Humanism became, in effect, the conceptual form of French universalism. Its hegemony was built on an alliance of social democracy and Christian democracy, the dominant political forces, but was sufficiently general and ecumenical that all of the major movements in post-war France could find some link or ancestor that enabled them to identify with it. There were inevitably problems inherent in the situation, which may be summed up as the repression of difference. It was not only that the collaborationist Right were excluded, it was also that in rallying to humanism many other groups, including existentialists, Marxists and Catholics, were obliged to abandon or diminish significant aspects of their own intellectual and cultural past, which were critical of humanism. Post-war humanism was also quite unblushing in its assumption that the model of Man was a certain idea of the white French male, leaving little space for those who by virtue of their gender, race, class, religion or other difference, could not be assimilated to the dominant model.79 The excluded groups for the most part accepted the humanist hegemony as a necessity of the moment. Some internalised it and became its strongest advocates, while others lapsed into resentful acquiescence, paying minimal lip service to it. The result was an ideological framework that held sway in France for a generation, encountering serious challenge only with the return of the repressed differences and the collapse of the Fourth Republic in the late 1950s.


The surge of explicit humanist fervour was a feature of the first postwar years, and in the later 1940s it proved a loose-fitting framework, capable of accommodating a wide diversity of interpretations. Had it not been so commodious it would scarcely have survived the conflicts between the divergent groups it embraced, conflicts that were further sharpened by the repressed differences, which found expression in indirect and displaced forms. In practice, the capacity of humanism to tolerate dissent was proportional to the security of the French postwar political settlement. In the summer of 1944, the war was still being waged, and was in some respects almost a civil war. France’s future was full of uncertainties. The role of humanism in reconstructing national unity and national identity made it highly assertive, and relatively impatient of dissent or reservations. Three or four years later, when most of the uncertainties had been safely resolved, the hegemony of humanism was more discreetly exercised. It quickly became taken largely for granted and rarely examined directly, acting as the canvas on which the colours and shapes of French intellectual life were painted. As a result it was able to survive even the chilliest moments of the Cold War and to weather the worst of the crisis of decolonisation. So pervasive was the humanist frame that, for most of the late 1940s and the 1950s it functioned mainly as an underlying and usually unspoken set of assumptions, paradoxically strongest when it was least visible.

7 The Battle of Ideas

The loser wins War often inflicts severe damage on the moral and intellectual frameworks that have previously dominated a country. It is the common experience of defeated countries, exemplified by Germany and Japan after the Second World War, and by the former Soviet Union after the Cold War. But it may also affect countries that have been victorious in war, as happened in Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War. France emerged from the Second World War in the ambiguous position of being ‘partly victorious, partly defeated’, with the sense that the country had both lost and won the war, plucking victory from the jaws of defeat. 1 This sense was strongly felt in the field of ideas. Events had conspired to discredit the moral and philosophical frameworks that had previously been dominant, but as a result, opportunities became available for previously subaltern currents of thought, which lost no time in presenting their intellectual wares and filling the moral and philosophical vacuum. The destruction of old intellectual frameworks provided a golden opportunity to build new ones. In some respects, this was an unexpected consequence of the war, and could be considered a ‘collateral benefit’. It is well expressed in the familiar French expression, ‘qui perd gagne’ (‘the loser wins’), which captured some of the ambiguity of post-war France. 2 It is not an inevitable result of war that it provides a favourable climate for new ideas to develop. But it is a possible outcome, and one that offers hope for post-conflict societies. It has been echoed by some countries that were defeated in the Cold War, where the discrediting of communist orthodoxies has been followed by a period of cultural 155


dynamism. The circumstances leading to the flowering of French thought after 1944 were specific to that country, but the success of post-war French thinkers may offer lessons applicable to other countries emerging from intellectual catastrophe. In the intellectual domain, national unity was largely secured by the adoption of a loose and inclusive humanism, with which almost all citizens could identify, and to which almost all intellectuals publicly subscribed.3 But the shared humanism was a framework of values at too general a level to offer moral and philosophical direction, or to articulate the particular aspirations of diverse social groups. It was a canvas on which different philosophies could be depicted, defining the boundaries of acceptable debate and the arena for struggle between contending schools of thought. In the years following the war, France became an intellectual battleground where competing philosophies and ideologies fought with great ferocity to secure the allegiance of a substantial part of the population. The energy that intellectuals devoted to the battle, and the abundance of new ideas they produced, proved fascinating to their French audience, and also attracted the attention of a wider international audience, who increasingly looked to France for intellectual inspiration. In this sense, the particular circumstances of the post-war years enabled the French intellectual elites to play a leading role in restoring their country’s international reputation, and ensuring that the identity of France on the world stage was closely entwined with its intellectual culture. The intellectual struggles can be readily understood in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the struggle for distinction.4 In his account, individuals and groups within a given field, or area of social activity, seek to maintain or increase their power by gaining greater recognition and distinction. But though they may bitterly attack their competitors, they will tend to defend the field itself, because that is where their recognition and distinction come from. Applied to France in the postwar years, it suggests that the humanist frame was so closely identified with national unity, that it defined the field of ideas. Within it, contending movements sought to distinguish themselves from each other as competitors. The competition between them was particularly fierce, however, because a large section of the cultural elite had withdrawn or been excluded from the intellectual ‘market’ as a result of the events of the past few years. An older and more conservative generation, identified with the culture of the declining Third Republic, was widely considered to have been responsible for the ignominious defeat of 1940. Some of them, together with some younger intellectuals, were

The Battle of Ideas 157

also discredited by their support for Vichy or collaboration. As a result the pattern of dominant and dominated groups was dramatically overturned, and the previously dominated groups now struggled with each other for intellectual domination.

The new generation The intellectual market in France was more open to new and energetic entrants than it had been for many years. Paris was itself a magnet, which drew back many intellectuals who had been forced or had chosen to leave during the occupation, and which began to draw people from many other countries, attracted by the vibrancy of cultural life. The city acted as a ‘cluster’ bringing together some of the most dynamic groups of people in the cultural and intellectual sectors. They provided both an audience and sharp competition for each other, and in the process they conferred on France a national competitive advantage.5 In this sense, the role of the Left Bank in intellectual activity was similar to the later role of Silicon Valley in the computer industry. In 1945, a new generation of intellectuals took Paris by storm, and from there exercised an extraordinary influence on the post-war culture of Europe and on the Western world as a whole. 6 In fact, there were two new generations. The elder generation was dominated by men and women born just after the turn of the century, who had for the most part begun to find their feet in the 1930s, often outside the mainstream currents of thought and certainly outside the corridors of cultural power. The younger of the two generations was composed of people born around 1914 or later, who came to maturity during the occupation, mostly through their activities in the Resistance, where they had often exercised significant responsibilities. Though they cannot always be clearly separated, the older generation was distinguished by its memory of the First World War, though for the most part they had been too young to see active service. The older cohort included people like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Mounier and Henri Lefebvre, while the younger group included Jean-Marie Domenach, Edgar Morin and Marguerite Duras. These new cultural elites, unselfconsciously referred to at the time as the new men, were largely able to displace the jaded or discredited establishment, and were eager to assume the roles of intellectual and cultural leadership in which the previous generations had conspicuously failed.


The principal cause of this shift in the cultural field was political. The elites of Vichy and of collaboration came mainly from the most conservative and right-wing movements, who had taken advantage of the opportunity to extend their power through a panoply of political, social and cultural organisations. The overthrow of the Vichy regime put an end to most of the organisations associated with it, plunged its elites into disgrace, and distanced them from the main sources of power and influence in the new regime. Although only a minority of conspicuous collaborators were officially tried and punished for their wartime activities, the ‘blacklists’ and the disapproval of the new cultural elites had a much wider effect. They confined the vast majority of cultural power to those who associated themselves with the Left and Centre political movements that now made up the government. A first consequence of this was to encourage the movement towards explicit political partisanship on the part of cultural figures, building on the experience of their involvement in the Resistance. A secondary consequence, not much observed at the time, was to move the centre of gravity in the cultural sphere away from the traditional literary elites, who had dominated pre-war French culture, and towards groups that had a more philosophical background. In particular, the pinnacle of the literary establishment, the Académie française, lost much of its credit through the collaborationist activities of some prominent members, consonant with its overwhelmingly right-wing complexion. And leading liberal writers of the Third Republic, such as André Gide, Jules Romains or Roger Martin du Gard found themselves ill at ease with the new ethos of political commitment.7 A significant mark of the change was the closure of the literary review, La Nouvelle Revue française, which had been the premier review of the Third Republic. The closest thing to a replacement was Les Temps modernes, directed by Sartre, which combined literary work with a strong component of philosophical analysis and political comment. Ideologically, the new intellectuals fell broadly into three groupings, the existentialists, the Marxists and the Catholic personalists. There is an analogy between these three intellectual movements and the three political movements that composed the tripartite coalition governments from 1944 to 1947: socialists, communists and Christian democrats. But the relations between the political and intellectual movements were complex. Although it is the existentialists who largely achieved dominance, and who are consequently best remembered, all three groups of intellectuals had important constituencies, stretching well beyond the Left Bank. None of the movements was new in an


absolute sense, but all three had been under the shadow of more powerful movements before the war, and now seized the opportunity to occupy the cultural limelight. Each developed a distinguishing ethos, appealing to differing but overlapping audiences. As has often been the case, some of the strongest intellectual competition took place in the schools and universities, aiming to attract young people to explore new ideas and engage in cultural activities for which their studies left them time. There was competition for the allegiance of older people too, especially the many people whose former beliefs and values had been thrown into question by the experience of war and its aftermath. And although the new intellectual movements seemed at times to carry all before them, they did not have a monopoly on ideas and allegiances. Some of the older or less fashionable strands of thought continued to have their supporters, though in most cases they remained isolated voices into the 1950s.

Sartre’s existentialism By far the most successful of the post-war cultural movements was existentialism, which has been very extensively studied.8 Much attention was focused on Jean-Paul Sartre, who featured as the intellectual star of the movement, to the extent that some commentators have identified the twenty or thirty years following the war as ‘the Sartre Years’.9 In the immediate post-war period, Sartre exercised great intellectual influence, along with Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others whose writings and lives were closely associated with him. But the impact of existentialism came from a much wider movement of people and events, articulating the contradictory mood which was so widespread: torn between hope and despair, between illusion and cynicism, between romanticism and rationalism.10 It was often described as a new stoicism, in reference to the classical philosophers who taught mastery of the emotions and submission to the laws of nature. This chimed with the experience of people who had seen the horror and heroism of the war, followed by the euphoria and disillusion of its aftermath. Its main focus was the anguish of individuals obliged to exercise their freedom when confronted with difficult but unavoidable choices, and it strongly argued the need for action. The inspiration for existentialism can be traced back to the ancient Greeks or to early Church Fathers such as St Augustine. In French thought it is frequently traced back to the seventeenth-century thinker


Blaise Pascal, whose Thoughts (Pensées ) explored the heights of exaltation and the depths of despair, experienced by human beings in the face of God and the Universe.11 More immediately, the existentialism that was popular in post-war France, and in the rest of Europe for that matter, sprang from the pre-war writings of the German thinkers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. They started with the longstanding philosophical debate between idealists and materialists as to whether the world really exists, as we perceive it. In response, they proposed to sidestep the question by concentrating on the appearances we perceive, or ‘phenomena’, rather than realities that may or may not underlie them. This led to the name phenomenology, which was adopted by Husserl and his followers.12 Sartre encountered phenomenology as a student in Berlin in the early 1930s, where his friend Raymond Aron introduced him to it. Aron was excited at discovering a philosophy that allowed people to talk about everyday things, and Sartre shared his enthusiasm. Sartre explored the implications of these ideas in a series of works, of which the most widely read was a novel Nausea (1938), in which the main character painfully discovers that the world and his existence in it are contingent rather than necessary. In a strict sense he is therefore superfluous.13 The same themes were developed in a weighty philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant, 1943), where Sartre outlines the distinction between three kinds of being.14 The starting point is the world, or rather the mass of objects that appears to us as undifferentiated sense perceptions: it simply exists as being in itself (êtreen-soi). Human beings perceive the world, and are aware that they do so, but their consciousness is distinct from the world of objects. Human consciousness is always based on self-consciousness, which is being for itself (être-pour-soi). Consciousness cannot itself be perceived by the senses, and is a kind of void within existence, a nothingness (néant) which inhabits the being of the world (être) and gives it form, meaning and purpose. Not being an object for perception also means that consciousness is radically free and cannot be determined or constrained by anything. However, a person’s particular set of physical or social circumstances, their situation, is always constrained, and provides them with a context in which, while the options may be limited, the choice is always free. The sharpest restriction on an individual’s choices is the existence of other people, who are free to see and behave towards him or her as they choose. Recognising that we exist for others (êtrepour-autrui) we are forced into a clash of freedoms. In response, we can either attempt to subjugate the other person (l’autre) to our view, or try


to accept their view and implicitly deny our own freedom. Neither approach can ultimately succeed, since each involves self-deception (mauvaise foi). Sartre sets a high value on the authenticity that comes from lucidly recognising one’s situation, however painful, and a high value on making conscious choices, however perverse. He adopted the notion of commitment (engagement) to describe the ideal path in which people consciously organise their life around a consistent set of moral and political choices, rather than drifting with the tide.

Ethics of freedom The issue of how these ideas could lead to positive moral and political choices runs through Sartre’s prolific journalism, literary criticism, art criticism, public lectures, broadcasts and interviews. There were few written or spoken media in which he did not intervene. His proposals on how his principles should apply to literary work were presented in What is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 1948), which remains a classic statement of the theory of literary commitment.15 In some respects, though, his most provocative work was Portrait of the AntiSemite (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946).16 He drew a portrait of the typical anti-Semite as someone who regards himself or herself as driven by over-mastering passions, attempting in this way to avoid having to recognise his or her real freedom to choose. The Jew is seized upon as an ideal scapegoat for all the frustrations and dissatisfactions that beset ordinary middle-class people. Echoing Voltaire’s epigram about God, Sartre declares that if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Jews for their part have to take lucid account of the situation in which others’ perceptions place them. They cannot avoid their Jewish identity without falling into inauthenticity, though they are free to assert it in whatever way they choose. However, the responsibility for dealing with anti-Semitism falls on all French people, especially on non-Jews, who are in Sartre’s view the cause of the problem. The work has been criticised on many grounds, not least because it perpetuates received stereotypes of Jewishness and casts Jews mainly in the role of passive victims. But it had two important strengths. First, it openly discussed the situation of French Jews at a time when it was not fashionable or easy to do so. The official anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime was a recent and embarrassing memory. There had been a good deal of public complicity in the deportation and killing of 70–100 000 French Jews, and Vichy’s anti-Semitic campaigns had been partially effective in shaping


public attitudes. It was only in the mid-1970s that these issues began to be publicly confronted on a large scale in France. Second, Sartre’s essay provided a readily transferable framework for understanding and analysing prejudice, especially racial and sexual prejudice, which is found in any society. One of the most influential applications was by Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952), which analysed the racial prejudice of lighter-skinned people over darker-skinned, especially in a colonised country.17 Sartre’s ideas provided a powerful conceptual framework, which people could readily apply to their own circumstances, whether to their self-image, to their personal relations, or to their political activities. Many of the issues were dramatised in Sartre’s own works, in plays like The Flies (Les Mouches, 1943), In Camera (Huis clos, 1944), or Crime passionnel (Les mains sales, 1948); in screenplays like The Chips are Down (Les Jeux sont faits, 1947) and In the Mesh (L’Engrenage, 1948); and in his trilogy of novels, The Age of Reason (L’Âge de raison, 1945), The Reprieve (Le sursis, 1945) and Iron in the Soul (La mort dans l’âme, 1949).18 In their different ways, each of these works explores the obligation of action, and the guilt that arises from acting or failing to act in particular. They tease out the steps by which people try, and usually fail, to work out their salvation personally and politically. One of the recurrent problems of Sartre’s position was that it was difficult to translate into specific ethical principles. He announced his intention to produce a volume on ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness, but abandoned the effort without completing the task. Simone de Beauvoir undertook to address the issues, and developed an ethics of ambiguity.19 She argued that morality must begin by accepting that for humans, being and non-being coexist, like life and death, mind and matter, freedom and necessity. They cannot be comfortably reconciled, and neither can be reduced to the other. Human beings are fully responsible for their actions and for creating their own ethical framework, within a situation that limits their ability to do so freely. Therefore, she concludes that the basis of morality lies in working for liberation and fighting against oppression, to increase the scope for people to exercise their freedom and develop their own moral framework. As she puts it, ‘just as life merges with the will to live, liberty always appears as a movement of liberation’.20 Liberation will never be fully achieved, and must contend with inevitable failure, but this fundamental ambiguity only serves to increase the importance of pursuing liberation. The same quest for personal freedom and liberation for a wider human community subsequently informed Beauvoir’s remarkable


book The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949), which became the founding work of post-war feminism.21 From the end of the war to the late 1950s, Sartre and Beauvoir were the ‘first couple’ of French cultural life. They were at the centre of virtually all the major political and cultural debates, giving forthright views on everything from France’s colonial adventures, which they opposed as politically oppressive, to the launching of the Livre de Poche paperback series, which they opposed as culturally debasing.22 Together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a team of like-minded colleagues, they launched a monthly literary and philosophical review, Les Temps modernes, named after the Charles Chaplin film, Modern Times. MerleauPonty provided much of the practical political guidance for the review, though he was above all a philosopher, and later became professor of philosophy at the prestigious Collège de France. His Phenomenology of Perception (1945) gave particular attention to the role of the human body as both a subject and object of perception, and his later writings questioned the conceptual foundations of political and social theory.23 With its powerful editorial group, Les Temps modernes rapidly became the pace-setter for cultural debate in post-war France.

The existentialist milieu Albert Camus shared many of the existentialists’ concerns. Best known for his novel The Outsider (L’ Étranger, 1942) and for the related philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), Camus developed a philosophy of the absurd.24 He began from the observation that the world has no inherent meaning or purpose, despite people’s ardent wish that it did, and he was primarily concerned with how to respond to this basic absurdity, other than by committing suicide. The characters in his novels, stories and plays explore various strategies for resisting or embracing absurdity, which include seeking the greatest intensity of experience, acting with determined capriciousness, rebelling politically or philosophically, and stoically accepting their lot. As editor of the daily newspaper Combat (1944–47) he developed liberal and humane positions on the major issues of the day, earning a reputation as a lucid and compassionate commentator: ‘a just man’. His heroic Resistance record and good looks, which were often compared to Humphrey Bogart, also contributed to make Camus an intellectual star. The close personal friendship between Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir is fictionalised in the latter’s novel The Mandarins (Les Mandarins, 1954), and contributed to their reputations being


linked.25 However, their paths gradually diverged as Sartre’s political commitment took him towards a revolutionary and pro-communist position, while Camus’s ethical humanism took him into more moderate and spiritual directions. Their later quarrel, following the publication of Camus’s book The Rebel (L’Homme révolté, 1951) was one of the most dazzling confrontations of the period.26 Existentialism had a good deal in common with other currents of thought, including the more spiritually oriented interpretations of phenomenology. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, had been one of the first to introduce Husserl and Heidegger in pre-war France, and after the war developed concepts of the self’s relation to time and to other people.27 His reflections on love and freedom were informed by Jewish spirituality, and echoed some of the ethical themes proposed by Simone de Beauvoir. The philosopher Jean Wahl, best known as a commentator on the Danish existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, had also been one of the first to reintroduce Hegel’s philosophy in the late 1920s, focusing on the spiritual implications of his notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’.28 After the war, as professor at the Sorbonne, he founded a College of Philosophy centred on a programme of lectures and discussions designed to encourage dialogue between the different schools of thought at a high theoretical level.29 There was a strong movement to re-examine and apply the philosophy of Hegel, led by Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève. In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 1947), Kojève popularised Hegel’s analysis of the Master–Slave relationship, a metaphor for human consciousness.30 In it, the Master braves death to secure domination over the Slave, who chooses submission as the price of life. Gradually the roles are reversed as the Master becomes dependent on the Slave’s service while the Slave learns independence through hard work and coping with tyranny. This dialectical twist was another variant of the ‘loser wins’ theme, and like Sartre’s être-pour-autrui, it was a model that could easily be applied to the complexities of personal relations and to the sharpening political conflicts, both national and international. Though writers and philosophers were the cultural pinnacle of existentialism, they served most potently as the spokespersons or symbols of a much wider movement. In an easily identifiable sense they were identified with the lifestyle of the Left Bank, and especially the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This was the area where many reviews and publishers had their offices, including Les Temps modernes, Esprit, Éditions Gallimard and Éditions du Seuil. The


leading cultural figures frequented cafés and restaurants in the area, and there are many photographs and accounts of Sartre and Beauvoir writing or entertaining in the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots. Night-clubs, such as Le Tabou and Le Club Saint-Germaindes-Prés, were opened in cramped and dingy cellars, and soon became a privileged venue for the newly fashionable jazz scene, greatly influenced by black American jazz and be-bop artists, like Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins and Kenny Clark, who were regular visitors, as were American writers like James Baldwin, Chester Himes and Richard Wright. The habitués of these places, popularly labelled troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, were students, young bourgeois (les zazous), and bohemians, who excited a mixture of scandal and envy with their often uninhibited behaviour. They might expect to come across germanopratins like the novelist Boris Vian, an enthusiastic jazz trumpeter and chronicler of Saint-Germain, or the singer Juliette Gréco, female icon of existentialism, or young writers of Sartre’s circle such as Jacques-Laurent Bost or Jean Cau. The Left Bank of the late 1940s was not the exclusive property of existentialism. But the subsequent work of myth and tourism has marked this as the moment of existentialism. The movement had many critics and detractors, who at the time denounced it as depraved, subversive or even blasphemous. Ironically, they helped to strengthen the myth, giving existentialism the attraction of the forbidden fruit. In a commercial and diluted form, the ideas, images and sounds spread through the proliferating media, which accompanied the eventual economic recovery. Despite its emphasis on commitment, or perhaps because of it, existentialism’s direct political influence was negligible. No political party subscribed explicitly to it, and Sartre’s one attempt in 1948 to help form a political movement, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), was a short-lived venture. The indirect political influence of the existentialists was substantial, especially in setting the agenda and moulding the style for political debate. Les Temps modernes was a point of reference for the non-communist Left, especially in the socialist party and in the more fragmented Trotskyist and anarchist groupings to the Left of it. Existentialism also had a clandestine presence in the Communist Party. But its real importance was in the wider but less tangible underlying beliefs and values, which responded to and shaped the mood and climate of post-war France. At this level, the bleak euphoria of post-conflict France resonated responsively to the message of existentialism.


Catholic personalism Catholic personalism sprang politically from attempts by French Catholics after the First World War to find forms of reconciliation with the Third Republic, and with the modern world more generally, rather than seeking to turn the clock back.31 The national unity achieved during the Great War had the effect of putting the institutions of parliamentary democracy beyond dispute. Many Catholics, who had previously been opposed to the Republic, began to work more actively within it, for example by training to be teachers in state schools, or cooperating with the state in areas of social work. From the mid-1920s, the Church established a number of Catholic Action groups for young people from different backgrounds, including working, farming and professional backgrounds. These aimed to prepare young people to exercise the duties of public citizenship in a way that would be consistent with their faith. Significant intellectual momentum was provided after 1926, when the Vatican withdrew its support from Charles Maurras’s powerful royalist movement, Action française (French Action), by placing its newspaper on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. Former supporters among the Catholic intelligentsia, such as the influential Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, began to explore new forms of engagement with the political and social problems of the day, especially in the grim economic climate of international recession. They were aided in this by the renewed urgency given by Pope Pius XI to social issues, in an encyclical letter, Quadragesimo anno (1931), which particularly drew attention to the condition of working people, earlier addressed by Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891).32 Several groups of young Catholics established new magazines and reviews to develop new ideas and deal with new issues, outside the traditional orthodox frameworks, but nonetheless under the watchful eye of their seniors.33 Esprit, launched in 1932, was the most successful of these non-conformist reviews. Directed by Emmanuel Mounier, with the patronage of Maritain, it brought together progressive-minded Catholics with Protestants, Jews and agnostics under the banner of a moral revolution, in the manner of Charles Péguy.34 It developed a broad political and intellectual framework, pushing at the boundaries of what could be accepted by the Catholic bishops. It combined openness to a transcendent dimension with an orientation towards action, and participated in the major political and social debates of the 1930s, taking Centre-Left positions on the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War and the threat of fascism among other issues. After the defeat, the


review reappeared in November 1940, and gained a foothold in a more conservative constituency. Mounier and some of his activists participated in Vichy organisations in the early stages of the occupation, especially in the official youth movements. This involvement has been the focus of controversy in recent years.35 Esprit was banned by Vichy in August 1941 after a campaign by the revived Action française group. Mounier spent some time in prison for suspected Resistance activities, went on hunger strike in protest, and was released after an inconclusive trial. Many of the Esprit movement’s members participated in Resistance organisations, as did Mounier. At the end of the war, Mounier and those around him were propelled to the fore as the acceptable face of a Catholicism whose more senior representatives had for the most part been heavily compromised under Vichy. As the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos put it: ‘the brutal collapse of all the traditional values in the sham of Vichy has made these people the provisional administrators of the French Catholic conscience’.36 Encouraged by the Christian democratic party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), they provided intellectual leadership to a large and divided Catholic community.

Mounier and Esprit Mounier re-established Esprit, which was the first monthly review to reappear, in December 1944.37 He and his contributors constructed a loose philosophical framework to guide their work. They accepted the humanist principle that Man should be at the centre of social thought, which they felt would provide a suitable basis for co-operation between Catholics and non-Catholics, provided that a transcendental, spiritual dimension was recognised as part of their humanism. This led them to a concept of the human person as a fully rounded centre of initiative, standing at the crossroads of the material, social and spiritual worlds, free to act within constraints. For Mounier, the human person was the touchstone of ethics and politics. The person was not to be considered as an object but as a point of intersection between the natural, social and spiritual realms. The natural realm is dominated by biology, in which the person is incarnated and embodied, but which the human person is called on to transcend. The social realm is composed of the various groups to which a person belongs, and which they are called on to be consciously engaged in, humanising or personalising the communities in which they are involved. The third realm is that of private thoughts and feelings, from which inner strength, conviction


and spirituality flow, and which for Catholics led to the divine. Mounier argued that the three domains are mutually supportive and need to be held in balance in order to realise the full potential of the human person. As the leading Catholic intellectual of the post-war period, he was a prolific writer and broadcaster, and published many books on the issues of the day. His very substantial book The Character of Man (Traité du caractère, 1946) set out a detailed application of personalist principles to the psychological and sociological aspects of an individual’s life.38 He wrote a widely read popularisation of his ideas, which was published shortly before his death in 1950, in the recently founded ‘Que sais-je?’ paperback series.39 The personalism he championed provided an eclectic framework, which drew on the Catholic tradition from St Augustine to Pope Leo XIII, and was inspired by French writers such as the nineteenth-century socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, and the poet and Dreyfusard campaigner Charles Péguy. Personalism was a loose association of thinkers, and its wider circles included many of the most important figures in Catholic thought. For example, Jacques Maritain applied St Thomas Aquinas to political philosophy, extending the Catholic conception of democracy and developing concepts of human rights and the common good.40 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit palaeontologist, applied scientific theories to elucidating the roles of Man and God in the evolving universe. Some of his most influential works were completed at this period, though the majority were not published until after his death in 1955.41 Personalism also had close links with Catholic theologians like Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu and Jean Daniélou, who were influential in shaping Catholicism in the second half of the century, especially through the Second Vatican Council. In intellectual terms, personalism was also important in providing a bridge to other movements, especially existentialism and Marxism, which were considered pernicious by more conservative Catholic commentators. Mounier and the personalists accepted the risks of dialogue, and though they often incurred criticism, they were able to take the most powerful insights from other movements, often incorporating them into their own thinking. Esprit established a network of correspondents and local groups in the major cities of France and in France’s extensive possessions overseas. But much of personalism’s impact was ensured by the network of Catholic social and cultural organisations which amplified its ideas within France and internationally. The discourse of personalism was


adopted in Catholic seminaries, where future priests and missionaries responded to its social concerns. It flourished in Catholic schools and university institutes, where new generations of students saw it as a viable left-wing alternative to communism, with a real purchase on political action. It found a ready welcome in the Catholic trades union movement, the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens. And it became common currency in the many Catholic newspapers, magazines, ciné clubs, youth clubs, adult education classes and the like, which brought its language to a wide lay audience.

The personalist milieu Personalism fiercely denounced any attempts to regiment culture to suit ideological purposes, but it had a very tangible presence in postwar culture. It was adopted by the group of young men who had been associated with the École des cadres (leadership training school) at Uriage in the early years of Vichy.42 Uriage itself established a model for the École nationale d’administration (ENA), the national school established in 1945 to train the country’s new administrative elites. And several members of the Uriage group were particularly influential in post-war France. Hubert Beuve-Méry founded and edited France’s premier daily newspaper Le Monde from the autumn of 1944 until 1969.43 Jean Lacroix was the philosophy columnist of Le Monde from its foundation until 1980. He taught philosophy in Lyon and was himself an influential exponent of personalism. Paul Flamand directed the publishing house Éditions du Seuil, which he had founded in 1935, and led it to become one of the most powerful publishers in post-war France. Personalist ideas permeated the work of poets like Loys Masson, Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Tardieu and Bertrand d’Astorg, most of whom looked for a revolution that would be spiritual as well as political. The ideas were taken up by the literary critic Claude-Edmonde Magny, whose Essays on the Limits of Literature (1945) wove a spiritual awareness into acute analyses of contemporary writing. Her studies of The Age of the American Novel (1948) offered both an innovative approach to techniques of narration and a more sympathetic view of America than generally prevailed on the Left Bank.44 Jean Cayrol is now best known for his spoken narrative in Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), showing the horror of the concentration camps, of which Cayrol had been an inmate.45 But his trilogy of novels I Shall Live the Love of Others (Je vivrai l’amour des autres, 1947–50) conveyed the same spiritualist humanism in depicting the struggles of the


human spirit in the face of social deprivation and oppression.46 In a similar though more sentimental vein, Gilbert Cesbron popularised the mission of worker-priests to the working-class suburbs in his novel Saints in Hell (Les saints vont en enfer, 1952), and the activities of foreign missionaries in the play It is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer (Il est minuit, Dr Schweitzer, 1951).47 Like existentialism, personalism had its critics and detractors, most of whom were concerned at the potential contamination of Catholic values, especially by the subversive and atheistic ideas from existentialism and Marxism. In some respects, the personalists welcomed these criticisms as confirmation that their mission of building bridges between Catholics and the modern world was having its effect. In many respects, the personalists, like the existentialists, were politically closest to the socialist party. The relationship was particularly strong through André Philip, a leading member of the party, who held several ministerial appointments during the post-war period. A Protestant and a Resistance comrade of Mounier, Philip was one of the few leading socialists of the period to bring an overtly religious perspective to their political activity. The personalists had their strongest body of support in the Christian Democrat party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP).48 The founding leadership of the MRP were Centre-Left Catholics, such as PierreHenri Teitgen and François de Menthon, both of whom had close relations with Mounier and Esprit, and with the review’s leading political commentator, the political scientist François Goguel. The personalists stood noticeably further to the Left than the party on most issues, and increasingly so as the MRP moved closer to the conservative values of its largely Catholic electorate. But the Esprit group continued for a long time to be seen as the conscience of Christian democracy. The review also had close links with new and more radical Catholic groups, such as the ‘progressistes’ who sought a direct alliance with the communists, and the Témoignage chrétien (Christian Witness) group who translated their Resistance experience into a radical social and political programme. Esprit was also part of the abortive attempt to set up the New Left political movement, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR). Undoubtedly, the most contentious aspect of Esprit’s work was its relationship with Marxism and communism. Mounier argued that Catholics should not lose contact with the working class, and therefore needed to maintain a dialogue with communists, who were the workers’ most active advocates. He also felt that the growing influence of Marxism placed a duty on him to confront it, taking seriously any


valuable insights it contained while pointing out its errors and its conflict with Christian doctrine. As the Cold War set in during 1947, Mounier came under increasing pressure to issue denunciations of communism, especially after the Vatican decree of 14 July 1949, which prohibited Catholics from belonging to communist parties and from most forms of co-operation with them. In this and in his other political relationships, Mounier was careful not to stray too far from the centre ground, and in particular not to go beyond what the bishops and the Vatican would permit. In this sense, he was the respectable face of the Catholic avant-garde.

The Marxist tradition In some ways, Marxism was an older intellectual tradition than either personalism or existentialism, since it traced its origins directly to the work of the nineteenth-century theorist and activist Karl Marx. But the Marxism that became so influential in France after the Second World War was in most respects a product of the 1930s, in much the same way as its two competitors were.49 Marxism was not strongly implanted in the French socialist movement, which looked rather to the ideas of the nineteenth-century thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had been one of Karl Marx’s chief adversaries.50 The Proudhonists placed strong emphasis on the social role of trades unions, and were hostile to private property and to the power of the state. They tended to be suspicious of political organisations and of theoretical systems. And though they were notoriously split into factions, they regarded themselves as the indigenous, non-ideological form of French socialism. Marxism, by contrast, had an intermittent existence in France. At different times it was represented by small handfuls of socialist activists, usually with little contact or continuity between them. They took responsibility for recycling the more schematic short works by Marx, Engels and later Lenin. And when they spoke in their own name, they were capable of producing striking insights, somewhat at odds with the ideas of Marx. For example, Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue produced a brilliant pamphlet on The Right to be Lazy (Droit à la paresse, 1880), which tended to undermine the Marxist focus on the primacy of work.51 His contemporary, Jules Guesde, produced works claiming to be Marxist, which prompted Marx’s famous remark, ‘In that case, I am not a Marxist’.52 From time to time an individual intellectual, like Lucien Herr or Georges Sorel, attempted to develop Marx’s ideas further, but these were little followed and soon forgotten. French socialism, and communism after it, tended


to follow Jean Jaurès’s dictum that theory divides while practice unites, and theory was generally frowned on. In the 1930s a new generation of young Marxist philosophers developed a series of lively and innovative debates at a more sophisticated level, which set some of the intellectual agenda for the Popular Front movement.53 This small group had barely experienced the effects of Stalin’s codification of dialectical materialism as official dogma before the outbreak of war. Some of the most active of them, like Paul Nizan and Georges Politzer, were killed during the war, and apart from Henri Lefebvre and Auguste Cornu, it was another new generation again who took up their pens in 1944 to create French Marxism, canon and tradition, almost from scratch. As a result, French Marxism barely existed in August 1944. Its reality was virtual rather than actual, since it was talked about far more than it was read. The vast majority of Marxist publications in bookshops and libraries were banned, seized and burnt during the occupation. Some texts had circulated clandestinely, confined mainly to three or four short classics, such as The Communist Manifesto, Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Lenin’s The State and Revolution. But the risks associated with underground publishing meant that theoretical ‘background’ reading had low priority. The only openly accessible sources of information about Marxism were hostile criticisms published in forms acceptable to the German or Vichy authorities, and even these were rare. Serious discussions of Marxism at a theoretical level were therefore slow to emerge after 1944–45, in part at least because paper and newsprint were in extremely short supply.54 In the immediate post-war period, there were relatively few books of substance on Marxism, and most discussion took place in the press. The daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), L’Humanité, carried regular literary and intellectual features, but the real centre of intellectual gravity in these years was the periodical press. In quantity at least, the weekly and monthly reviews that accommodated writing about Marxism were plentiful. The PCF house journals were soon re-established. The political review Les Cahiers du communisme usually carried a theoretical article in each monthly issue, while the quarterly review La Pensée specialised in expert discussions on philosophy, the arts and the sciences. Though ostensibly independent, the weekly magazines Action and Les Lettres françaises became fellow-travelling magazines, closely aligned to PCF policy, as did the monthly literary review Europe when it reappeared in early 1946. Nevertheless, the peak time of interest in Marxist ideas coincided with a serious dearth of work available to satisfy it.


Marxist philosophies The most experienced and prolific French Marxism thinker of this period was Henri Lefebvre.55 His short book, Dialectical Materialism (Matérialisme dialectique, 1939), had been banned throughout the war, but became a post-war best-seller, as did his later popularisation in the ‘Que sais-je?’ paperback series, Marxism (Le marxisme, 1948).56 Lefebvre worked to promulgate a conception of Marxism that differed significantly from the official doctrine of the communist movement, codified by Stalin. He emphasised the inheritance of Hegel and the importance of the philosophical works that Marx had written in the mid-1840s, which official doctrine tended to dismiss as pre-Marxist. Lefebvre focused on the theory of alienation and the dialectical method of thought. Alienation, he argued, is the tendency in society for the products of human activity to be turned against those who produce them. A key example is the experience of workers, whose work produces all wealth, but who see that their effort and energy are spent to enrich their employers. Dialectics, he argued, is a method of understanding problems by analysing the contradictory elements within the processes concerned. Continuing the example of workers, a dialectical view understands that while labour and capital are both necessary for economic production, they are both locked in struggle with each other for control of the process and of its products. Hence, he suggested that dialectics offered a guide to action for overcoming alienation, and thus achieving human completeness: Total Man (l’Homme total). Lefebvre also traced the ravages of alienation outside the workplace and at the individual level, in what he termed ‘everyday life’, a concept that later became influential as a measure of human liberation.57 Young communist intellectuals, like the sociologist Edgar Morin, enthusiastically took up Lefebvre’s humanist Marxism.58 Privately, they saw it as an intelligent philosophy that was more satisfying than the dogmatic principles of Stalin’s Short Course, the standard manual of Soviet theory and practice, first published in 1938.59 Lefebvre was given great prominence by the Communist Party, who published one of his difficult theoretical works on formal and dialectical logic in the party press, Éditions sociales.60 His ideas also appealed to leading noncommunists, including Mounier and Sartre, who saw Lefebvre as the kind of thinker with whom they could have productive discussions. Lefebvre’s moment of prominence ended as the Cold War began to have an impact on intellectual life, especially from the spring of 1947, when communist ministers were dismissed from government. The


party began to insist on its members confining themselves to a narrowly dogmatic Stalinism. Lefebvre found this deeply distressing, and though he attempted to demonstrate his political loyalty, he found himself increasingly marginal among communists. The leading exponent of Stalinist Marxism in France was the young philosopher Roger Garaudy.61 In the early period of national consensus, he was at pains to portray Marx as a great French republican thinker and an heir of Descartes. He traced the sources of Marxist-Leninist doctrine to the French thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, and to the leaders of the French Revolution, such as Robespierre and Marat.62 However, as international relations began to chill, Stalin’s commissar for ideological matters, Andrei Zhdanov issued instructions requiring communist intellectuals to profess obedience to orthodoxy as expressed in the Short Course. Garaudy was one of the many to write a self-criticism (‘autocritique’) and toe the Moscow line. In return he became PCF spokesman on all philosophical matters for almost two decades, eventually having the ironic duty of composing the official repudiation of Stalin’s ideas.

The Marxist milieu Marxism was not just a body of ideas. Under the PCF’s sponsorship, it became a programme of social and cultural transformation, even though the party recognised that the Yalta agreement placed France firmly in the American sphere of influence, and that while they might have seats in government they would only be accepted as a minor partner. Among Marxists’ more ambitious enterprises were an encyclopaedia combining all human knowledge in a single synthesis for this new French Renaissance; and a plan for a new education system, devised by two leading scientists, psychologist Henri Wallon and physicist Paul Langevin.63 Neither enterprise came to fruition, but they did help to feed a stream of practical ideas into communist-led local authorities and trades unions. They were also relayed to a wider audience through the network of cultural activities in which Marxists were active. These included newspapers, especially the dailies, l’Humanité and Ce soir; monthly journals such as La Pensée, Europe and La Nouvelle critique; and voluntary associations such as the extremely active women’s organisation, Union des femmes françaises, the student movement, the peace movement, war veterans’ organisations, international solidarity and friendship societies, and professional groupings such as the Comité national des écrivains.64


In art and letters, the PCF’s prestige drew several major figures into its orbit.65 They included the painter Fernand Léger, whose firm geometrical compositions often evoked strong working-class figures at work or at leisure. The indefatigable Pablo Picasso produced drawings of doves for the pro-communist peace movement to use in posters and publications. The poet Paul E´luard rejoined the PCF during the occupation, and modulated his surrealistic verse to support the party’s social and political aspirations. Roger Vailland, whose prize-winning novel Playing with Fire (Drôle de jeu, 1945) explored ironies in the work of the Resistance, was a staunch fellow-traveller, who eventually joined the party in 1952.66 A French variety of socialist realism was vigorously promoted by the powerful figure of Louis Aragon, whose novels, culminating in Aurélien (1944), were cited as exemplars, despite their preoccupation with the upper echelons of society.67 He was strongly supported by his wife Elsa Triolet, whose novels and short stories took a strong stance on the political issues of the day. More typical examples are the images and narratives, often evocative and moving, of workers and their families suffering but determined to carry on their struggles, which appear in the paintings of André Fougeron and Boris Taslitzky, and in the novels of André Stil and Pierre Courtade. The worlds of film and theatre also provided prominent members and fellow-travellers at this period, among whom were the director Louis Daquin, the critic Georges Sadoul, and actors such as Gérard Philippe, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. Though the basis of Marxist thought in publications was relatively flimsy, its reputation was enormous, and its influence was perceived as ubiquitous. In the two years before and after 1944, large numbers of young intellectuals, communists, socialists, Catholics, existentialists and others declared their allegiance to Marxism or their fascination with it.68 For the most part, what attracted them was a Marxism of the imagination, composed of generous political and social ideals and a thirst for action. They had little acquaintance with a Marxism of the intellect, and what that entailed in terms of acquiring a theoretical framework, despite the undoubted appeal of Henri Lefebvre. It could hardly have been otherwise since their Marxism was learned in day-today militancy, and access to written works of theory or strategy was limited. This led to what might be called the myth of Marxism in France. In Roland Barthes’s terms, Marxism existed largely as connotation, and hardly at all as denotation. The image of almost an entire generation rushing to embrace Marxism is difficult to reconcile with the historical and material reality. In practice, Marxism was more often


a coded label for a general left-wing political commitment, and usually also a sympathy for the Communist Party. Communism acquired its extraordinary influence from three main factors. First, the Soviet Union had played a major role of defeating Hitler, and its prestige at the end of the war was high. Second, the energetic participation of communists in the Resistance had gained it prestige and political power. The PCF was proud to call itself ‘le parti des fusillés’ (‘the party of those who were shot’), a reference to the tens of thousands of communists who were killed, many executed by firing squad. A third factor was the widespread desire for a revolutionary transformation of society to eliminate war and exploitation. This was summed up in the phrase ‘les lendemains qui chantent’, a bright new tomorrow, to which many people aspired. A quarter of the electorate voted for communist candidates in successive post-war elections, and as the philosophy of a major political party, Marxism exercised a strong attraction for intellectuals who wanted to have an impact on historical events.

The intellectual struggle Between the three movements, the popular appeal and intellectual dominance of existentialism was evident, but it was contested from the beginning. Intellectual domination is always a provisional state of affairs, and dominant ideas are constantly compelled to address challenges from those who are dominated. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a dominated social field carries the implication that domination is maintained by its repeated demonstration, and conversely, that dominated participants inevitably struggle to oppose and resist domination.69 Similarly, contemporary theories of competitive strategy tend to highlight the advantages of attacking the ‘industry leader’.70 It is not surprising therefore that existentialism was attacked by the currents of thought it dominated, principally by its two main competitors, personalism and Marxism, but also by movements that had been displaced, or had remained marginal. Perhaps the most virulent attacks came from the remnants of the Catholic right-wing movements that had been close to the Vichy regime. The loyal follower of Charles Maurras and Action française, Pierre Boutang, was quick to suggest that Sartre was possessed, and that he was consequently an agent of the devil.71 Accusations of blasphemy were frequent, based on Sartre’s publicly declared atheism, as were denunciations of the morally corrupting nature of existentialism,


which was commonly associated with sexual license and with undermining moral and spiritual values. The popularity of the movement among young people was all the more reason to raise the polemical tone. A flavour of the attacks from conservative Catholic quarters may be gleaned from a review of Being and Nothingness in Études, the intellectual organ of the Jesuits. Jeanne Mercier saw Sartre’s concept of man as destructive and perverted: Ambiguity of the demonic and the divine. This mockery of a subhuman man. There is for the Christian something satanic in this blasphemy. There is for man something ignoble in this betrayal of the spirit.72 Mercier’s comment conveys an impression of the vehemence with which Sartre was attacked, and which he later remembered, not unreasonably, as hatred.73 A more temperate assault came from the philosophy teacher Paul Foulquié, whose widely read and much reprinted short study, L’Existentialisme (1946), argued for a more balanced relationship between existence and essence than Sartre allowed.74 He acknowledged that Sartre’s philosophy raised some serious questions, though he rejected his answers as variously absurd, nihilistic and arbitrarily atheistic. He also pointed out that it was difficult to disentangle the ideas from the immoral, perverted and pornographic literature in which they were usually conveyed.75 In still more measured terms, Gabriel Marcel suggested that, having denied the possibility of God, Sartre’s vision was inevitably of an atrophied and contradictory world, in which it is impossible to find the best aspects of humanity.76 The Marxists were no less hostile or vehement in their criticisms, though they alternated between stinging attacks and gestures of reconciliation.77 The philosopher Henri Mougin, for example, identified existentialism as the logical outcome of the long tradition of philosophical idealism in France.78 He argued that Sartre’s rejection of the materialist dialectic led to him subtly reintroducing a metaphysical justification for fideism, since his notion of transcendence was a veiled quest for God.79 Henri Lefebvre, for his part, saw Sartrean existentialism as a pale imitation of the philosophical enquiries that he and his ‘Philosophies’ group had undertaken in the mid-1920s, and from which they had moved on to Marxism.80 His detailed critique of Sartre’s philosophical antecedents combined theoretical analysis with personal criticisms. He hinted, for example, that Sartre’s friend Paul Nizan had been an undercover police spy within the pre-war Communist Party, and drew


particular attention to the active participation of Heidegger in Nazism. He accepted that existentialism might be able to describe the alienated condition of the individual under capitalism, but argued that it erected this condition into a human universal. Since existentialism was fundamentally irrational, he argued that it denied the resources of reason, especially the kind of dialectical reason that Marxism embodied, in succession to Hegel. Without such reason, he thought, there could be no escape from alienation and no reason to prefer one course of action over another. Among the personalists, opinion on Sartre and the existentialist around him was more nuanced than among the more conservative Catholics. They recognised the political affinities, which briefly brought them together in the RDR, and they recognised a common preoccupation with the contemporary human dilemmas. However, they also saw the dangers of a version of atheism, which recognised transcendence of a kind, and which could potentially prove attractive to young Catholics. Esprit offered carefully balanced analyses of existentialist publications, including chapters from Mounier’s widely read book, Existentialist Philosophies (Introduction aux existentialismes, 1947).81 He initially considered himself further from existentialism than from Marxism, but on reflection, he reformulated his understanding of existentialism as a much wider movement of ideas and sensibility. The mainstream of the movement was in fact a Christian tradition, with a significant number of French representatives, including Pascal, Maine de Biran, Laberthonnière, Blondel, Bergson, Péguy, Gabriel Marcel and personalism too. Taking account of Kierkegaard, Berdyaev and Jaspers and other figures, it seemed to him that the atheist wing of existentialism (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre) was a rather limited backwater of existentialism in its extended sense. Thus conceived, what existentialists had in common, he argued, was a dramatic conception of human existence characterised by a number of key themes: the contingent nature of human life; the limits of reason; transcendence; fragility; alienation; the nearness of death; solitude; and the void. Of all these themes, only the fear of emptiness and the void was unique to the atheistic branch, and reflected the despair of man without God. All of the existentialist family could, he thought, share the recognition of a need for personal conversion and active commitment, the difficulties of relationships with other people, the need to take risks and to confront the truth lucidly. In the course of this analysis, Mounier’s balancing act with Sartre struck a conciliatory note, at least to the extent of suggesting implictly that he could


make common cause with existentialists against Marxists in the name of transcendence, while aligning himself with Marxism against the more other-wordly tendencies in existentialism. The intellectual struggles of the immediate post-war years were manysided. The criticisms of existentialism by Catholics, personalists and Marxists were more than matched by the arguments that existentialists directed against their critics. These debates were amplified by the reciprocal criticisms between Marxists, personalists and traditional Catholics. The tone ranged from fraternal dialogue to vehement polemics. But across all the debates and discussions, there were two underlying constants. The first was that participants sought to gain the maximum recognition for their stance and, in Bourdieu’s terms, to increase the distinction accruing to themselves and their group. The second was that all participants recognised the ultimate importance of winning the hearts and minds of the French people, and thereby affirmed their allegiance to the national community. The first constant was often explicit, as groups tried to understand the attraction of one or other intellectual movement for young people in post-war France. The second constant was rarely explicit, and then usually negatively, when a group accused another of falling short of its national obligations: an accusation always hotly denied. The robustness of this national community in struggle was demonstrated by the advent of the Cold War, when the polemical levels rose steeply. In this, the battle of ideas between the three major movements resembled the conflicts between the three main parties of government. The ensuing arguments, however vehement, did not challenge the underlying framework of humanist values until the end of the 1950s, and never questioned the legitimacy of the nation as the essential context of debate, however divided it might be intellectually. The three intellectual movements constantly attempted to outdo each other, and the intensity of their competition raised the level of their performance. Ultimately, it reinforced the attraction of the contest in which they were engaged and consolidated the reputation of their country as a leading player in the international battle of ideas.

Conclusion

A new beginning The aftermath of war provided the French political and intellectual elites with a new beginning. The country’s cultural and intellectual heritage was badly damaged by the conflict. In that respect it resembled the material infrastructure of buildings, bridges, roads and railways, which suffered destruction on a massive scale, and the political institutions, which had collapsed for the first time in the spring of 1940 and for a second time in the spring of 1944. Emerging from a succession of foreign military interventions, the elites took ownership of regime change and launched an urgent programme of nation building, in which the cultural and intellectual rebuilding of French national identity played a key role. The way in which they rebuilt their nation was particular to the circumstances of France in 1944–47, but the success with which they achieved it might hold lessons for other countries in the present day, where embattled national elites confront the strategic task of building or rebuilding a nation after conflict and regime change. The French post-war elites demonstrated a remarkable unanimity on one central point: the need to rebuild their nation. This unanimity was captured in the euphoria of the moment of liberation, especially the heavily symbolic liberation of the French capital, Paris. It gave many French people the feeling of a brilliant moment that could never be taken from them, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote.1 Later accounts have then focused on the difficulties that began almost immediately, and the rapid onset of disillusionment and disagreement.2 There was no shortage of divisions among the French elites, as among the French people more generally. But there was fundamental agreement that France should be a 180

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single, united, sovereign and independent nation, and that French people should determine its destiny. All other disagreements, however vehement, were secondary to this. The consensus was made more achievable by the radical pruning the elites had undergone, with a significant part of the political spectrum excluded by virtue of their poor wartime record, and much of the rest of the older generation compromised by their poor pre-war record. The remaining elites were more homogeneous than at any time in France’s recent history, and had in addition the common bond of affiliation with the movements that had fought for national liberation. No doubt the historical circumstances of the period were particular to France. But a first lesson may then be that a vital component of successful nation building is the unanimity of national elites on the existence of the nation, and on their own responsibility for it, to the exclusion of external forces. Once the fundamental agreement was secure, and the fear of external intervention was removed, the French elites did not need to fear high levels of discord on other issues. On the contrary, internal conflicts may have served to strengthen national identity as different groups contended for a greater degree of influence over the nation’s future. Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence helps to clarify this process, showing that the strength of a whole social field can be increased by the struggles that are waged within it, since the field itself is the source of the recognition and distinction that are at stake in the struggles. He further shows that when the field is seen as being under threat, the dominated groups within it are likely to co-operate in reinforcing the position of the dominant group as a means of strengthening the field as a whole. This point is demonstrated in the subordination of class and gender identities to the overriding national imperative. A second lesson might then be that disagreement on many issues can be accommodated, and can even have a positive effect on nation building, provided that the overall common purpose is secure. The French elites did not begin reinvention with a blank sheet. On the contrary, they had a rich and diverse cultural heritage to draw on. Much of it was damaged or compromised, but they carried out a work of bricolage that constructed workable meanings from rough and ready assemblages of existing materials.3 In the process they were able to juxtapose elements that had previously been incompatible, such as the symbols of state and religion, in order to serve an immediate purpose. They were also able to nurture cultural traditions that had previously been marginal. The new intellectual movements of the post-war period, for example, all had some roots in pre-war culture,


but were enabled to rise rapidly to a position of cultural dominance. This suggest the lesson that building a nation necessarily takes place on a ‘brown-field site’, rather than a ‘green-field site’. There are always previously existing materials and they are likely to provide valuable building materials, at least in the short term and perhaps in the longer term too. One of the most urgent tasks for the immediate aftermath of the conflict was to find a common language with which to articulate the experience of the present and the immediate past. Very rapidly, all parts of French society came to agree with the Resistance and the Free French movements, that what was happening was a liberation. Those who saw it differently, for the most part sympathisers with German collaboration or with Vichy, were constrained to silence or at least to a discreet cynicism. Before long the Liberation became the canonical French name for the entire period and implicitly described all the events leading up to and following the end of the war. The Liberation was a self-conscious starting point for a new era, and became a myth and milestone in the narration of French history. Within this agreed framework, a rich lexicon developed to express the nuances of interpretation and aspiration held by different groups. Revolution, rebirth, rebuilding and modernisation all had their advocates, and each encoded a different concept of the past and future. This suggests a variation of the first lesson: that if there is agreement on the most important objective (the nation and its liberation), disagreements on secondary issues can be contained and may well be productive.

Opportunities and costs Among the most important building materials for the reinvented nation were its symbols. Charles de Gaulle was a consummate manipulator of symbolic speech and action, and constructed himself as the symbolic incarnation of France. He was conscious that in many respects he had little more than symbolic resources to draw on, but recognised that a certain gesture, a turn of phrase or a tone of voice could exercise more power than administrative and military means, which were so painfully lacking. The symbols of the French state were themselves seriously damaged, so that de Gaulle and the political and cultural elites around him were obliged to draw on other symbolic systems, especially those of Catholicism. Christian symbols were similarly damaged but were sufficiently operational to provide at least temporary support, and were drawn on unhesitatingly by

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nation builders across the political spectrum, as the communist poet Louis Aragon confirmed. It may be a useful lesson that, when the dangers are immediate, symbolic alliances may be required that in other circumstances would be unthinkable. The imperative of nation building had the immediate effect of subordinating class interests to the common task. The working class and the intellectuals, for example, had strong traditions of independence. The workers were often bitterly opposed to the national ruling elites, while writers and artists typically set a high value on a prior commitment to their vocation. In the period after 1944, they both accepted the overriding priority of the nation, and swallowed their deep-seated reservations. They became part of an implicit ‘sacred union’, which placed the national interest above sectional interests, at least for the period of immediate need. They accepted a process of symbolic violence, in which their national commitment increased their own subordination within the nation. At this stage, the ruling political and economic elites within France were not clearly identified as a dominant group. In 1947 and later, when political and economic conflicts resurfaced, and the dominant interest groups were exposed more clearly, the national imperative proved robust enough to contain the internal social divisions. It might therefore be concluded that a likely condition and cost of nation building is the long-term subordination of dominated classes and professional groups. In a similar way, gender roles were also subjected to the symbolic violence of nation building. The end of the war reinforced male domination as an integral part of French national identity, despite the extension of voting rights to French women. All historical states have been based on the subordination of women, and it appeared that the urgent rebuilding of the French state required a proportionately urgent reaffirmation of male supremacy. The nation was symbolically represented by the figure of Marianne in her various embodiments, but the work of building the nation was reserved for men. This was demonstrated by the ritual punishment of women suspected of collaboration. In all parts of France, these women had their hair shaven or cropped by men, usually under official auspices, and thereby had their guilt firmly identified with their sexuality, regardless of the nature of their offence. This coincided with a movement to confine women to the private, domestic sector, under the cover of a humanist ideology that reasserted masculinity as the standard and model of humankind. In accordance with the ‘rules of the game’ of symbolic violence, women largely accepted their subordination in the national interest. Its oppressive


weight subsequently sparked a feminist reaction in Simone de Beauvoir, whose book, The Second Sex (1949) sprang from the experience. It is a dismal lesson that the process of nation building has the potential cost of reinforcing male domination, and that national liberation may be bought at the expense of women’s freedoms. The rebuilding of the nation was facilitated by a general agreement on shared values. No religious or secular ideology offered an acceptable basis for this. As a result, a process of intellectual bricolage brought the moral framework of humanism together to create an agreed space for argument and debate. Assembled from disparate elements of pre-war thinking and the universalistic aspirations of the Resistance movement, it was promoted by Christian democrats and social democrats, and secured the assent of most other currents of thought. It proved an inclusive framework and rapidly became a ‘doxa’, in Bourdieu’s sense, expressing the common wisdom of the nation and defining the boundaries of what could be thought and said. Once established, this eclectic value system exercised a discreet hegemony in France for many years, rarely examined directly, but providing the underlying assumptions of the Republic. The debates around the nature of humanism in 1945–46 may reflect the fact that nation building requires an agreed value system. If there is no widely accepted system, such as a shared religion, then a more general system may need to be constructed, as it was in France, from the ideological materials to hand. Within the loose framework of humanism, there was broad scope for a battle of ideas. Three dynamic and innovative intellectual movements emerged in France in the post-war period: existentialism, Catholic personalism and Marxism. They were developed by a younger generation of thinkers, who took advantage of the relative intellectual vacuum created by the war, and built energetic schools of thought. Each offered a largely new philosophy, built on long-standing intellectual currents of French and European thought that had previously struggled on the margins of cultural life. They offered moral and political guidance that engaged with the difficult issues of the time, and attracted strong commitment from a wide intellectual and cultural milieu. Existentialism emerged as the culturally dominant movement, but the other movements strongly and at times vehemently contested it. The intensity of the competition between them contributed to raising the level of debate, and generated both a high level of philosophical culture in the country and a wider reputation for France as a leading international focus for new ideas and debate. While the intellectual effervescence was a particular feature of France, there may be lessons that the rebuilding

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of a national culture can be strengthened by intellectual debate. And in the aftermath of conflict, when previously dominant cultural forms have been swept away or damaged, there are opportunities to develop exciting new intellectual and cultural movements.

The unburied corpse With all its ambiguities, France did succeed in re-establishing a sense of national identity. The French political and intellectual elites addressed their post-war problems with a remarkable degree of national unity. However, there was a price to be paid for the pragmatic sinking of differences, and the amalgamation of disparate symbolic systems. The re-established national identity bore the marks of its provisional and ambiguous beginnings. It was made with symbols that still carried uncomfortable connotations, and narratives that still lacked closure. This was already tangible in the summer of 1945, as the Second World War finally ended. The celebrations were distinctly muted, and Sartre observed of the VE-Day celebrations: ‘people were told to hang out the flags: they did not do so’.4 In some respects, it was not felt to be their victory, and did not bring the sense of final triumph that was felt, for example, in Britain. Even de Gaulle, more upbeat about the occasion, commented in his memoirs: And then, although the ordeal was marked, for us French, by a glory drawn from the depths of the abyss, it nevertheless included first of all certain disastrous weaknesses. Along with the satisfaction caused by its outcome, it leaves – for all time – a dull pain deep in the national consciousness.5 The disastrous weaknesses in question primarily included the acts and policies of Vichy and the collaboration. From de Gaulle’s point of view they also included the deep divisions between political parties and intellectual traditions. The dull pain was the lasting impression that these left, however carefully it was contained. For Simone de Beauvoir, writing later in her autobiography: The war was over: we were left holding it like a big cumbersome corpse, and there was nowhere in the world to bury it.6 Although the war was formally ended in 1945, it had already been symbolically ended for France in 1944. But that earlier end had been as


much an end to the French civil war as to the German occupation. Consequently the defeat of Germany did not provide a narrative closure, and perhaps served more to emphasise the ambiguity of the victory, which had nonetheless to be celebrated. Beauvoir’s unburied corpse is in essence the same as what de Gaulle diagnosed as a dull pain in the national consciousness, and corresponds to a deep-seated ambiguity in French national identity. The extent of French complicity in collaboration with the German occupation, and in its repressions and atrocities, is a historically unresolved issue, which has flared into life with extraordinary regularity in France, to the extent of appearing as a pathological disorder, which Henri Rousso has called the ‘Vichy Syndrome’. 7 It is characterised by acrimonious quarrels and alternating rhythms of affirming and denying the importance of the occupation and its interpretation. Undoubtedly, as Rousso argues, each crisis in which France has been divided is sedimented on preceding ones, so that the ‘Franco-French war’ has developed a self-propelling momentum, from the Revolution to the Dreyfus Case and on to the occupation, all of which have resurfaced intermittently in more recent contentions. However, this longstanding internecine struggle took a new turn after 1944, which gave it a particular visibility. On the one hand, there was virtual unanimity over the need for national unity, and for its powerful expression in a reconstructed national identity. This was successfully achieved by deploying the symbolic resources of religion and culture to supplement the weakened images of the state itself. On the other hand, the new republican state and its accompanying national identity became the only political and cultural fields within which the traditionally conflicting forces in French society could find expression. Previous generations in France, on the Left or the Right, had variously looked to a change of regime, whether by revolution, restoration or coup d’état. The conflicts pitted Royalists against the Republicans, Republicans against the monarchies and empires, fascists against parliamentary democracy, and communists against the capitalist state. Now for perhaps the first time in two centuries there was no available political project or cultural identity outside the existing regime. The result of this containment was to focus divisions internally. The smaller space inevitably raised the temperature. Moreover, the heightened role of cultural construction, and its ‘nationalisation’, meant that the conflicts contained within national identity were exhibited to the French and to the rest of the world with a particular prominence through the development of post-war French culture. In this way, in proportion as the reconstructed national

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identity dampened fundamental conflicts, the energy from those conflicts was transferred to the cultural realm. There, the struggle to articulate and reconcile the resulting ambiguities nourished the effervescence of a combative cultural and intellectual industry. And its participants drew additional confidence from the implicit awareness that they bore the responsibility of representing the nation, to itself and to others. In some respects, the post-war rebuilding of French national identity was a synthesis in the Hegelian sense. It was achieved by superseding internal conflicts and contradictions, but without abolishing them. And the more strongly the internal conflicts raged, the more strongly the overriding national identity was reaffirmed. There are both opportunities and costs in this dialectic of unity and struggle. A secure national synthesis provides opportunities for groups and movements to contend with one another for dominance within it. But it exacts a cost in subordinating the demands of other identities, especially those of class and gender, to the dominant forces in the national society. The powerful consensus to rebuild a new national identity in 1944–47 helped to secure the future for a free and prosperous post-war France. It placed a cordon sanitaire round those parts of its wartime experience that could not be integrated into the new identity, it helped to entrench a state of social dominance in class and gender relations, and it set cultural and intellectual life at the heart of national identity. In the process, it has provided a cultural arena within which the French political and cultural elites return continually to re-examine their country’s wartime experience and its struggles of class and gender, to the endless fascination and instruction of observers in other countries.

Notes Introduction 1 ‘Bricolage’ is a term originally used for amateur ‘do-it-yourself’ manual building work. Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced it as a concept in cultural anthropology, using it to describe the use of available materials to create artefacts with new cultural meanings. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). 2 ‘Système D’ is an expression widely used in the 1940s to describe resourceful improvisations of any kind to overcome shortages, thought to be derived from ‘débrouillard’ (resourceful, ingenious). 3 The concept of myth is developed in Chapter 2. 4 See K. H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–6. 5 ‘La guerre franco-française’ is a frequently quoted term referring to longrunning divisions within France, especially between supporters and opponents of the Republic, and between Right and Left. The term was given currency in the 1950s by Louis-Dominique Girard, La guerre franco-française (Paris: André Bonne, 1950). See also Stéphane Kémis and Jean-François Kahn, ‘Dossier: Deux siècles de guerres franco-françaises’, Evénement du jeudi, no. 180 (1988). 6 Useful general accounts are given in standard histories. The most useful in English are Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front, Government and People 1936–1986 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), James F McMillan, Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society 1898–1991, 2nd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944–1958, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 7 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: a Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). See also Donald Reid, ‘Narratives of Resistance in Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite’, Modern and Contemporary France, 11, no. 4 (2003). 8 See for example: Hugh Schofield, Plus ça change in Franco-US ties [Webpage] (BBC News, Tuesday, 22 July 2003, 16:16 GMT 17:16 UK 2003 [cited 8 October 2003]); available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3087785.stm. 9 There are informative articles on these in Bertram M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998). 10 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 11 Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation 1944–1949 (London: Penguin, 1995), 31–4. 12 Grégoire Madjarian, Conflit, pouvoirs et société à la Libération (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1980), 14. 188

Notes 189 13 Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française. François Mitterrand 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 14 Richard J. Golsan, ed., The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (London: Routledge, 2000). 15 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2. L’Unité 1942–1944 (Paris: Plon, 1956), 709. All translations from French texts are those of the present author, except where otherwise indicated. 16 Ibid. 17 The link between ideas of the Algerian War and the Second World War is analysed in Philip Dine, ‘The Inescapable Allusion: the Occupation and the Resistance in French Fiction and Film of the Algerian War’, in The Liberation of France: Image and Event, ed. H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg, 1995).

1.

Contexts for rebuilding

1 Bloch, Strange Defeat. 2 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 1. L’Appel 1940–1942 (Paris: Plon, 1954), 5. 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988), 178. 4 Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? et autres essais politiques, ed. François Laurent (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992). The principal text was published in English as: Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 19. 5 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3–5. 6 This is extensively discussed in Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1977); Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Keith Cameron, ed., National Identity (Exeter: Intellect, 1999); Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Ruth Wodak, The Discursive Construction of National Identity, trans. Angelika Hirsch and Richard Mitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 15. 8 Pierre Nora, ‘La nation-mémoire’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, II La nation, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). 9 Dominique Schnapper, ‘Existe-t-il une identité française?’, in L’identité, ed. Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan (Paris: Sciences Humaines, 1998). See also Dominique Schnapper, La Communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 10 Many works explore particular national cultures in this light. In the case of French identity, see, for example, Herman Lebovics, True France: the Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Spyros A. Sofos and Brian Jenkins, eds, Nation & Identity in Contemporary Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Robert H. Crawshaw and

190 Notes

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

Karin Tusting, Exploring French Text Analysis: Interpretations of National Identity (London: Routledge, 2000). Broader theoretical issues of cultural nationalism are explored in a number of essays in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 1. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols, vol. 1, History and Environment (London: Fontana, 1989), 23. See Yoram Barzel, A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Bill Jordan, The State: Authority and Autonomy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). G.W.F Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 155. Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1992). See the chapter entitled ‘Produire la nation’, in ibid., 100–10. Ibid., 110. Marc Fumaroli, L’État culturel: essai sur une religion moderne (Paris: Livre de Poche & Fallois, 1992). Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15. Between 1789 and 1939, French constitutions included three republics (1792–1804, 1848–52, 1870–1940) three monarchies (1789–92, 1814–30, 1830–48) and two empires (1804–14, 1852–70). This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. There is an abundant literature on this question. The following discussion draws on approaches explored in Tony Bennett, Culture: a Reformer’s Science (London: Sage, 1998); Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage, 1995); Williams, Keywords; Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981). Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 89. See J. B. Sykes, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 7th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Williams, Culture, 13. Featherstone, Undoing Culture, 33. A detailed analysis of these issues is presented in Brian Rigby, Popular Culture in Modern France: a Study of Cultural Discourse (London: Routledge, 1991). The book’s main focus is discussions of popular culture since the 1960s. See also Phillippe Bénéton, Histoire des mots: culture et civilisation (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1975). The debates in this area are lucidly examined in Lebovics, True France. For a Catholic example, see Georges Zérapha, ‘Le problème politique français 1789–1944,’ Esprit 13, no. 105, Décembre (1944) 38. For a Marxist example, see the ‘Rapport au Xe Congrès du Parti communiste français’ (June 1945), partially reprinted in Maurice Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2: 1938–1950 (Paris: Editions sociales, 1966), 311. For example, Sartre does not use the notion of ‘culture’ in either of his early essays in Les Temps modernes: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Présentation’, Les Temps modernes, 1, no. 1 (1945); Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La nationalisation de la littérature’, Les Temps modernes, 1, no. 2 (1945).

Notes 191 31 See, for example Sartre, ‘Présentation’, reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 11; Georges Bernanos ‘Il faut refaire des hommes libres’ (July 1945), reprinted in Georges Bernanos, Français, si vous saviez (1945–1948) (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 28. 32 See Rigby, Popular Culture in Modern France. 33 Emmanuel Mounier, Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947), reprinted in Emmanuel Mounier, Oeuvres, t.3 1944–1950 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962), 243. 34 See for example, Fernand Robert, L’Humanisme: Essai de définition (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1946), 65. 35 Simone Weil, L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 65. 36 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Oxford: Polity, 1988). See especially pp. 1–16. 37 See, for example, Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire: II La nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), especially volumes 2 and 3; Jean-Pierre Rioux and JeanFrançois Sirinelli, eds, Histoire culturelle de la France, 4 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1997–8). 38 Rioux and Sirinelli, eds, Histoire culturelle de la France, 12. 39 See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: the Arts in France 1885–1918 (London: Faber, 1959). 40 Jill Forbes and Michael Kelly, eds, French Cultural Studies: an Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61–78. 41 See Denis Peschanski, ed., Images de la France de Vichy 1940–1944 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1988). 42 See Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., La vie culturelle sous Vichy (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1990). 43 Vercors, Le Silence de la mer (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1942). It was translated into English as Vercors, Put Out the Light, trans. Cyril Connolly (London: Macmillan, 1944), and was published in New York under the title Silence of the Sea. See also Vercors, The Silence of the Sea, ed. James W. Brown and Lawrence D. Stokes (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1991). 44 See, for example, François Dendieu, Petit miroir de la civilisation française (London: D. C. Heath, 1940). 45 See Nora, ed., Lieux de mémoire, II, and Rioux and Sirinelli, eds, Histoire culturelle de la France. 46 Nora, Pierre, ‘La nation-mémoire’, in Nora, ed., Lieux de mémoire, II, 647–58. 47 Ibid., 654. 48 See, for example, Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).; Forbes and Kelly, eds, French Cultural Studies, 54–61. 49 Marcel Carné, Les Visiteurs du soir (1942). 50 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mouches: drame en trois actes (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), translated in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies and In Camera, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946). Jean Anouilh, Antigone (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1946), translated as Jean Anouilh, Antigone, ed. Ted Freeman, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Methuen, 2000). 51 This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. 52 Braudel, Identity of France, 1, 24.

192 Notes

2.

Inventing a language

1 See Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, ed. C. P. Otero (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1988), Michelle Grattan, ‘The Politics of Spin’, Australian Studies in Jounalism, 7 (1998). 2 See for example: an American protest movement, Occupation is not Liberation [website] (International A.N.S.W.E.R., 2003 [cited 18 November 2003]); available from http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/ 040903occup.html. 3 See Pascal Fouché, L’Édition française sous l’occupation (1940-1944), 2 vols (Paris: Université de Paris–VII, 1987). 4 See Henri Lefebvre, Le Langage et la société (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 5 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). 6 For example: H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood, eds, The Liberation of France: Image and Event (Oxford: Berg, 1995). Herbert R. Lottmann, The People’s Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France (London: Hutchinson, 1986). Beevor and Cooper, Paris after the Liberation. JeanPierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Fabrice Virgili, La France virile: des femmes tondues à la libération (Paris: Payot, 2000). Lt-col. Eddy Bauer et al, eds, La Libération, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Christophe Colomb, Glarus, 1983). 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La fin de la guerre’, Les Temps modernes 1, no. 1 (1945). Reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 63–71. ‘On avait dit aux gens de pavoiser: ils ne l’ont pas fait, la guerre a pris fin dans l’indifférence et dans l’angoisse’. 8 Philippe Buton, La France et les Français de la Libération 1944–1945 (Paris: Musée des deux guerres mondiales-BDIC, 1984), 9–11. 9 Ibid., 17. 10 Marshal Pétain introduced a replacement slogan of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (‘Work, Family, Country’). 11 ‘Liberator’ was also the name given by the Royal Air Force to the American-manufactured heavy bomber, the B24. 12 The poster is reproduced in Buton, La France et les Français de la Libération, 34. and in Bauer et al., eds, La Libération, 57. It can be viewed on the website of the Hoover Institution: Phili, Liberation (1944 [cited 4 December 2003]); available from http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/ar2000/liberation.html. See also Marie de Thézy and Thomas Michael Gunther, Images de la Libération de Paris (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1994), 2. This shows the poster displayed in Paris on a boarded-up pharmacy. 13 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 709. ‘Paris! Paris outragé! Paris brisé! Paris martyrisé! mais Paris libéré! libéré par lui-même, libéré par son peuple avec le concours des armées de la France, avec l’appui et le concours de la France toute entière, de la France qui se bat, de la seule France, de la vraie France, de la France éternelle.’ 14 Ibid. ‘…le concours de nos chers et admirables alliés’.

Notes 193 15 Reproduced in Bauer et al., eds, La Libération, 80. 16 The pétroleuses were women who used, or were accused of using, oil to start fires while fighting on the barricades in defence of the revolutionary Paris Commune in 1871, against government troops 17 This is discussed in the Introduction. 18 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 709. 19 Albert Camus’s editorial in Combat (27 June 1945), reprinted in Albert Camus, Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 288. 20 The list of French terms has almost thirty root-words, including the following: crise, renaître/ renaissance, (se) refaire, réforme/ (se) réformer, révolution, recommencer/ recommencement, reconquérir/ reconquête, reconstruire/ reconstruction, redevenir, redresser/ redressement, régénérer/ régénération, (se) relever/ relèvement, remettre (debout/ en marche etc), (se) renouveler/ renouvellement, réparer/ réparation, reprendre/ reprise, restaurer/ restauration, rétablir/ rétablissement, retour, (se) retrouver, revenir, démarrer/ démarrage, évolution, moderniser/ modernisation, rajeunir/ rajeunissement, (se) rassembler/ rassemblement, rénover/ rénovation. The list was established by concordance analysis of a corpus of political texts from the period collected by the CARAFE project at the University of Southampton, with the support of the British Academy. 21 In French, the group comprises the terms (se) refaire, réforme, (se) réformer, révolution. 22 Marie Granet and Henri Michel, Combat: histoire d’un mouvement de résistance, de juillet 1940 à juillet 1943 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1957). 23 Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Esprit, nouvelle série’, Esprit, no. 105 (1944): 2. 24 Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Suite française aux maladies infantiles des révolutions’, Esprit, no. 105 (1944). Reprinted in E´mmanuel Mounier, Oeuvres, t.4 Recueils posthumes, Correspondance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963), 89. 25 Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Refaire la Renaissance’, Esprit 1, no. 1 (1932). 26 Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Situation du personnalisme (suite et fin)’, Esprit, no. 120 (1946). Reprinted in Mounier, Oeuvres, 3, 207. 27 See Mounier, Oeuvres, 3, 183. 28 Sartre, ‘Présentation’. Reprinted in Sartre, Situations II, 16. 29 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Matérialisme et révolution’, Les Temps modernes (1946). Reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, see especially p. 224. 30 The poster was reproduced on the front page of the first issue of the communist review Action: Paul Colin, ‘1789–1830–1848–1871–1944’, Action, 9 septembre 1944. 31 Sartre, Situations II, 16. 32 In this discussion, the term ‘rebirth’ has mainly been used in English, as the first meaning for the French term ‘renaissance’. 33 See Jean-Pierre Rioux, La France de la Quatrième République I. L’ardeur et la nécessité (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 74. 34 Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 290. ‘L’unité nationale sera la condition d’une renaissance effective de la France’. 35 This is discussed in detail in Chapter 6. 36 Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 353. 37 See Nicholas Hewitt, ‘Les Lettres Françaises and the Failure of the French Postwar “Renaissance”’, in The Culture of Reconstruction. European Literature,

194 Notes

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55

56

3.

Thought and Film, 1945–1950, ed. Nicholas Hewitt (London: Macmillan, 1989). Henri Wallon, ‘Pour une encyclopédie dialectique’, La Pensée (1945). These terms were all used in his speech to the 10th Party Congress in June 1945, see Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 308–70. Ibid., 453. Interview in The Times, 17 November 1946. This group comprises the following terms: recommencer/ recommencement, reconquérir/ reconquête, reconstruire/ reconstruction, redevenir, redresser/ redressement, régénérer/ régénération, (se) relever/ relèvement, remettre (debout/ en marche etc), (se) renouveler/ renouvellement, réparer/ réparation, reprendre/ reprise, restaurer/ restauration, rétablir/ rétablissement, retour, (se) retrouver, revenir. Jacques Fauvet, La IVe République (Paris: Fayard, 1959), 21. De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 712. Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, notes et carnets, juin 1943–mai 1945 (Paris: Plon, 1983), 319. The foot of the poster bears the information ‘G.P.R.F. Secrétariat général à l’Information, affiche exécutée sous l’occupation allemande–août 1944’. This is discussed in Chapter 3. Reproduced in Stéphane Marchetti, Affiches 1939-1945. Images d’une certaine France (Lausanne: Edita, 1982), 173. Archives de France, ed., Reconstructions et modernisation. La France après les ruines 1918 … 1945 … (Paris: Archives nationales, 1991), 159. C’est une fleur de Paris, Du vieux Paris qui sourit, Car c’est la fleur du retour, Du retour des beaux jours. Pendant quatre ans, dans nos coeurs, Elle a gardé ses couleurs, Bleu, blanc, rouge … Avec l’espoir, elle a fleuri, Fleur de Paris. The song ‘Fleur de Paris’ was written in 1944, with words by Maurice Vandair, music by Henri Bourtayre, published by Éditions Paul Beuscher, see Pierre Saka, La chanson française à travers ses succès (Paris: Larousse, 1988), 158. Ibid. De Gaulle, Lettres, notes et carnets, juin 1943–mai 1945, 172. De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 1, 1. This group comprises the following terms: démarrer/ démarrage, évolution, moderniser/ modernisation, rajeunir/ rajeunissement, (se) rassembler/ rassemblement, rénover/ rénovation Archives de France, ed., Reconstructions et modernisation, 95. These themes are extensively explored in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonisation and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France, Plans for Renewal 1940–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 89. The omissions are mine. In the passage quoted, he is specifically discussing the socialists, though the same point can be extended to the other governing parties.

Finding the symbols

1 See Lefebvre, Le Langage et la société. Barthes, Mythologies. The concepts are discussed in Chapter 2. 2 See Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 17–19.

Notes 195 3 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981). See Chapter 1, ‘On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act’, 17–102. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J. B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity and Blackwell, 1991). See Chapter 7, ‘On Symbolic Power’, 163–70. 5 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Paris sous l’occupation’, La France libre, 15 November 1944. Reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, 28. 7 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 311. 8 See Barthes, Mythologies, 235–6. 9 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La République du silence’, Les Lettres françaises, 9 September 1944. Reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, 11. 10 This point is developed in the Introduction. 11 The Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories is discussed in the Introduction. 12 ‘Message à Alexandre Parodi, délégué général du G.P.R.F. en France, à Paris’, in de Gaulle, Lettres, notes et carnets, juin 1943–mai 1945, 274–5. 13 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 700. 14 Ibid., 289–322. 15 ‘Rien n’y manque, excepté l’État. Il m’appartient de l’y remettre. Aussi m’y suis-je d’abord installé.’ Ibid., 306. 16 Ibid., 709. 17 Fauvet, La IVe République, 21. 18 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 309. 19 De Gaulle subsequently claimed that the speech was improvised, no doubt emphasising that the occasion lacked formal status. The text is reproduced in ibid., 709–10. Aspects of the speech are discussed in Chapter 2. 20 Barthes, Mythologies, 230. 21 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 19. 22 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 1, 1. 23 Rioux, La France de la Quatrième République, I, 30. 24 See Anne Bony, Les Années 40 (Paris: Editions du Regard, 1985); Pontus Hulten, ed., Paris-Paris 1937–1957 (Paris: Centre Georges Ponpidou, 1981); Jean-Luc Daval, ed., L’art en Europe. Les années décisives 1945–53 (Geneva: Skira, 1987); Frances Morris, ed., Paris Post War: Art and existentialism 1945–55 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993). 25 Hulten, ed., Paris-Paris, 455. 26 Ibid., 454. 27 Quoted in Henri Amouroux, ed., La France contemporaine: les années quarante (Paris: Taillandier, 1972), 262. 28 Sartre, Situations III, 34. 29 Ibid., 42. 30 Morris, ed., Paris Post War, 132. 31 Job, 23.2. The Authorised Version reads: ‘Even today is my complaint bitter; my stroke is heavier than my groaning’, while the Good News Bible has ‘I still rebel and complain against God. I can’t hold back my groaning’.

196 Notes 32 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: a Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). 33 Marchetti, Affiches 1939–1945, 171. 34 John, 11. 1–44. 35 See W. D. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (Oxford: Berg, 1995). 36 See Kay Chadwick, ed., Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). The impassioned debates around the wearing of Islamic headscarves are a continuing illustration of this point. 37 See William Kidd, ‘Identity and Iconography: French War-memorials 1914–1918 and 1939–1945’, in Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Rosemary Chapman and Nicholas Hewitt (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1992). 38 See Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, 368–9., and de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 2, 314–15. 39 See Rioux, La France de la Quatrième République, I, 31. The following statistics are given: Soldiers killed in action or fatally wounded: 170 000 (92 000 in 1939–40; 58 000 in 1940–45; 20 000 FFI). Prisoners and deportees: 280 000 (40 000 prisoners; 60 000 political deportees; 100 000 racial deportees; 40 000 workers; 40 000 Alsaciens incorporated in the Wehrmacht). Civilian casualties: 150 000 (60 000 in bombings; 60 000 in land-fighting and massacres; 30 000 executed). 40 Louis Aragon, La Diane française (Paris: Seghers, 1944), 19–20. ‘Celui qui croyait au ciel / Celui qui n’y croyait pas / Tous deux adoraient la belle / Prisonnière des soldats’ 41 L’un court et l’autre a des ailes / De Bretagne ou du Jura / Et framboise ou mirabelle / Le grillon rechantera / Dites flûte ou violoncelle / Le double amour qui brûla / L’alouette et l’hirondelle / La rose et le réséda. 42 See ‘Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux’, in Aragon, La Diane française, 29–30. 43 The poem is dedicated to four Resistance figures who were executed, two Catholics and two communists. 44 Aragon, Louis, ‘De l’exactitude historique en poésie’, in Aragon, La Diane française, 95.

4.

Workers and intellectuals

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘La guerre a eu lieu’, Les Temps modernes (1945). 2 Aragon, La Diane française, 19. The French text is: Quand les blés sont sous la grêle/ Fou qui fait le délicat/ Fou qui songe à ses querelles/ Au coeur du commun combat. 3 ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, 1943, words by Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, music by Anna Marly. See Chantal Brunschwig, Jean-Louis Calvet, and JeanClaude Klein, Cent ans de chanson française, 2nd edn (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 88. The opening verse is: ‘Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines? / Ami, entends-tu les cris sourds du pays qu’on enchaîne? / Ohé! partisans, ouvriers et paysans, c’est l’alarme! / Ce soir l’ennemi connaîtra le

Notes 197

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

prix du sang et des larmes …’ (‘O friend, can you hear the black flight of the crows on our plains? O friend, can you hear the muffled cries of our country in chains? Hey there, partisans, workers and peasants, this is the signal! Tonight the enemy will know the price of blood and tears …’) The second verse is: ‘Montez de la mine, descendez des collines, camarades / Sortez de la paille, les fusils, la mitraille, les grenades … / Ohé! les tueurs, à la balle ou au couteau, tuez vite! / Ohé! saboteur, attention à ton fardeau, dynamite!’ (‘Come up from the mines, come down from the hills, comrades, Bring out from the straw the guns, the ammunition and grenades … Hey there, you killers, with the bullet or knife, kill quickly, Hey there, saboteur, take care with your load, dynamite!’) Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 334–45. Ibid., 334–5. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 360. Ibid., 369. Maurice Thorez, Fils du peuple (Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1937), translated as Maurice Thorez, Son of the People, trans. Douglas Garman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938). For, example, a word-frequency analysis of the conference address shows that the most frequently used nouns are parti (126), France (89), peuple(s) (67), guerre (59), pays (57), production (51). Classe(s) occurs 20 times. Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 312. ‘14 juillet de la Renaissance Française’, Ce soir, 14 July 1945, reproduced on the back cover of Charles-Louis Foulon, La France libérée 1944–1945 (Paris: Hatier, 1984). The image is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, pp. 124–5. Charles De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 3. Le Salut 1944–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1959), 309. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948), 195. See his editorial in Combat, 30 août 1945, reprinted in Camus, Essais, 289–91. See Raymond Aron, ‘Les désillusions de la liberté’, Les Temps modernes 1, no. 1 (1945). Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Situation du personnalisme’, Esprit, no. 118 (1946), reprinted in Mounier, Oeuvres, 3, 191. See Georges Bernanos, ‘Il n’y a pas de révolution dirigée. Le président Truman et son piano’, La Bataille (1945) in Bernanos, Français, si vous saviez, 47–50. See Chapter 3. Jacques Prévert, Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). The poem was first published in October 1945, and is reprinted in Jacques Prévert, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 139–40. ‘Il ne faut pas laisser les intellectuels jouer avec les allumettes/ Parce que Messieurs quand on le laisse seul/ Le monde mental Messssieurs/ N’est pas du tout brillant/ Et sitôt qu’il est seul/ Travaille arbitrairement/ S’érigeant pour soi-même/ Et soi-disant généreusement en l’honneur des travailleurs du bâtiment/ Un auto-monument/ Répétons-le Messssssieurs/ Quand on le laisse seul/ Le monde mental/ Ment/ Monumentalement’ (‘Intellectuals should not be allowed to play with matches/ Because Gentlemen when it is left alone/ The mental world Geenntlemen/ is far

198 Notes

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

from brilliant/ And as soon as it is alone/ Works arbitrarily/ Erecting for itself/ And so-called generously in honour of building workers/ A selfmonument/ Let me repeat Geeennntlemen/ When it is left alone/ The mental world/ Lies/ Monumentally’) This argument has been forcefully proposed in Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Siècle de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). Sartre, ‘La nationalisation de la littérature’, reprinted in Sartre, Situations II, 50. Sartre, Situations II, 34–5. Ibid., 35. The constitution of a Fourth Republic was under discussion at this point. It was not formally inaugurated as the Fourth Republic until a year later. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 49. Sartre, ‘Présentation’. Reprinted in Sartre, Situations II, 30. Sartre, ‘La République du silence’, reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, 11–14. Sartre, ‘Paris sous l’occupation’, reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, 42. See Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 117–23. ‘Jean-Paul Sartre revient des États-unis’, Radiodiffusion française, 1 April 1946. Author’s transcription from the tape recording, consulted at the Inathèque in the Maison de la radio, Paris. ‘Premier éditorial du journal “Combat” lu par Albert Camus’, BBC, 22 August 1944. Inathèque reference Lo 5823/A. The recording lasts for four minutes. The text is not included in Camus Essais., which collects most of his journalism from this period. Camus, Essais, 255–316. The use of religious symbols is discussed in Chapter 3. ‘La rose et le réséda’, in Aragon, La Diane française, 19–20. See also Chapter 3. Mounier, Oeuvres, 4, 798. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect. French Intellectuals 1944–1956 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: California University Press, 1992). Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See, for example, Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Modern Languages Publications, 1992). These movements are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations VIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). See pp. 377–8. Similar formulations are adopted in Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France : De l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jour, 3rd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), and Michel Leymarie, Les intellectuels et la politique en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001). These groups are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Sartre, Situations II, 49. Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1927), translated as Julien Benda, The Great Betrayal, trans. Richard Aldington (London: G. Routledge, 1928). It was republished after the war as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals

Notes 199

48

49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

5.

(1955) and Treason of the Intellectuals (1969), by which time the term ‘intellectuals’ had become established. For example, the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIAAnti-fascist intellectuals vigiliance committee), and the Union des intellectuels français (UDIF – French intellectuals union). See Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises. Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 132–214. Ibid., 241–3. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, 183–4. See Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 231–8.; Pierre Assouline, L’Épuration des intellectuels: 1944–1945 (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1985). Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? I’, La République française 2, no. 8 (1945); Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? II’, La République française 2, no. 9 (1945); reprinted in Sartre, Situations III, 45. Thorez, Oeuvres choisies, 2, 346. Their speeches were reprinted as a brochure: Georges Cogniot and Roger Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance française (Paris: Éditions du PCF, 1945). Georges Cogniot, in ibid., 17. Roger Garaudy, in ibid., 6. This has been extensively studied, for example, in David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–60 (London: Deutsch, 1964); and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Au service du Parti. Le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944–1956) (Paris: Fayard/Minuit, 1983). See also Michael Kelly, ‘French Intellectuals and Zhdanovism’, French Cultural Studies, 8, no. 22, February (1997). See Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 74. See for example Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise. Sartre and ‘Les Temps modernes’, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).; Jeremy Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in TwentiethCentury France, Mandarins and Samurais (London: Macmillan, 1993); Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France; Leymarie, Les intellectuels et la politique en France.

Regendering the nation

1 See Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997); Sylvia Walby, ‘Woman and Nation’, in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, eds., From Gender to Nation (Longo Editore: Ravenna, 2002). 2 See Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1944–68 (London: Routledge, 1994); Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948. Choice and Constraints (London: Pearson, 1999). 3 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972).

200 Notes 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard Madison Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 84–91. 5 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 244. 6 Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 7 This point is developed in more detail in Michael Kelly, ‘The Hegemony of National Identity in the Field of Cultural Identities’, in Memory, History and Critique: European Identity at the Millennium CD-ROM, ed. Frank Brinkhuis and Sascha Talmor (Utrecht: ISSEI/UHS, 1998). 8 See Célia Bertin, Femmes sous l’Occupation (Paris: Stock, 1993); Diamond, Women and the Second World War; Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara, ‘Special Issue: Gendering the Occupation of France’, Modern and Contemporary France 7, no. 1 (1999). 9 See Diamond, Women and the Second World War; Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940–1945 (New York; Chichester: J. Wiley, 1995). 10 See Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives.; Diamond, Women and the Second World War. Both of these works offer detailed bibliographical information on the topic. 11 Diamond, Women and the Second World War, 204. 12 The fullest account is provided by Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women. Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (Oxford: Berg, 2002). See also Alain Brossat, Les tondues: un carneval moche (Paris: Manya, 1993) and Corran Laurens, ‘“La femme au turban”: les femmes tondues’, in The Liberation of France. Image and Event, ed. Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg, 1995). 13 Photographs are reproduced in many sources, see in particular Virgili, Shorn Women and Laurens, ‘La femme au turban’. 14 See Brossat, Les tondues, who invokes the notion of carnival in his subtitle, Un carneval moche. 15 This is examined in detail in Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), and Lottmann, The People’s Anger. 16 ‘Jerrybags’ was the derogatory term used in the Channel Islands at this period to denote women (‘bags’) who had associated with the German occupying forces (‘the Jerries’). 17 A useful overview is presented in the special number of the review Clio, edited by Françoise Thébaud, ‘Résistances et Libérations. France 1940–1945’, Clio, 1 (1995). 18 See L’Ordre de la Libération (2004 [cited 1 February 2004]); available from http://www.defense.gouv.fr/actualites/dossier/d29/libe.htm. 19 See Hilary Footitt, ‘The First Women Députés: “les 33 glorieuses”?’, in The Liberation of France. Image and Event, ed. H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg, 1995); William Guéraiche, ‘Les femmes politiques de 1944 à 1947: quelle libération?’, Clio 1 (1995). 20 From November 1947 to July 1948. See Yvonne Knibiehler, ed., Germaine Poinso-Chapuis, femme d’État (1901–1981) (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1998). 21 See Edmund Dulac, 1882–1953 Collection [Website] (25 November 2003 2003 [cited 1 February 2004]); available from http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ research/fa/dulac.html#folder. Edmond Dulac, born in France, had lived in England for forty years by this time, was naturalised British, and adopted

Notes 201

22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43

44 45

the English spelling of his first name, Edmund, under which he is more widely known. Hulten, ed., Paris-Paris, 455. This image is discussed in Chapter 3. Gabriel Audiovisio, ‘L’Air de la délivrance’, Poésie 44, no. 20 (1944). ‘O Semaine stupéfiée par trop d’espérances si longtemps contenues! Assomption, dans l’été, des attentes chimériques. Assomption, vierge de Paris, au ciel illuminant le soleil enfin qui retrouvait sa naissance des premiers jours du monde pour des hommes nouveaux tout étonnés de sentir qu’ils allaient bientôt vivre.’ See Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. This concept is discussed in Chapter 3. This practice began informally with Brigitte Bardot in 1969, and was formalised with subsequent versions based on celebrities including Catherine Deneuve, Mireille Mathieu, Mireille Darc, Isabelle Adjani and Laetitia Casta. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972), 47. Elizabeth Badinter, X Y de l’identité masculine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992), 15. These are the concluding words of Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). See Camus, Essais, 198. Reproduced in Hulten, ed., Paris-Paris, 129. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire 1 (Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946), 71. Ibid., 76. Marchetti, Affiches 1939–1945, 171. The poster is discussed in Chapter 3. Bernanos, Français, si vous saviez, 205. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, 331. Simone de Beauvoir, L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Paris: Nagel, 1986), 9–10. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique’, Les Temps modernes, 1, no. 2 (1945): 266. Sartre, Situations II, 22–3. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 15. Interpolation added. Ibid., 295. See John MacInnes, The End of Masculinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Modern Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 1–23. The previous photograph in the series indicates this. In it, the woman, already seated, attempts to brush the hands of two of the men away from her hair. Reproduced on the back cover of Foulon, La France libérée. The main headline is ‘14 juillet de la Renaissance Française’, and the two feature columns on either side of the picture are by Jean-Richard Bloch, ‘La leçon de 1789’, and Louis Saillant, ‘Les États généraux et la Nation’, a reference to the meeting of the States General, which sparked the Revolution. Henri Lefebvre, Le marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 10. See Jean-François Sirinelli, Les baby-boomers: Une génération 1945–1969 (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

202 Notes

6.

The humanist moment

1 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 2 André George et al., Les grands appels de l’homme contemporain (Paris: Éditions du Temps présent, 1946). The papers were originally delivered between January and April 1946. 3 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), 24–8. 4 Ibid., 104. 5 The picture is reproduced in Hulten, ed., Paris-Paris, 129. 6 See Plautus, The Comedy of Asses, ‘Man is not a man, but a wolf, to those he does not know’. 7 See Robert Burns, ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’ (1786). 8 Marchetti, Affiches 1939–1945, 174–5. 9 See Rioux and Sirinelli, eds, Histoire culturelle de la France. 10 See D. G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire 1852–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). 11 See F. Charmot, SJ, L’Humanisme et l’humain (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1934). 12 Charles Andler, L’Humanisme travailliste (Paris: Bibliothèque de la civilisation française, 1927). 13 Paul Arbousse-Bastide, Pour un humanisme nouveau (Paris: Cahiers Foi et Vie, 1930). Contributors included P. Archambault, H. Brémond, L. Brunschvicg, J. Chevalier, A. Forest, R. Garric, H. Gouhier, A. Lalande, J. Maritain, R. Rolland and D. de Rougemont. See also Henri Clavier, L’Humanisme et la piété chrétienne (Paris: Éditions Je Sers, 1932). 14 Mounier, ‘Refaire la Renaissance’, reprinted in Emmanuel Mounier, Oeuvres, t.1 1931–1939 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961), 153. See Michael Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival: the Ideas and influence of Emmanuel Mounier (London: Sheed & Ward, 1979). 15 See Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral: Problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chrétienté (Paris: Aubier, 1968). 16 Ibid., 10. 17 See Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). 18 See for example Waldemar George, L’Humanisme et l’idée de patrie (Paris: Fasquelle, 1936). 19 See for example Max Hermant, Hitlérisme et Humanisme (Paris: Paul Brodard & Joseph Taupin, 1936). Victor Monod, Dévalorisation de l’homme (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935). 20 ‘Vers un nouvel humanisme’, Bulletin de la coopération intellectuelle, 75–6 (1937). 21 Paul, Nizan ‘Sur l’humanisme’ in Paul Nizan, Paul Nizan, intellectuel communiste, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspéro, 1970), 32–7. The article was first published in Europe, 1935. 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Oeuvres romanesques, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 138–40. 23 Sartre, Oeuvres romanesques, 140. The emphasis is Sartre’s. 24 See René D’Ouince, ‘A nos lecteurs’, Études (1945). 25 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Translated as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, trans. Lewis Galantière (London: William Heinemann, 1942).

Notes 203 26 ‘L’homme où est l’homme l’homme L’Homme / Floué roué troué meurtri / Avec le mépris pour patrie / Marqué comme un bétail et comme / Un bétail à la boucherie’. Aragon, La Diane française, 15. The poem was originally published clandestinely in Paul Éluard, ed., L’Honneur des poètes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943). 27 Louis Aragon, ‘De l’exactitude historique en poésie’, in La Diane française (Paris: Seghers, 1944). 28 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 474. 29 The possibility of extra-terrestrial species replacing God as a third party is not considered in this context. 30 See Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, eds, Les Idées politiques et sociales de la Résistance (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954); and Henri Michel, Les Courants de pensée de la Résistance (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962). 31 André Hauriou, Vers une doctrine de la Résistance: le socialisme humaniste (Alger: Éditions Fontaine, 1943). 32 Quoted in Ibid., 223. 33 This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. 34 The following titles were published in 1945: Paul Alpert, Economie humaniste; Léon Blum, A l’échelle humaine; Pierre Bourgelin, L’Homme et le temps; Jacques Maritain, Les Droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle; Jean Mouroux, Le Sens chrétien de l’Homme. A longer list appeared in 1946: André Ulmann, L’Humanisme du XXe siècle; Luc Sommerhausen, L’Humanisme agissant de Karl Marx; Louis Aragon, L’Homme communiste; Jacques Rennes, Du marxisme à l’humanisme; Robert Fernand, L’Humanisme: essai de définition; Georges Friedmann, Machine et humanisme; Georges Izard, L’Homme est révolutionnaire; Daniel Perrot, Style d’homme; André Lang, L’Homme libre, ce prisonnier; André George et al., Les Grand appels de l’homme; Simone de Beauvoir, Tous les hommes sont mortels; Nicolas Berdiaeff De l’esclavage et de la liberté de l’homme; Edward Montier, Les Jeunes devant l’humanisme intégral; Louis de Lavareille, Humanisme et prière; Charles Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté; Xavier de Virieu, Perspectives d’humanisme militaire; Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialism est un humanisme. 35 Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) was one of the leading French humanists of the Renaissance. 36 Robert, L’Humanisme: Essai de définition, 9. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 39 Ibid., 195. 40 See for example, Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944–1958; Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin, eds, Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Lottmann, The People’s Anger. 41 The concept of bricolage is discussed in Chapter 3. 42 André Mandouze, ‘Nous avons rompu, sous saurons unir’, Témoignage chrétien, 9 September 1944. 43 Mgr Saliège, ‘Vocation de la France’, Témoignage chrétien, 30 September 1944. 44 Emmanuel Mounier, ‘Faut-il refaire la Déclaration des droits de l’homme?’, Esprit, no. 105 (1944).

204 Notes 45 See Stanislas Fumet, ‘Charles de Gaulle, ami de Temps présent’, Temps présent, 26 August 1944. 46 See ‘Il faut reconstruire en pensant à l’homme’, Temps présent, 24 November 1944; and Gilles Ferry, ‘Uriage: École d’humanisme’, Temps présent, 22 September 1944. 47 Jacques Maritain, Les Droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1945); Jacques Maritain, Principes d’une politique humaniste (New York: Éditions de la Maison française, 1944). 48 See for example Philippe Viannay, Nous sommes des rebelles (Paris: Défense de l’Homme, 1945), published under his Resistance pseudonym ‘Indomitus’. 49 SFIO (Section française de l’internationale ouvrière) was the French section of the Second International, and one of the main precursors of the present socialist party. 50 Robert Verdier and Pierre Stibbe, ‘Socialisme humaniste’, Esprit (1945): 691. 51 Léon Blum, A l’échelle humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). See also Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); Joel Colton, Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics (New York: Knopf, 1966). 52 Pierre Hervé and Philippe Viannay, ‘Un “socialisme humaniste”?’, Esprit (1945); Verdier and Stibbe, ‘Socialisme humaniste’; Jean Lacroix, ‘Un socialisme humaniste’, Esprit (1945). 53 Jean Lacroix, Socialisme? (Paris: Éditions du livre français, 1945). 54 Ibid., 66. 55 Ibid. ‘En dehors de la culture, on n’est pas un homme.’ 56 Jean Mouroux, Le Sens chrétien de l’Homme (Paris: Aubier, 1945), 5. Translated as Jean Mouroux, The Meaning of Man, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948). 57 D’Ouince, ‘A nos lecteurs’, 8–9. 58 Paul Alpert, Economie humaniste (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1945). 59 Henri de Lubac, Le Drame de l’humanisme athée (Paris: Spes, 1944). Translated as Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (London: Sheed & Ward, 1949). 60 Jean Daniélou, ‘H. de Lubac: Le Drame de l’humanisme athée’, Études, no. mai (1945): 275. 61 Henri de Lubac, ‘L’idée chrétien de l’Homme et la recherche d’un homme nouveau’, Etudes, October, november (1947): 1. 62 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946). Whereas the French title asserts that ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, the published English translation has a less affirmative title: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1974). 63 Jean Kanapa, L’Existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1947). 64 Henri Lefebvre, Le matérialisme dialectique, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947). See also Lefebvre, Le marxisme. 65 See Georges Friedmann, Machine et humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). 66 See Auguste Cornu, ‘Marxisme et idéologie’, La Pensée (1945). See also Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et la pensée moderne (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1948). 67 Cogniot and Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance française, 12. ‘Patrie d’élection de l’humanisme’.

Notes 205 68 See for example René Maublanc, ‘Le rationalisme en face des mystiques’, La Pensée (1945). 69 Hervé and Viannay, ‘Un “socialisme humaniste”?’, 409. 70 See Gaston Fessard, France, prends garde de perdre ta liberté (Paris: Éditions du Témoignage chrétien, 1945). The issue is usefully discussed in Ronald Tiersky, French Communism, 1920–1972 (London: Columbia University Press, 1974). 71 Sartre, ‘Présentation’, quoted from Sartre, Situations II, 15. 72 Sartre, Situations II, 28. 73 Francis Ponge, ‘Notes premières de l’homme’, Les Temps modernes 1, no. 1 (1945). 74 Beauvoir, ‘Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique’, 266. 75 This point is taken up in Chapter 7. 76 Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme. 77 See Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 160–1. 78 In the essay ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’, first published in Les Temps modernes in the winter of 1946–47, and reprinted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 178. 79 This is discussed in Chapter 5.

7.

The battle of ideas

1 See Pierre Nora, ‘Mi-vainqueur, mi-vaincu’, in Les idées en France 1945–1988: Une chronologie, ed. Anne Simonin and Hélène Clastres (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 2 It is a common expression, which echoes the biblical text: ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it’ (Mark, 8, 35). It often occurs in the titles of books and films, and is also the name used for versions of chess and checkers. It was a favourite theme with Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Mounier, and the idea was used as the title for an English translations of Sartre’s play, Les séquestrés d’Altona (1960): Jean-Paul Sartre, Loser wins … a play in five acts, trans. Sylvia Leeson and George Leeson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960). Most recently it is the title of a film directed by Laurent Bénégui (2004). See, for example, Christina Howells, ‘Sartre and Derrida: qui perd gagne’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1982); Philip Knee, Qui perd gagne: essai sur Sartre (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993). 3 This is discussed in detail in Chapter 6. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). This framework is also used in other works on this area: Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise. Sartre and ‘Les Temps modernes’, and in Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 5 See Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Free Press, 1990), 148–54. 6 See Herbert R Lottman, The Left Bank (New York: Wallace and Sheil, 1981), and Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, 143.

206 Notes 7 The climate of commitment is discussed in Chapter 4. 8 See for example, Allen Joyland Belkind, Jean-Paul Sartre: Sartre and Existentialism in English. A Bibliographical Guide (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970); Walter Arnold Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: New American Library, 1975); Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Lottman, The Left Bank; George Myerson, Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism: a Beginner’s Guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). See also the journal Sartre Studies International: an International Journal of Existentialism and Contemporary Culture (Providence, RI: Berghahn). 9 This was the title of a series of seven one-hour broadcasts on French radio: Michel Contat, ‘Les années Sartre’, (Paris: France-Culture, 1990). It was adopted as the title for the final part of Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1999). 10 See for example, Aron, ‘Les désillusions de la liberté.’; Emmanuel Mounier, Malraux, Camus, Sartre, Bernanos: l’espoir des désespérés (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1953); Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (London: Fontana, 1967). 11 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976). Blaise Pascal, Pascal: selections, ed. Richard H. Popkin (New York: Macmillan, 1989). 12 See Reinhardt Grossmann, Phenomenology and Existentialism: an Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). 13 Sartre, La Nausée, translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). 14 Sartre, L’Etre et le néant. Translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1972). 15 Reproduced in Sartre, Situations II, translated as Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950). 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. Erik de Mauny (London: Secker & Warburg; Lindsay Drummond, 1948). 17 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), translated as Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 18 Sartre, The Flies and In Camera; Jean-Paul Sartre, Three Plays: Crime Passionel, Men without Shadows and The Respectable Prostitute, trans. Kitty Black (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949); Jean-Paul Sartre, The Chips are Down, trans. Louise Varèse (London: Rider, 1951); Jean-Paul Sartre, In The Mesh, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Andrew Dakers, 1954); Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, trans. Eric Sutton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947); JeanPaul Sartre, The Reprieve, trans. Eric Sutton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947); Jean-Paul Sartre, Iron in the Soul, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950). 19 Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); translated as Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1962). 20 Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguité, 45.

Notes 207 21 Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), translated as Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard Madison Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953). Some of the ideas in this work are discussed in Chapter 5. 22 The period is described in Beauvoir’s autobiography. See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), translated as Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (London: Deutsch, 1965). 23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), translated as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 24 Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942)., translated as Albert Camus, The Outsider, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946). Also published in English as The Stranger. Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), translated as Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955). 25 Simone de Beauvoir, Les mandarins (Paris: 1954), translated as Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (London: Fontana, 1960). 26 Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953). See Germaine Brée, Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (New York: Dell, 1972); Claudie Broyelle and Jacques Broyelle, Les illusions retrouvées: Sartre a toujours raison contre Camus (Paris: Grasset, 1982). 27 See Emmanuel Lévinas, Le Temps et l’autre (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1979). Emmanuel Lévinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 28 See Jean André Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929); Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1937). 29 See Jean Wahl, Le choix, le monde, l’existence (Paris: Arthaud, 1947); Jean Wahl, Esquisse pour une histoire de ‘l’existentialisme’; suivi de Kafka et Kierkegaard (Paris: L’Arche, 1949), translated as Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans. Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). 30 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), translated as Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the reading of Hegel … Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York & London: Basic Books, 1969). See also Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève. La philosophie, l’État, la fin de l’Histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1990). 31 See Chadwick, ed., Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France; Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin, eds, Religion, Society and Politics in France since 1789 (London: Hambledon Press, 1991); Roy Pierce, Contemporary French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); R. William Rauch, Politics and Belief in Contemporary France: Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932–1950 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). 32 Both encyclicals are reprinted in Anne Freemantle, ed., The Social Teachings of the Church (New York: Mentor-Omega, 1963). See also Charles E. Curran,

208 Notes

33 34

35

36 37

38

39

40

41

42 43 44

45 46 47

48

Catholic Social Teaching, 1891–Present: a Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002). See Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30 (Paris: Seuil, 1969). See Michel Winock, ‘Esprit’. Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, Revue et augmentée ed., Histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival. See John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); John Hellman, The KnightMonks of Vichy France, Uriage, 1940–45 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1993). A defence of Mounier’s position is given in Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 426–37. Bernanos, Français, si vous saviez, 163. See Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival; Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950; David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Emmanuel Mounier, Oeuvres, t.2. Traité du caractère (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961), translated as Emmanuel Mounier, The Character of Man, trans. Cynthia Rowland (London: Rockliff, 1956). Emmanuel Mounier, Le Personnalisme, Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). Translated as Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, trans. Philippe Auguste Mairet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952). See Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944).; Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, trans. Doris C. Anson (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945); Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948). His two most influential works are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959), and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le milieu divin: an Essay on the Interior Life, trans. Bernard Joseph Wall (London: Collins, 1960). In 1948 he was forbidden by his Order to publish the books. Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France. Laurent Greilshamer, Hubert Beuve-Méry (1902–1989) (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Claude-Edmonde Magny, Les Sandales d’Empédocle: essai sur les limites de la littérature (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1945); Claude-Edmonde Magny, L’âge du roman américain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1948). Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: the Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1972). Alain Resnais, ‘Nuit et brouillard’, (Paris: 1955). Jean Cayrol, Je vivrai l’amour des autres, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1947–50). Gilbert Cesbron, Les saints vont en enfer (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1952), translated as Gilbert Cesbron, Saints in Hell, trans. John Russell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953). Gilbert Cesbron, Il est minuit, Dr Schweitzer (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1951). See R. E. M. Irving, Christian Democracy in France (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973); Rauch, Politics and Belief in Contemporary France; David Hanley, ed., Christian Democracy in Europe: a Comparative Perspective (London: Pinter, 1994).

Notes 209 49 Much of the following discussion is informed by George Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); and Daniel Lindenberg, Le Marxisme introuvable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975). See also Kelly, Modern French Marxism. 50 Proudhon’s best known idea is the ‘property is theft’. See Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1970); Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Robert Louis Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice : the Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 51 Paul Lafargue, Le droit à la paresse (Paris: Allia, 1999). 52 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 353–8. 53 See Bud Burkhard, French Marxism between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Philosophies’ (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000). 54 A useful summary of the situation is given in Jean Kanapa, ‘Bilan des éditions marxistes’, Europe (1947). 55 See the biography of Lefebvre, Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle (Paris: Métailié, 1988). 56 Lefebvre, Le matérialisme dialectique, translated as Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock (London: Cape, 1968). Lefebvre, Le marxisme. 57 See Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, 1, Introduction (Paris: Grasset, 1947); translated as Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 1. Introduction, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991); Michael Kelly, ‘The Historical Emergence of Everyday Life’, Sites, 1, no. 1 (1997). 58 This is discussed at some length in Edgar Morin, Autocritique, 3rd edn (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 59 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939). The work was edited by a Commission of the Soviet Communist Party, under the general supervision of Stalin, who is generally attributed with authorship of the section on Dialectical Materialism (pp. 97–131). There is further discussion of later developments in Kelly, ‘French Intellectuals and Zhdanovism’. 60 Henri Lefebvre, Logique formelle, logique dialectique, A la lumière du matérialisme dialectique, 1 (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1947). 61 Serge Perottino, Roger Garaudy et le marxisme du XXe siècle. Présentation choix de textes, biographie, bibliographie (Paris: Seghers, 1969). 62 See Roger Garaudy, ‘Les sources françaises du marxisme-léninisme’, Cahiers du communisme (1946); Roger Garaudy, Les sources françaises du socialisme scientifique (Paris: Éditions Hier et aujourd’hui, 1948). 63 Gaston Mialaret, Le plan Langevin-Wallon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 64 See Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains. 1940–1953. 65 Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals; Verdès-Leroux, Au service du Parti. Le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944–1956). 66 Roger Vailland, Drôle de jeu (Paris: Bûchet-Chastel, 1945), translated as Roger Vailland, Playing with Fire, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).

210 Notes 67 Louis Aragon, Aurélien (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), published in English as Louis Aragon, Aurelien, trans. Eithne Wilkins (London: Pilot Press, 1946). 68 See Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, 150–4, Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, 511–84. 69 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Oxford: Polity, 1990), 41. 70 Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage (New York: Free Press, 1985), 513–36. 71 Pierre Boutang, Sartre est-il un possédé? (Paris: La Table ronde, 1946). 72 Jeanne Mercier, ‘Le ver dans le fruit’, Études (1945): 249. 73 See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’, in Situations, X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 154. 74 Paul Foulquié, L’Existentialisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), translated as Paul Foulquié, Existentialism, trans. Kathleen Raine (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947). 75 Foulquié, L’Existentialisme, 6. 76 Gabriel Marcel, Homo viator (Paris: Aubier, 1944), 242. 77 These relations are discussed in detail in Poster, Existential Marxism, 109–60. 78 Henri Mougin, La Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1947). 79 Ibid., 153. 80 Henri Lefebvre, L’existentialisme (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1946). 81 Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes (Paris: Denoël, 1947), translated as Emmanuel Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies: an Introduction, trans. Eric Blow (London: Rockliff, 1952).

Conclusion 1 See Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 688. 2 See Aron, ‘Les désillusions de la liberté’. 3 ‘Bricolage’ is a term originally used for amateur ‘do-it-yourself’ manual building work. See the Introduction and Chapter 3. 4 Sartre, Situations III, 63. 5 De Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 3, 178. 6 Beauvoir, La Force des choses, 50–1. 7 See Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome.

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222 Bibliography —— ‘La nationalisation de la littérature’. Les Temps modernes 1, no. 2 (1945): 193–211. —— La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. —— ‘La République du silence’. Les Lettres françaises, 9 September 1944, 1. —— Les mouches: drame en trois actes. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. —— L’Etre et le néant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. —— L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1946. —— Loser Wins … A Play in Five Acts. Translated by Sylvia Leeson and George Leeson. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960. —— ‘Matérialisme et révolution’. Les Temps modernes (1946): 1537–63. —— Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962. —— Oeuvres romanesques. Edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. —— ‘Paris sous l’occupation’. La France libre, 15 November 1944, 9–18. —— Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. —— Portrait of the Anti-Semite. Translated by Erik de Mauny. London: Secker & Warburg; Lindsay Drummond, 1948. —— ‘Présentation’. Les Temps modernes 1, no. 1 (1945): 1–21. —— ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? I’. La République française 2, no. 8 (1945): 5–6. —— ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur? II’. La République française 2, no. 9 (1945): 14–17. —— The Reprieve. Translated by Eric Sutton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947. —— Situations II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. —— Situations III. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. —— Situations VIII. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. —— Three Plays: Crime Passionel, Men without Shadows and The Respectable Prostitute. Translated by Kitty Black. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949. —— What is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Methuen, 1950. Schalk, David L. The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Schnapper, Dominique. ‘Existe-t-il une identité française?’ In L’identité, edited by Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan, 297–306. Paris: Sciences humaines, 1998. —— La Communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Schofield, Hugh. Plus ca change in Franco-US ties [Webpage]. BBC News, Tuesday, 22 July, 2003, 16:16 GMT 17:16 UK 2003 [cited 8 October 2003]. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3087785.stm. Seton-Watson, Hugh. Nations and States: an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1977. Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: the Arts in France 1885–1918. London: Faber, 1959. Shennan, Andrew. Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal 1940–1946. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Sirinelli, Jean-François. Intellectuels et passions françaises. Manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. —— Les baby-boomers. Une génération 1945–1969. Paris: Fayard, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991.

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224 Bibliography Weitz, Margaret Collins. Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940–1945. New York; Chichester: J. Wiley, 1995. Williams, Raymond. Culture. London: Fontana, 1981. —— Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1988. Winock, Michel. ‘Esprit’. Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950. Revue et augmentée. Paris: Seuil, 1996. —— Le siècle des intellectuels. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Wodak, Ruth. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Translated by Angelika Hirsch and Richard Mitten. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage, 1997. Zérapha, Georges. ‘Le problème politique français 1789–1944’. Esprit, 13, December (1944): 34–55.

Index absurd 163 academics 3 Académie française 153 Action 172 Action française 136, 139, 166–7, 176 Afghanistan 1, 4, 106 Africa 127 Albrecht, Berthie 114 Algeria 11, 189 Algiers 7, 11, 17, 64, 115, 141 alienation 151, 173, 178 Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) 7, 42, 63 Alpert, Paul 148 Alsace 5 ambiguity 2, 4, 18, 43, 51, 54, 62, 76, 78, 89, 91, 108, 139, 150, 152, 162, 177, 185–7 America 4, 5, 7, 33, 36–7, 42, 57, 97, 100–1, 109, 112, 169, 174 Amitié française 128, 146 anarchism 29, 165 Anderson, Benedict 14, 17, 69, 82, 91 Andler, Charles 136, 137 Anglo-Saxons 101 Anouilh, Jean 30 anthropology 18, 20, 188 anti-semitism 161 Aquinas, St Thomas 168 Aragon, Louis 30, 81–2, 85–6, 98, 137, 140–1, 146, 175, 183 Armistice 2, 4, 6, 31 Aron, Raymond 91, 160 artists 3, 20, 29, 93, 100–2, 183 Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR) 102 Assumption 116 atheism 141, 149, 176 atonement 74 Aubrac, Lucie 114 Audiovisio, Gabriel 116 Augustine, St 159, 168

Badinter, Élisabeth 117, 118, 126 Baldwin, James 165 Barbusse, Henri 137 Barthes, Roland 35, 60, 62, 68, 110, 121, 130, 175 Baudrillard, Jean 60, 61 Bayard 31 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 27, 34, 97 Beaufret, Jean 143 Beauvoir, Simone de 56–7, 107, 121–3, 152, 157, 159, 162–5, 180, 184–6 belle époque 24 Benda, Julien 102 Benjamin, Walter 100 Berdyaev, Nicholas 178 Berger, John 117 Bergson, Henri 168, 178 Berlin 160 Bernanos, Georges 91, 120, 167 Beuve-Méry, Hubert 169 Bhabha, Homi K. 14 Bidault, Georges 67 Bloch, Marc 5, 13 Blondel, Maurice 178 Blum, Léon 147, 151 Bogart, Humphrey 163 Bonaparte, Napoléon 28, 95 Bost, Jacques-Laurent 165 Bourdieu, Pierre 60, 64, 76, 86, 107, 108, 128, 156, 176, 179, 181, 184 Boutang, Pierre 176 Brasillach, Robert 102–3 Braudel, Fernand 15, 31 bricolage 1, 60, 69, 73, 79, 83, 127, 144, 181, 184, 188 Britain 4–7, 27, 36, 100, 101, 109, 112, 155, 185 brothels 115 Bruckberger, Raymond-Léopold 79 Budapest 137

225

226 Index Budé, Guillaume 142, 203 Burns, Robert 131 Caesar 28 Café de Flore 165 Cahiers du communisme 172 Camus, Albert 44, 46, 57, 91, 97, 119, 147, 159, 163, 164 capitalism 50, 85, 90, 100, 129, 141, 178 carnival 111 Casanova, Danielle 104, 114 Catholic Action 166 Catholicism, Catholics 3, 20, 22, 24, 30, 46, 50, 66, 70–4, 78–81, 67, 101, 127, 133, 136, 139, 142, 145–6, 148, 150–3, 166–71, 175–7, 182 Cau, Jean 165 Cayrol, Jean 169 Ce soir 174 censorship 25 Cesbron, Gilbert 170 Chamonix 24 Chantiers de la jeunesse 139 Chaplin, Charles 56, 57, 163 Chartier, Roger 22 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 168 Cherbourg 65, 73 Chevalier, Maurice 54 Cholitz, General Dietrich von 65 Christ, Jesus 71, 73, 76, 78, 120, 126, 140 Christian democrats, Christian democracy 21, 46, 49, 58, 115, 137, 143, 145, 148, 153, 158, 167, 170, 184 Churchill, Winston 7 cinema 24–26, 30, 44 citizenship 90 civilisation 20, 21, 46, 48, 137, 148 Clark, Kenny 165 class 3, 48, 84–105, 126, 136, 181, 187 Club Maintenant 152 Club Saint Germain des Prés 165 codes 34–5, 48 Cogniot, Georges 194, 151 Cold War 2, 10, 14, 49, 52, 57, 104, 126, 154–5, 171, 173, 179

Colin, Paul 53, 71–3, 76, 115, 116 collaboration 100, 103, 110, 144, 157–8, 182–6 Collège de France 136, 163 Colonial Exhibition (1931) 24 colonies 10 Combat 46, 97, 146–7, 163 comics 25, 44 Comité général d’études (CGE) 146 Comité national des écrivains (CNE) 96, 103, 174 Commissaires of the Republic 51, 64, 109 commitment 96, 100–1, 161, 165 Committees of Liberation 51 communism, communists 5, 7, 9, 10, 25, 29, 46, 49, 50–2, 58, 64, 76, 83, 87–9, 98, 115, 127, 129, 137–9, 141–4, 155, 158, 170–9, 186 community (imagined) 1, 3, 14–15, 17, 32, 69, 71, 91–2, 98, 109, 112, 141 Compagnons 139 Comte, Auguste 136, 149 concentration camps 78, 120 Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC) 169 consciousness 160–5 Conseil national de la résistance 67 Construire 139 Cornu, Auguste 151, 172 Coubertin, Pierre de 24 Courtade, Pierre 175 crisis 49–50 cultural memory 2, 28 culture 1–4, 11, 13–15, 17, 18–24, 26–30, 43–4, 98–9, 102, 127, 129, 131, 133, 137, 143, 147, 151, 153, 186–7 Czechoslovakia 12, 50 D’Alembert, Jean 51 D’Astorg, Bertrand 169 D’Ouince, René 148 Dada 29 Daniélou, Jean 149, 168 Daquin, Louis 175 Darnand, Joseph 5

Index 227 Dautry, Raoul 56 de Gaulle, Charles 2, 3, 5–11, 13, 17–18, 27, 30, 37, 38, 41–43, 49, 52–3, 55, 58, 61–70, 73, 76, 79, 80, 89, 90, 98, 102, 104, 115, 146–7, 150, 153, 182, 185–6 de Lattre de Tassigny, Jean 9 de Menthon, François 170 death 70, 73, 78–9, 162 Decour, Jacques (Daniel Decourdemanche) 104 defeat 5, 44, 74, 80, 156, 166 Delacroix, Eugène 41, 115 Descartes, René 44, 52, 174 Descombes, Vincent 99 Deux Magots, Les 165 dialectic 173 Diamond, Hanna 108 Diderot, Denis 51–2, 174 Dimitrov, George 137 distinction 156, 179, 181 Domenach, Jean-Marie 157 domination 60, 64, 107, 109, 113, 117, 157–8, 164, 176, 181–5, 187 Dominicans 139 doxa 107–8, 184 Dreyfus Case 29, 186 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre 103 Druon, Maurice 86 Duhamel, Georges 137 Dulac, Edmond 115–16, 200 Dullin, Charles 93–4 Dumazedier, Joffre 21 Duras, Marguerite 157 École des cadres, Uriage 26, 139, 169 École nationale d’administration (ENA) 169 Économie et humanisme 139 economy 1, 10, 12, 14, 20, 44, 47, 89, 100 education 8, 17, 21–2, 26, 44, 136, 145, 174 Eiffel Tower 24 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 7 Eliot, T. S. 71 elites 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 21, 26, 32–3, 56, 58–9, 83, 88, 93, 100, 127–8, 144, 156–8, 180–3, 187

Éluard, Paul 30, 175 Emmanuel, Pierre 169 Encyclopedia of the French Renaissance 51 Engels, Friedrich 52, 107, 171–2 Enlightenment 51, 136 Épuration 91, 144 Esprit 46, 48, 98–9, 136, 139, 145–7, 164, 166–8, 170, 178 État français 6, 17, 18, 25, 31, 63, 69, 147 Études 139, 148, 177 Europe 10, 36, 129, 130, 136, 139 Europe 172, 174 everyday life 173 existentialism 3, 46–7, 58, 74, 91, 100–1, 121, 143, 149–53, 158–65, 168, 170–1, 175–9, 184 Fabien, Colonel (Pierre Georges) 41 faith 49 Fanon, Frantz 162 fascism 29, 87–8, 129, 137, 153, 166, 186 Fauvet, Jacques 67 Featherstone, Mike 19 feminism 107, 163 Ferry, Jules 23 Feuerbach, Ludwig 137, 149 First World War 24, 29 Flamand, Paul 169 Flaubert, Gustave 131 Fougeron, André 89, 124–6, 175 Foulquié, Paul 177 France libre 96 Franco-French war 2, 10, 26, 186, 188 Francs-tireurs et partisans français (FTP) 87 freedom 160–2, 184 freemasons 25 Free French 5, 7, 26–7, 30, 32, 38, 41, 44, 63–4, 67–8, 73, 80, 86, 103, 118, 141, 182 French Communist Party (PCF) 5, 9, 24, 50–1, 76, 83, 87, 102–4, 124, 133, 137, 147, 151, 165, 172–9 Freud, Sigmund 99 Friedmann, Georges 137, 151

228 Index Front national 87 Front populaire, see Popular Front Fumaroli, Marc 17 Fumet, Stanislas 139, 146 Gandon, Pierre 116 Garaudy, Roger 104, 174 Geertz, Clifford 18 gender 3, 106–26, 136, 181, 187 generation 157, 181 Germany 4–7, 9, 10, 25, 27, 35–6, 38, 41–2, 63, 79, 80, 99, 100, 102, 108, 110, 112–13, 118–20, 155, 172, 182, 186 Gid, Raymond 71, 76–7, 120 Gide, André 158 Girondins 48 Gisors 110–11, 123 Godot 49 Goguel, François 170 Goldmann, Lucien 76 Gréco, Juliette 165 Gruber, Francis 74–6 Guesde, Jules 171 Guterman, Norbert 137 Hauriou, André 141, 146 Hegel, G. W. F. 16, 99, 151, 164, 173, 178, 187 Heidegger, Martin 99, 143, 149, 160, 164, 178 heroes 63, 120 Herr, Lucien 137, 171 Hervé, Pierre 147, 151 Himes, Chester 165 history 35, 66–8, 90–1, 121, 130–1, 133 Hitler, Adolf 100, 120, 139, 176, 182 Hobsbawm, Eric 14 Hollywood 100 honour 9 Hôtel de Ville 63, 65–8 Hugo, Victor 29 Huizinga, Johan 137 humanism 3, 20, 27, 48, 51, 83, 119–23, 126, 127–54, 156, 161–7, 169, 173, 179, 183–4 Humanité, L’ 137, 172, 174

Husserl, Edmund 99, 160, 164 Hyppolite, Jean 164 ideas 2, 3, 23, 70, 92, 100, 117, 127, 155 identities 2, 3, 11, 22, 60, 69, 71, 91, 98, 106–8, 110, 118–19, 129, 130, 187 ideology 130, 148, 150, 156, 169, 184 images 2, 3, 23, 59, 61, 68–70, 79, 92, 131, 175 incarnation 66, 182 Indo-China 126 intellectuals 3, 29, 84, 92–105, 151, 175–6, 181, 183–4 Iraq 1, 4, 12, 33 Islam 196, 127 Italy 4 Jacobins 48 Jakobson, Roman 34 Jameson, Fredric 60 Japan 155 Jaspers, Karl 99, 178 Jaurès, Jean 137, 171 jazz 100, 165 Jesuits 168, 177 Jeune France 26, 139 Jews 8, 25, 38, 76, 78, 80, 161, 164, 166 Joan of Arc 31, 42, 73 Judt, Tony 99 Kanapa, Jean 150 Kant, Immanuel 99 Kessel, Joseph 86 Kierkegaard, Søren 164, 178 Kojève, Alexandre 164 Laberthonnière, Lucien 178 Lacoste, Robert 98–9 Lacroix, Jean 147–8, 151, 169 Lafargue, Paul 171 Lagrange, Léo 21, 25 Langevin, Paul 51, 174 language 3, 14, 33 Languedoc 109 Laval, Pierre 26, 118

Index 229 Lazarus 78 League of Nations 137 Leclerc, Colonel (Philippe de Hauteclocque) 5, 41, 63, 65 Lefebvre, Henri 34, 60, 126, 137, 151, 157, 172–5, 177 Léger, Fernand 175 Lenin 52, 171–2 Leo XIII, Pope 166, 168 Lettres françaises 96, 172 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 60, 188 Lévinas, Emmanuel 164 liberation 2, 31, 33, 35–41, 42, 44, 67–8, 103, 109–10, 116, 162, 173, 180, 182 literature 93, 95–8 Lithuania 127 London 7, 17, 64, 95, 97, 141 Louvre 115 Lubac, Henri de 149, 150, 168 Lucifer 121 Lyon 147, 169 MacKinnon, Catherine 107 Madonna (Virgin Mary) 70, 89, 116, 124, 126, 142 Magny, Claude-Edmonde 169 Maine de Biran (Marie-François Gontier) 178 Maisons de la culture 21 Malraux, André 137, 147 Man 47, 120–3, 129, 133, 136–40, 143–6, 151–3, 167–8, 173, 177 Mandouze, André 145 Mann, Thomas 137 Marat, Jean-Paul 174 Marcel, Gabriel 177–8 Marianne 23, 38, 42, 53, 71, 73, 89, 115–16, 124, 183 Maritain, Jacques 136–7, 146, 148, 166, 168 Marrane, Georges 67 Marseillaise 23 Marseille 139 Marshall Plan 10, 54 Martin du Gard, Roger 158 Martinet, André 34 Marx, Karl 52, 99, 137, 144, 171, 173–4

Marxism 3, 20, 47, 51–2, 85, 100, 129, 137, 149–53, 158, 168, 170–9, 184 masculinity 3, 117–26, 183 Masson, Loÿs 169 Maurras, Charles 139, 166, 176 Medusa 93–4 memory 14, 22, 28, 35 men 3, 107–8, 110, 112–13, 117–26, 183 Mercier, Jeanne 177 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 56, 85, 90, 102–3, 120, 153, 159, 163 Middle East 127 Milice française 5 military intervention 1, 2, 4–5, 180 misrecognition 60, 64–5, 117 Mitterrand, François 8 modernisation 56, 57 Monde, Le 147, 169 Monnet, Jean 10, 56, 58 Montand, Yves 175 Montour, Bernard 97 Montparnasse 65 monuments 92, 94 Morgan, Lewis H. 107 Morin, Edgar 157, 173 Mougin, Henri 51, 177 Moulin, Jean 27 Mounier, Emmanuel 21, 46–8, 91, 98–9, 136–7, 139, 145–6, 157, 166–71, 173, 178, 205 Mouroux, Jean 148 Mouvement de libération nationale (MLN) 146 Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) 47, 150, 167, 170 Munich agreement 50 Musée de l’homme 24, 140 myth, mythology 2, 34–5, 60, 62, 68, 82–3, 110, 114, 119–20, 124, 138, 140, 175, 182 Nancy 53 Napoléon, see Bonaparte narrative 2, 4, 14–15, 23, 60, 67, 169, 175, 182, 185 nation 3, 8, 13–17, 28, 30–1, 42–3, 52–3, 60, 66, 69, 70–1, 74, 76, 81,

230 Index 83–6, 89–92, 95, 99, 100, 104, 108–9, 113, 117, 124, 140–1, 144, 146, 150, 153, 179, 180–7 nation building 1, 3, 4, 8–11, 106, 180–4 National Assembly 8 national identity 2–4, 9, 12, 13–16, 18, 27–8, 32, 42–3, 59, 62, 70, 82–3, 106, 108, 116, 126–7, 145, 154, 180–7 National Revolution 26, 29, 31, 44, 79, 127, 139 national unity 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 28, 42, 51, 59, 61, 74, 81, 84, 86–9, 92, 112, 127, 140, 147, 151–5, 185–6 nationalised industries 8, 10 nationalism 13, 108, 142, 148 New York 146 newspapers 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich 99, 129, 149, 178 Nizan, Paul 138, 172, 177 Nora, Pierre 14, 28 Normandy landings 2, 4, 7, 64 Nouvelle critique 174 Nouvelle revue française 158 Occupation 6, 22, 32, 43, 56, 62–3, 85, 87, 96, 102, 110, 112, 139, 153, 157, 167, 172, 186 Otto lists 25 Palais de Chaillot 90 Papon, Maurice 8 paradigmatic dimension 34, 36, 45 Paris 5, 17, 18, 23, 24, 29, 36–8, 41, 51, 61, 63–5, 67–8, 71, 73, 96, 98, 115, 122, 140, 144, 152, 157, 180 Paris Opera 24 Parker, Charlie 165 Parodi, Alexandre 64 Pascal, Blaise 76, 160, 178 patriotism 85, 112, 147 peasants 86, 103–4 Péguy, Charles 47, 142, 166, 168, 178 Pensée, La 151, 172, 174 people 87–9, 103

personalism 3, 47–8, 100, 158, 166–71, 176–9, 184 Pétain, Philippe 2, 6, 7, 17, 25–6, 29–31, 41, 55, 63, 74, 78, 86, 116–17, 192 pétroleuse 41 Peuples et culture 21 Phili (Philippe Grach) 38, 39, 53 Philip, André Philippe, Gérard 175 Piaget, Jean 137 Picasso, Pablo 175 Pius XI, Pope 166 Plautus 131 poetry 34 Poincaré, Raymond 94 Poinso-Chapuis, Germaine 115 Poland 127 police 8 political structures 1, 10, 14, 20, 44 Politzer, Georges 104, 172 Ponge, Francis 152 popular culture 19, 21, 25, 29 Popular Front 21, 24–6, 29, 30, 87–8, 137, 140, 147, 151, 166, 172 posters 34, 35, 38 practices 22, 23 Prévert, Jacques 92, 94, 101 Prometheus 121 propaganda 41 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 168, 171 provisional government 2, 7–8, 18, 25, 27, 42, 44, 48, 63, 68–9, 80, 109, 144 publishing 24, 27 Racine, Jean 76 radio 24, 34, 96–7 Radio Moscow 27, 51 Radio Paris 25, 27 Radio Vichy 25, 27 Rambouillet 65 Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) 165, 170, 178 Ravanel, Colonel 50 rebirth 49–52 rebuilding 1, 4, 33, 45, 52–5, 98, 108, 126, 133, 146, 153, 182

Index 231 redemption 74 reform 45 regime change 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 18, 63, 180, 186 religion 38, 44, 69–73, 78–80, 82, 97–8, 124, 127, 131, 181, 184, 186 Renaissance 50–1, 124, 130, 174 representation 22, 61–2, 70 Republic 18, 37–8, 53, 55, 56, 67–8, 71, 113, 117, 124, 136, 142, 184, 188; First Republic 145; Third Republic 6–7, 13, 17, 23, 28, 29, 31, 46, 55, 68–9, 78, 118, 147, 156, 158, 166; Fourth Republic 10, 55, 68, 94, 153, 198; Fifth Republic 11 Resistance 2, 5, 7–9, 21, 26–7, 30, 32, 37–8, 41, 44, 46, 49–50, 62, 64–9, 73–4, 79–87, 95, 102–9, 114, 118, 123, 139–46, 151, 157–8, 163, 167, 170, 175–6, 182, 184 Resnais, Alain 169 reviews 34 revolution 21, 31, 45–51, 85, 90, 124, 176, 182, 186, 201 Richard, Marthe 115 Rimbaud, Arthur 95 Riom 147 Rioux, Jean-Pierre 23 Rixens, Léa and Émile 116 Robert, Fernand 142–3 Robespierre 48 Rol-Tanguy, Colonel 41, 65 Rolland, Romain 137 Romains, Jules 158 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 7, 63 Rosanvallon, Pierre 16–17 Rouault, Georges 120, 131–3 Rouen 42 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 174 Rousset, David 120 Rousso, Henri 6, 186 Russia 50 Rwanda 106 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 139 Saint-Germain-des-Prés 164–5

Saliège, Archbishop Jules-Gérard 145, 148 Salomon, Jacques 104 Salon de la libération 74 Sartre, Jean-Paul 20, 30, 47–9, 56–7, 61–2, 74, 93–7, 101–4, 121–2, 129, 138, 140–1, 150–2, 157–65, 173, 176–9, 205 Saussure, Ferdinand de 35 Scheler, Max 99 Schnapper, Dominique 14 science, scientists 100, 102, 130–1, 133 Second Armoured Division 7, 41, 63 Second Vatican Council 168 Second World War 1–2, 4, 33, 70, 84, 117–18, 130, 171, 185 Sète 98 shearing 109–14, 123 Shennan, Andrew 58 sign 22, 35 Signoret, Simone 175 socialism, socialists 21, 29, 49, 83, 91, 115, 137, 140–8, 153, 158, 165, 171–9, 184 Sorel, Georges 171 Soviet Union 12, 27, 155, 176 Spain 166 sport 24, 26 Stalin 50, 52, 89, 172–4 state 3, 7–9, 13, 16–18, 22–24, 27–30, 35, 42–3, 53, 55, 63–6, 67, 69, 73, 76, 78–80, 83, 90–4, 98–9, 102, 104, 107–8, 116, 124, 145, 147, 171, 181–2, 186 Stavisky Affair 50 Stibbe, Pierre 147 Stil, André 175 Stockholm 95 Strindberg, August 71 style 64, 67, 69 suffering 70, 74, 76, 78 Suhard, Cardinal Emmanuel 79 surrealism 29, 175 symbol, symbols 3, 5, 18, 19, 22, 31, 34–5, 59–83, 106, 108, 112, 140, 142, 164, 181–6 symbolic violence 76, 86, 90, 104, 107, 117, 183

232 Index syntagmatic dimension système D 1, 188

34, 43

Tabou, Le 165 Tardieu, Jean 169 Taslitzky, Boris 175 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 168 Teitgen, Pierre-Henri 170 Témoignage chrétien 145–6, 163–5, 170 Temps modernes 49, 85, 93, 96, 102, 121, 152, 158 Temps nouveaux 139 Temps présent 87, 128, 139, 146 theatre 25–6, 93 Thomas, Édith 114 Thorez, Maurice 48, 50–52, 87–90, 103–4 Times, The 52 tondues, see shearing Toulouse 120, 145 Tournier, Michel 152 tourniquet 68, 121 trades unions 119, 169, 171, 174 transsubstantiation 66 Triolet, Elsa 175 Trotskyism 165 Turenne, Henri de 95 Ulmann, Suzanne 98 unconscious 60 Union des femmes françaises (UFF) 174 United Nations 10 United States 7, 10, 27, 97 Vailland, Roger 175 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul 137 Valéry, Paul 95, 98, 137 Valmy 140 values 3, 9, 127–8, 130, 143–4, 165, 170, 184

Vercingetorix 28 Vercors (Jean Bruller) 27 Verdier, Robert 146–7 Vian, Boris 165 Viannay, Philippe 147 Vichy 2, 5–8, 13, 17–18, 21, 25–7, 30–1, 36, 41, 44, 56–7, 63, 74, 78–80, 86, 102, 118, 127, 139, 142, 144–50, 157–8, 161, 167, 169, 172, 176, 182, 185 victory 36, 41, 186 Vilar, Jean 71 Voice of America 27 Voltaire 104, 161, 174 Waffen SS 5 Wahl, Jean 164 Wall Street Crash 50 Wallon, Henri 51, 174 war 1, 4, 42, 70, 79, 176, 185 War Ministry 65–6 Washington 95 Weil, Simone 22 Williams, Raymond 18–19 women 3, 70, 89, 106–26, 183–4 worker priests 170 workers, working class 3, 76, 84, 86–91, 103–4, 133, 136, 175, 183 world fairs 24 World Trade Center 59 writers 3, 20, 29, 93–5, 98, 100–2, 183 Yalta 50, 89, 174 youth 44, 139, 167 Yugoslavia (former) 1, 4, 12, 106, 127 zazous, les 165 Zhdanov, Andrei A.

174

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