government, which overtaxed them, and most of the politicians and the journalists who tried to ‘stuff our brains’ (bourrage de cranes). The Canard confirmed their convictions, though, like its readers, it did not actually denounce the system. As in Marcel Pagnol’s then famous comedy Topaze, in which an idealistic schoolmaster learns that careers and wealth are not achieved by republican virtue – not even the state’s recognition of educational merit, the order of the Palmes Academiques for which he thirsts10 – corruption was not for crusading but for disenchanted laughs.
Nothing could have been further from the world of the Canard than my instructor in the ways of another France, Madame Humbline Croissant, in whose apartment by the Porte de Versailles I lived during the summer of 1936. I was on a grant from the London County Council while waiting to go up to Cambridge. Madame Croissant, a grey-haired lady of Norman origin, played the harp, took the ancient and conservative Revue des Deux Mondes, and disapproved, among many other matters, of my reading of Proust, whom I brought into her salon from the Gallimard lending library on the boulevard Raspail which I visited almost as regularly as the Dome in Montparnasse. (The Gallimard bookshop is still on the same block today.) In her view Proust wrote bad French. On the other hand, she taught me the firm truths of the French table such as that meat and vegetables must not be placed hugger-mugger on the same plate but eaten separately, and that fish requires wine (‘le poisson sans boisson est poison’). Her social life was restricted and formal. Marvellous though her cuisine was, I fear each of us was a disappointment to the other. Her France was not mine.
Young intellectual males of my generation were lucky to encounter France in the 1930s. (The scope it provided for young women of that generation was distinctly narrower.) Historians are unenthusiastic about the France on which I first set foot in the spring of 1933 and in which I passed most of my summers between then and the Second World War. Politically, the Third Republic was on its way to the grave. Culturally, France lived on capital accumulated before the Great War, to which Frenchmen added little after 1918. Most of the great names of the interwar Ecole de Paris, native or immigrant, belonged to artists who had reached maturity and established their reputation before 1914. As A. J. Liebling, the finest American writer on boxing, New Orleans, politics and gastrononomy, has pointed out, between the wars even French haute cuisine, like Paris courtesans, was past its golden age.
And yet, this is not how it looked to us. After all, Matisse and Picasso were still in full spate, and Renoir’s son, the finest talent in French movies, was producing a masterpiece every other year. What we saw was not a country in decline, let alone on the verge of the miserable and shameful episode of the Second World War, with which the French have difficulty coming to terms even half a century later, but the France whose image had been imprinted on the educated western world since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the quintessence of civilization and the good life. The famous joke that when good Americans die they go to Paris – it first occurs in print in the extraordinary compendium of French intellectual distinction, the Paris Guide of 1867 – still carried full conviction; indeed, Americans (North, Central and South) were to maintain their belief in Paris as paradise longer than most other foreigners. Even Nazi Germany could not free itself from this belief. The wartime memoirs of German sophisticates, civil and military, in occupied France, however convinced of the inferior moral fibre of the defeated, suggest that the conquerors still saw themselves in some ways as Romans among Athenians. Francophile foreigners accepted the patent and still unshaken conviction of the French that their country was indeed the centre of world civilization, a ‘middle kingdom’ of the mind like China, the only other culture which shared this conviction of its own unquestioned superiority.
What was it that made us take France at its own valuation? What made us think that Paris was still in some sense the ‘capital of the twentieth century’, as it had patently been that of the nineteenth? Except for painting and sculpture, and the extraordinary tradition of the French novel, nothing in French high culture and intellectual life was, or seemed, obviously ‘the best in the world’. The literatures of other leading European languages did not feel inferior to the French. Even passionate Francophiles did not argue the superiority of Rabelais or Racine to Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante or Pushkin. French music, however original, ran second to the Austrians’. French philosophy plainly seemed inferior to German (for young people of central European background), contemporary French science lacked the sheer mass of top-class achievement of Britain and pre-1933 Germany, French technology seemed to be stuck in the era of the Eiffel Tower and the art nouveau Metro, and as for the modern conveniences of life, apart from the bidet, as yet unknown to Anglo- Saxon culture, it was surely not the state of French toilet facilities that attracted young Americans and Britons to the sort of hotels most of them could afford to live in.
At a somewhat less rarefied level, the superiority of French civilization was taken for granted. Ever since Voltaire French wit had been the model for the western world. Nobody doubted that French women’s couture and cosmetics, French wine and food, were the best in the world, French (heterosexual) sex was considered the most sophisticated and adventurous, French style and taste in all these and other matters was something to which my generation inclined to defer. Even this rested on the long-established habit of turning selected superiorities of France into a general superiority supposed to be inherent in that country. We knew very well that there were a lot of things in which France was not superior. Yet our admiration for France was quite unaffected by the fact, which young men and women of my generation from North America, central and northern Europe could hardly fail to notice, that the French way of life between the wars as yet had virtually nothing to say about outdoor activities. It was not much into communing with nature. It showed no great interest in hiking, singly or in groups, mountaineering, skiing, practising, or even watching, team games; not even football. In the 1930s an ideological interest in the open air still seemed to be confined to conservatives, ranging from social Catholics to the frankly reactionary. In return, its only national grassroots sporting passion, the Tour de France of the cyclists, aroused no interest outside France except in a few bordering countries.11
On the other hand, France had one major asset. It appeared to offer its civilization to any foreigner who wanted it. It was ours to share, and we accepted it, and this not just because Mussolini and Hitler had soiled German and Italian culture – my generation would not have dreamed of vacations in fascist Venice or Rome – because British culture was too insular, and US culture visibly belonged to a different tribe from ours. The French Revolution, the starting-point of modern world history for every person on the globe with a western education, had democratized the most prestigious and exclusive of the great court cultures, and had opened the gates of a notoriously chauvinist nation to all who accepted the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French language one and indivisible. In the nineteenth-century France became not only the major immigrant-absorbing country in Europe, but also – especially between the 1830 and 1848 revolutions – the welcoming refuge for international political and cultural dissidents from all of Europe. Paris was the centre of international culture, the place to be or to have been. How else could the Ecole de Paris of the early twentieth century have become possible, in which Spanish, Bulgarian, German, Dutch, Italian and Russian artists rubbed shoulders with Latin Americans, Norwegians and, of course, the native French? In no other country was the wartime Resistance movement to rely so heavily on resident foreigners – refugee Spanish Republicans, assorted Poles, Italians, central Europeans, Armenians and Jews of the Communist Party’s MOI (main d’oeuvre immigree – immigrant labour). My own memories of Paris before going to Cambridge are of Americans in Left Bank art galleries, German surrealists in attics, the tables of the Dome cafe in Montparnasse crowded with impecunious artistic geniuses from Russia and central Europe waiting for recognition. My memories after I went to Cambridge and joined the Communist Party are of meetings with anti-fascist central Europeans in the Restaurant des Balkans in the rue de la Harpe, of the international conferences, filled with Italian, German and eventually Spanish refugees, persecuted Yugoslavs, Hungarians and assorted Asian revolutionaries, for which James Klugmann mobilized his young Cambridge loyalists.
For Hitler not only made France more than ever into an international centre, but, between 1933 and 1939, into the last major refuge for European civilization and, as fascism advanced, the only surviving headquarters of the European left. Though it did not welcome refugees and asylum seekers, being used to mass immigration unlike
