Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Britain before Munich, France made no systematic effort to keep them out. There were other places of refuge – the little Benelux countries, Czechoslovakia (until Munich), reluctant Switzerland, Denmark, where Brecht went, even, for very non-political Jews, Italy, until Mussolini introduced racism in 1938. (But not, from the time of the Great Terror, Stalin’s Russia.) They were only boltholes for the persecuted. France was different. In better times even the exiles would have gone there voluntarily. It seemed, and still seems, natural that the last great occasion before the descent into hell, when the entirety of a riven Europe still went on show, the International Exposition of 1937, should have been held in Paris. Where else? Almost certainly I am not alone in remembering it as both international and French: not only for Picasso’s Guernica and the giant German and Soviet pavilions glowering at each other, but also for the wonderful and luminous exhibition of French art, the finest I have ever seen.

And then, for a brief moment, France became not only the refuge of civilization, but the place of hope. In 1934 the native instincts of popular republican politics (union in defence of the Republic, no enemies on the left) combined with the unusually realistic sense of the passionately Francophile central European Comintern representative with the French CP, ‘Comrade Clement’, to devise the best strategy for fighting the apparently irresistible advance of fascism, the ‘Popular Front’.¹ A Popular Front won the elections in Spain in February 1936. In May it won the elections in France. It brought into office the first government in French history to be headed by a socialist – the communists could not bring themselves actually to enter the Cabinet – and an extraordinary, spontaneous outburst of working-class hope and joy, the wave of sit-in strikes, or more exactly factory occupations, of June 1936. I arrived in Paris at the tail-end of this extraordinary and remarkably good- tempered victory celebration, but enough was still there a few weeks later to make that year’s Fourteenth of July unforgettable. I was lucky to see it in the best possible way: driving round Paris on a truck with a newsreel team of the French Socialist Party, photographing the great day, doubtless on film-stock sold to them by my uncle.

For young revolutionaries of my generation mass demonstrations were the equivalent of papal masses for devout Catholics. But in 1936 the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, east of the Place de la Republique, was more than the greatest of mass demonstrations of the French left. (Nobody that year paid much attention to the military parade and other official government celebrations of the national holiday in the bourgeois part of the city.) The whole of popular Paris was on the street to march – or rather to perambulate between endless waits – or to watch and cheer the march, as families might cheer departing newlyweds after the marriage ceremony. The red flags and tricolours, the leaders, the contingents of workers from the victorious male strikers of Renault and the female strikers of Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, the Emancipated Bretons marching under their banners, the green flags of the Star of North Africa passed before the serried masses on the pavement, the crowded windows, the hospitably waving cafe proprietors, waiters and clients, the even more hospitable enthusiasm of the assembled and applauding brothel staffs.

It was one of the rare days when my mind was on autopilot. I only felt and experienced. That night we watched the fireworks over the city from Montmartre and, after I left the party, I walked back slowly across Paris as though floating on clouds, stopping to drink and dance at I do not know how many street-corner bals. I reached my lodgings at dawn.

Indeed, the Popular Front was almost designed for the young, for (through the agency of a new law under a new undersecretary ‘of sport and leisure’, Leo Lagrange) it introduced both the first national paid holidays and cheap rail fares. On the strength of the only money I was ever to win in the national lottery, 165 Francs (or about ?2–3 at the 1936 rate of exchange) I bought myself a fortnight’s backpacking in the Pyrenees and Languedoc, joining the first beneficiaries of the Loi Lagrange on the night train from the Gare d’Orsay to Luchon. The trip was to bring my first and only direct contact with the weeks-old Spanish Civil War, which is described elsewhere (chapter 20). It also introduced me (through a young Czech I met on the road) to hitchhiking, a practice then still virtually unknown in Europe, except to a minority of young footloose central European Tippler (hitchhiker). It was therefore very easy, especially after I discovered that middle-class French car drivers could be kept from expressing their detestation of Leon Blum and the communists by well-timed enquiries about what they thought about Napoleon – a subject which kept them talking for up to 200 kilometres. From then on I extended my knowledge of France every year through long backpacking hitchhikes.

By the time the war broke out I, like so many others of my generation, thought I knew Paris pretty well; in some ways better than London. I was probably more at ease between Montparnasse, the Pantheon, the Pont Saint-Michel and the long stretch of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Rennes than in any equally large chunk of central London. I could speak French sufficiently well to be beyond the stage when Frenchmen politely congratulate one on how well one speaks their language. I knew, or thought I knew, as much about the politics of France as about those of Britain, knew who were supposed to be the ‘in’ theatrical companies (Jouvet, Dullin, the Pitoeffs), had seen Renoir’s La regle du jeu when it first came out, smoked Gauloises at the corner of my mouth like Jean Gabin, and had bought both the works of Saint-Just and the speeches of Robespierre. In fact, we knew and understood very much less than we thought we did, but considering that most of us had no special academic, professional or family interest in French affairs, we felt at home in Paris. We were comfortable in France and with France.

However, there was one curious thing about the relationship with France. French people, the indigenous French rather than immigrants and more or less permanently resident foreigners, were virtually absent from it. For most of the foreigners in the 1930s, the French were physically present mainly as service-providers or extras on the permanent film-set of their country. It was not till the 1950s that my Paris became a city in which I had French friends and habitually spent my time with French people, as well as with the usual cosmopolitan community of visiting foreigners or immigrants.

The French were – indeed they still are – a remarkably formal people and their society a theatre with clearly prescribed roles and procedures. I cannot think of another country in which a notoriously womanizing, admittedly middle-aged philosopher in the 1950s still had as his stock-in-trade falling on his knees and presenting the lady with a rose. Unless officially committed to intimacy, Frenchmen still tend to sign everyday correspondence in the carefully graded flourishes of traditional deference (‘Kindly accept, Monsieur, the expression of my distinguished/ most distinguished/most devoted sentiments’). To be elected to the French Academy or the College de France, which still requires the formal declaration of one’s candidature, followed by the candidate’s ritual canvassing visits to all the electors, is a far more ceremonious affair than elsewhere; it is an honour and a recognized social obligation for those who have contributed to the successful academician’s outfit to attend the occasion when they are summoned to admire his ceremonial sword. Even informality is not without its obligations. When intellectuals were on the left, they believed that their status as such committed them to talking to each other in the vocabulary of Belleville. Nevertheless, it was then – perhaps it still is – difficult to enter their lives without some form of presentation. Only in France would one, calling on the great historian Ernest Labrousse at home – we knew each other quite well from economic history conferences in Britain – be kept waiting in the vestibule for the statutory ten minutes before being asked into his study and greeted affably as cher ami, cher collegue. A Professor at the Sorbonne and former Chef-de-Cabinet to Leon Blum knew what was his due. Jean-Paul Sartre was the only ex-officio ‘great French intellectual’ I ever met who seemed totally lacking in this sense of public status.

Equality itself was formalized. I knew I was accepted as an intellectual who belonged when somewhat younger French colleagues automatically addressed me as tu, as one does old boys and fellow- graduates of the Ecole Normale Superieure or similar elite educational establishments. (Of course communists of whatever status and country, except perhaps from the German Democratic Republic, also did so automatically, but most formerly communist French historians had ceased to be in the Party by the time I got to know them well.) Not that this implied personal intimacy. Because I could not detach it from intimacy, my personal relations with Fernand Braudelwere crippled for ever after the great man, very much my senior in age as well as eminence, formally