If you could live in any historical period, where would you go and who would you be? I used to imagine myself as an aristocratic woman hosting a salon in eighteenth-century Paris, carrying on brilliant conversations with all the fine philosophers in my living room—the only stipulation being that I got to die of natural causes before the fateful summer of 1789.
But then I was seduced by the myth of the heroic French Resistance. Forget the towering pouf hairstyles, the wigs and powder, the punishing corsets, the dubious medical practices (leeches?) and nasty smallpox epidemics. If I’d lived in Paris during World War II, I’d have been arguing passionately about matters of life and death while writing my own books by day, risking my life for those same ideals by night. I’d have been among the throngs mobbing the streets at the Liberation, cheering as Charles de Gaulle marched down the Champs Élysées at the head of the victorious Allied army.
A few years later you’d have found me smoking Gitanes at some Left Bank café with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For a time, we’d have been celebrated the world over for our moral fortitude. We’d have taken a stand against colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria. Together, we’d have defended Stalin, and stuck with him long past the time when most people lost faith in the Soviet experiment. In May of 1968, we’d have been on the barricades with the students, and then we’d have gone on to sing Mao’s praises during the Cultural Revolution.
Well, I might not have stayed with Sartre to the bitter end. By the time he died in 1980, he was respected more for his plays and his Existentialist philosophy than for his politics, most of the causes he’d supported having lost their luster.
Last to crumble was the the myth of the heroic role he’d played, along with so many of his countrymen, in resisting the Nazis—which is strange, since Sartre himself shattered that myth in “Paris Under the Occupation.” Written a few months after the Liberation in 1944, and addressed to an audience outside of France, Sartre admits that the majority of French people, himself included, went about their daily lives under the German Occupation as before. “Who would understand me if I said that at the time it was intolerable and that we accommodated ourselves to it quite well?”
Here was a country that had capitulated to the Germans in six weeks. In the unoccupied zone, an authoritarian, right-wing government headquartered in Vichy had pursued a policy of collaboration, lending support to the German war effort at the expense of its own people. Some seven hundred thousand French laborers were conscripted to work in Germany; French crops were requisitioned; French factories were refurbished to produce war materiel for the enemy.
Heroes were scarce in the early years of the Occupation, resistance limited to groups targeted for elimination by the Nazis: Communists, Jews, and foreigners. Vichy’s social agenda only reinforced Hitler’s, its so-called “National Revolution” a campaign to return to the order and simplicity of a premodern past and cleanse France of its impurities, namely, Communists, Jews, and foreigners.
The ease with which the French accommodated themselves to the Germans for four long years cannot be denied; nor is Sartre begging his foreign audience for forgiveness. Rather, he aims to explain the complicated reality of day-to-day life in occupied Paris, the “gray zone” that other guilt-ridden survivors of trauma have also sought to describe. “The evil was everywhere,” he writes, “every choice was a bad choice, and yet it was necessary to choose and we are responsible.”
The man who famously proclaimed, “Hell is other people” in his best-known play, No Exit, finds it hard to live with himself in this essay. Somehow I like him more for telling us. Another cigarette, Monsieur Sartre?
_______
Sartre's essay "Paris Under the Occupation", translated from the French with an introduction by Lisa Lieberman can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads , Barnes and Noble Nook Books and Google Books.
For a preview of "Paris Under the Occupation" visit Now and Then Reader.
No comments:
Post a Comment