Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  In my case it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life, comfortable, varied by travels, increasingly accompanied by Marlene, combining work, discovery and holiday, novelty and old friendships. Only the knowledge that people who live in poverty, the constant presence of disaster and death can also laugh, or at least tell good jokes, gives me the courage to say: it has been a lot of fun. It has not been a professional life of dramatic action, hardship or (except in the mind) of danger and fear. Like others in the small favoured minority to which I belong, I am amazed at the ‘patent contradiction between one’s own life experience … and the facts of the twentieth century … the terrible events which humanity has lived through’.3 By the criteria of professional success, it has not been unsatisfactory. It has given me more private happiness than I ever expected.

  Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: ‘One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.’ As the man said when I read him in my youth: ‘The point is to change it.’

  19

  Marseillaise

  I have gone to France almost every year since 1933, except during the Second World War. The country has been part of my life for almost seventy years, indeed for longer, because my mother had begun to teach her children French at home from the elder Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, an enormous stiff-bound volume which we never finished. She and her sisters had been sent as teenagers to perfect their French at a pensionnat in Belgium. I belong to the last European generation for which French was still the universal second language. Even after a long travelling life, I have probably gone to Paris more often than to any other foreign city: and for all of us Paris was and remained the core of our experience of France.

  I had first encountered it physically during a brief stopover on the way from Berlin to England in the spring of 1933. I travelled with my uncle, who presumably still had some final arrangements to make in Berlin, and must have had some business in Paris, for that city was certainly a detour from the direct route to London. I assume it must have been film business, for his later activities in Paris were based on an extensive network in the French movie scene, no doubt derived from his days at Universal, reinforced by his acquaintance with the emigrant film technicians he had known in Berlin.

  As boys from families such as mine expected to go to Paris sooner or later, I was excited, but not surprised. Indeed, excited not only by Paris but also by the prospect of passing Nazi frontier controls in the company of a young and well-dressed middle-class communist called, I think, Hirsch, also going to France for undisclosed reasons, with whom I struck up an acquaintance in the train corridor and who taught me my first phrase of colloquial French (‘merde alors’). My uncle had booked us into the Hotel Montpensier in the rue de Richelieu, between the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, of whose existence I was then unaware; a building which introduced me to the basic pattern of French lifts in the 1930s, apparently unchanged since the early days of the Third Republic. (On his later business trips to Paris my uncle stayed in somewhat less basic establishments – during his most sanguine era, the Georges Cinq.) That evening, and perhaps the next, he took me for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards, the long stretch of cafe-lined avenues from the République in the east to the Madeleine in the west, which in those days were still the main promenade of Paris, as they had been from the days of Haussmann, pointing out the whores, who were then called grues (cranes) and the red-light district around the boulevard Sébastopol, one of whose brothels is now being preserved as a historic monument from the ravages of property development. However, I did not enter any of them until some years later, when, in the course of a night on the town with a Hungarian communist, I lost my virginity in an establishment – I can no longer recall its address – with an orchestra of naked ladies, and in a bed surrounded on all sides by mirrors. The Hungarian, Gyorgy Adam, strongly urged me to visit Hungary, where the married middle-class ladies summering on Lake Balaton were, he assured me, only waiting for fellows like us. He was subsequently jailed in the days of the Stalinist purges, but remained a convinced Marxist. The only married lady with whom I ever tested his hypothesis on Lake Balaton, many years later, was my wife with whom I spent a short vacation there in the guest-house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a rather charming family-type establishment in which visitors kept their own bottle of wine from one meal to the next.

  The next day, alone, I went to the nearby Louvre, then still flanked by the gigantic wedding-cake of the monument to Gambetta, which did not survive the holocaust of (mainly Republican) statuary during the German occupation and since the war. I was impressed by the size of the Venus de Milo and, more sincerely, by the Victory of Samothrace and doubtless stopped before the Mona Lisa. But she did not speak my language. Another picture did, Manet’s Olympia. Perhaps it was natural that a virgin boy of fifteen should be transfixed by the cool, adult gaze of that astonishing image of a naked woman, glorying in luxe and calme, and for the moment visibly uninterested in volupté. And yet, what made my first encounter with this masterpiece so unforgettable was not the sensuality – after all, the Louvre is full of sexy nudes – but the sense that this wonderful painter was not interested in the incidental emotion but in ‘the truth’; in the stumbling words of a later generation of adolescents in ‘telling it like it is’. The Olympia is what I remember from my first visit to Paris. If I needed converting to France, Manet was the right missionary.

  I was in need of information rather than conversion. For the next three years, obliged to pass examinations in French for the first time, it came from books and schoolmasters, including a French intellectual preparing agrégation or thèse, who naturally assumed he was at the cutting edge of French culture. He assured me that there were only three serious contemporary writers, namely the three Gs – André śGide, Jean Giono and Jean Giraudoux. I do not know why he favoured this selection rather than, say, Gide, Céline and Malraux. I tried them all conscientiously, and found Gide boring as, I confess, I still do. I already knew about Jean Giono, from the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, which had published in instalments a translation of one of his rhapsodies of peasant life in upper Provence. I was so deeply moved by his casserole of sun, soil, passion and rural brutalism, that some years later on a hitchhike to the Mediterranean I made a special detour to visit Manosque in the Basses Alpes, where he lived, to pay my homage to the author – he was not there – and to dip briefly into the rushing icy waters of the river Durance, witness to his human dramas. I found that at least one other admirer had made the same pilgrimage, a not very attractive young woman of Polish immigrant parents, equally knocked out by his searing eloquence, and we compared notes chastely in the Provençal night. I still have the cheap editions of his novels of the period, but I have not had the courage to re-read them since.

  On the other hand, even today I find myself from time to time re-reading the elegant Jean Giraudoux, who was then known to a wider French public chiefly as a very successful playwright of intellectual inclinations, performed by the great actor-manager Louis Jouvet. His La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War will not take place), which demonstrated a melancholy conviction that another world war was utterly inevitable, remains a major text for students of the French establishment in the 1930s. I admired him for his soliloquies in the form of novels, especially the wonderful fireworks display of Siegfried et le Limousin, written shortly after the First World War and devoted to demonstrating both the utter incompatibility between what France meant to the French and Germany to the Germans and the complementarity of the two civilizations. Perhaps this explains why its author disappeared from French intellectual sight after Liberation, though not an unduly prominent Vichyite or collaborator. Suspended between languages and cultures like a lover between the competing objects of desire, I warmed to Giraudoux’s ability to be passionately, viscerally and intelle
ctually French while loving Germany, especially as he made fun of both.

  I did not need him to tell me about the Germans, but in Giraudoux I encountered and recognized for the first time the kind of France of which my friend the historian Richard Cobb has written better than anyone: the France of the Third Republic in which Giraudoux was rooted. The France to which I was introduced through the implausible medium of his novels was not the France of high intellectuals, confident in their superiority as only Etonians are in Britain – although as a product of the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure he was himself a very good specimen. It was the Jacobin France I shortly discovered for myself through its very own mouthpiece, and which became the France of my 1930s, the Republic of the Canard Enchainé.

  That grey four- or exceptionally six-page broadsheet of comments, jokes and cartoons, unsponsored, unsubsidized, refusing all advertisements, describing itself simply as ‘a satirical journal appearing on Wednesday’ and bought weekly by half a million frequenters of the Cafés du Sport and the Cafés du Commerce from Dunkirk to Perpignan, was perhaps the only national expression of the Third Republic. Indeed, its language, conventions, terms of reference and assumptions were so esoteric as to be largely incomprehensible to anyone not born and bred within it, at least without extensive commentary. Since General de Gaulle, whom it was to send up in a weekly ‘court bulletin’ in the classical style of the Duke of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs of Louis XIV, it has perhaps appealed more to graduates and the political in-groupies than to its original readers, the radical-socialist, socialist or even communist electors of Clochemerle (the archetypical community of the Third Republic, no longer recognizable in a country which is to abolish rural public telephones because of the spread of mobile phones in la France profonde).9 For it was an article of its and their basic faith that the Republic had no enemies on the left. (The other articles were a belief in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Reason, anti-clericalism, an abhorrence of war and militarism, and in the virtues of good wine.) It was utterly sceptical of governments. Its readers in the 1930s liked to think they had no illusions about the rich, who exploited them and corrupted both the government, which overtaxed them, and most of the politicians and the journalists who tried to ‘stuff our brains’ (bourrage de crânes). 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 Académiques 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 Dôme 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 immigrée – 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 Dôme café 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.