Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  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 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 Clément’, 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 République, 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 café 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’, Léo 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 Léon 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 Panthéon, 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 Pitoëffs), had seen Renoir’s La règle 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 Collège 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 be
fore being asked into his study and greeted affably as cher ami, cher collègue. A Professor at the Sorbonne and former Chef-de-Cabinet to Léon 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 Supérieure 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 suggested that we should say tu to one another. Conversation became too difficult – rather like writing a novel without the letter e, in the manner of Georges Perec – if one could use neither the old formal vous nor the tu which resisted crossing one’s lips. I simply could not bring myself to treat him as an ordinary informal friend, rather than a graciously condescending patron, which was the role in which I had learned to admire and like him. (He played it to perfection.)

  In such a country, however easy the entry to the geographical space, entry to the human space was difficult without personal introductions, or tacit recognition signals rather like those codes which – now that the traditional concierge no longer watches over the comings and goings after dark and at weekends – are necessary to visit Parisian friends in their apartment buildings. My own codes of entry were the Communist Party and association with one clan of French historians. The doors opened for me at, and through, the Paris International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1950. At this congress, described in chapter 17, I met the sort of people out of whom Braudel, the great academic entrepreneur, with his wonderful chief-of-staff, Clemens Heller, was soon to fashion the counter-establishment to the Sorbonne, the ‘Sixth Section’ of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Today it operates as the ‘High School for Social Sciences’ in the black glass building of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, which Braudel and Heller managed to erect on the site of the former Cherche-Midi prison, facing the comforts of the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Gestapo had tortured its prisoner not long before. And the great innovation of the Maison as an official institution was not only that, thanks to Braudel, but particularly to Heller, it systematically tried to bring French and foreigners together, but above all that it recognized the importance of informality and personal talk.

  It naturally helped personal relations to be on easy terms with the group of historians round Braudel and the Annales, all the more so as with the exception of the great chieftain himself, whom I got to know in the middle fifties, they were not yet great, or even significant, names with major works to their credit. In a sense our careers advanced together, and so did our social relations – at least until the curious posthumous reversion to Cold War anti-communism among French intellectuals in the 1990s. However, the academically mediated friendships did not develop fully until the 1960s, and my closer connections with the Maison, the Ecole (where I later taught for a month a year) and the Collège de France not until the 1970s. This was primarily due to the remarkable Clemens Heller.

  Clemens, a large, shambling, distracted-looking man who disliked phone conversations of more than fifty seconds, apt to lapse into a macaronic mixture of languages, may best be described as the most original intellectual impresario of postwar Europe. The theatrical metaphor is suitable. Son of Hugo Heller, a Viennese bookseller and cultural entrepreneur who had the bad luck to attract the sarcasm of Karl Kraus, he began his career as a pupil in the Max Reinhardt Theatre School, before being sent to the USA after Hitler came to Austria. He returned as a US officer to launch the celebrated Salzburg Seminars, was extruded from them by the US witch-hunt, and established himself in Paris. There he and Braudel formed their extraordinarily successful partnership, to which Heller brought the profoundly cosmopolitan culture of expatriate central Europe, a smell for intellectually interesting and promising people and ideas, an international network and the ability to mobilize American Foundation money for his academic projects. France being what it is, this led him to be denounced as an agent of the CIA in due course, fortunately in vain. Music and the intellect were the guiding passions of this man of extraordinary warmth and generosity. One of the rewards of a long life has been to be his friend.

  Although my friendships in the 1950s came through the Historical Congress, they were mediated through the politics of intellectuals. They did not actually come through the Communist Party, although most of the people I met were at that time still in the Party. The French CP, an organization apparently run by political sergeant-majors, had a quite extraordinary knack of bullying and then antagonizing the intellectuals its Resistance record had attracted in such quantities, which astonished those of us used to the more relaxed ways of the British and Italian Communist Parties; but then, as my friend Antonin Liehm has pointed out, being a genuine mass party between the wars, it had, like the Czech CP, stalinized itself, rather than had ‘bolshevization’ imposed on it from outside. On the defensive after 1947 it retreated into a private cultural and political universe, fortified against the temptations of the outside world in a manner which reminded me of Roman Catholic minorities in the era of Vatican One, at all events in Britain. (Having been brought up in a Catholic country, French communist intellectuals were, of course, keenly aware of the structural similarities between the Party and the Church.) It had a proletarian distrust of intellectuals. When the British Communist Historians’ Group looked for opposite numbers in France, we got no help from the PCF. The pre-war party wanted militants, not academics. Hence the 1950 Historical Congress, though attracting young Marxists, was not attended by several of the subsequently eminent and eventually anti-communist historians who were hard-line young CP activists at the time – François Furet, Annie Kriegel, Alain Besançon, Le Roy Ladurie. I did not get to know them until their post-communist days.

  In fact, looking back, it now seems clear to me that the foundation of my network of friends was not so much communism as the common experience of and identification with the Resistance.

  For all this decade and until the tragic break-up of their marriage, my Paris base was to be the rather basic working-class flat on the boulevard Kellerman of Henri Raymond and the enchanting Helène Berghauer. To the Raymonds I went most of my vacations, and with them I spent most of my free time. For some years after the break-up of my first marriage they were the closest thing to a family I had. When they left Paris I would travel with them in their small car to wherever we agreed to go – to the Loire valley, to Italy, wherever. When they were in town I shared it with them, going round in their company, observing the passing scene from the approved cafés such as the Flore or the Rhumerie, watching out for, and passing the time of day with, acquaintances among the intelligentsia – Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Edgar Morin. When they were absent, I stayed there alone, using it as a private desert island. The flat made up for the austerity of its equipment by the sheer sparkling high spirits of Helène, and a spectacular Lurçat tapestry that had later to be sold at a moment of financial stringency. Like Henri’s friendship with the libertine novelist Roger Vailland and the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, it was a relic of the Resistance, which he had joined as a very young man. (It was to get an introduction to Lefebvre that I had first been brought to the Raymonds’ flat by a young woman, also of Resistance background, whom I had met at the congress.)