Metro Stop Paris

by Gregor Dallas

  Saint-Germain-des-Pres is the closest-knit, cosiest quartier and also one of the oldest in Paris. True, the boulevard itself has, like all of Haussmann's thoroughfares, cut a blind swathe right through the heart of the historic quartier: ancient buildings have literally had their northern half sliced off in order to make way for the boulevard. But people cross the boulevard as if the boulevard did not exist—it is the one spot in Paris where pedestrians have priority over the cars, and so it was in Sartre's day. On the north side of the boulevard are the cafés Deux Magots and the Flore, on the south side, opposite, is the Brasserie Lipp. The marketplace on the south side—it is one of the few examples of Napoleonic architecture in Paris, square and uninteresting—is on the site of a fair that had been held here since at least the early Middle Ages. The twelfth-century abbey tower ascends to the north, defying the clouds, and establishing a powerful point of stability for the community that surrounds it. In the abbey's interior you will find the original display of Gothic coloured sacred stone: pillars of red and gold, and a high starry ceiling that are enough to challenge the thoughts of any doubter of God. On the south wall are inscribed the names of near five hundred parishioners mortspour la France in the war of 1914-18, and well over a hundred mortspour la France—soldats, re'sistants, deportes, fusilles, victimes civiles in the war of 1939-45.

  Religion, fair and festival were what kept Germanopratins (as the happy residents are known) together for so many centuries. Trade was vigorous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance because outside the city walls of King Philip Augustus (which followed the current Rue de Seine) one escaped the city's taxes. The abbey's farmlands provided fruit and vegetables, while the clerics encouraged the spread of books, paintings and engravings; there was plenty of music performed in the streets. Most of the abbey properties were destroyed during the French Révolution, but the market remained, as did the books, the paintings, and even the music.

  War left its imprint. Because Saint-Germain was outside the city walls, Viking marauders were allowed to run amok in the abbey and its surroundings; in the fourteenth century it was the turn of the English. The near total destruction of the abbey during the Révolution was in response to a war with the rest of Europe that didn't seem to be going too well. But it was the last two world wars that most affected what one finds today in Saint-Germain.

  Speak of Saint-Germain-des-Pres to a Parisian and his eyes will go misty and his hands rotate as he conjures up images of intellectuals regaling themselves in cafés, of jazz bands pounding out all night in the cellars, of painters, actors and actresses joining hands with famous writers in the late 1940s and early 50s—one long, gigantic party after the Second World War. Yet there had been an earlier celebration. "The great epoch of Saint-Germain-des-Pres was before the war," says the painter and actor Roger Edgar Gillet, who turned twenty at the Liberation. Before the war you could find great writers like Roger Martin du Gard, André Gide and Francois Mauriac having coffee in the Deux Magots. The Flore next door was considered a bit of a pit; many of its clients were Poles, who are still today an important minority in the quarter. The main bookstore then was across the street at the Divan, run by Monsieur Martineau, who suffered from a chronic ulcer. Others preferred the pretty young owner of Champion, down the road by the Seine. Yes, those were serious days born out of the poetry and disillusionment of the First World War. Then, with the Occupation, writers and artists closed in on themselves. 'And they liberated themselves," Gillet goes on. "Yes," he ruminates, "after the war, came the explosion."

  Sartre himself thought the critical change occurred during the war itself. This was when the move was made by the intellectuals from Montparnasse to Saint-Germain-des-Pres; and it was during the Occupation that the Flore triumphed over the Deux Magots. Sartre said, "Montmartre became a forbidden place because: (i) it was cold at the Dome; (2) the grey mice of Boulevard Raspail arrived lugging sachets of tea, pots of butter and jam, and white bread: it was intolerable; (3) the métro Vavin was closed." Paul Boubal, the new owner of the Flore, installed a pot-bellied coal stove and, just as important, a telephone. German soldiers and collaborators frequented the Deux Magots; they rarely made an appearance at the Flore. During the last winter of the Occupation people passed mornings, afternoons and evenings in Boubal's Flore; one lady spent two to three hours in the toilets every day Sartre thought, "Either she's got enteritis, or she's reading compromising papers." Boubal became King of the Quarter, ran several dubious financial affairs, threw prostitutes out of his café and, with the Liberation, convinced trumpeter Boris Vian that he was going to run for Prime Minister.

  In 1942 Boubal noticed a little man arrive every day at opening, leave at midday and return in the afternoons to stay until closing time. He would always be accompanied by an attractive but very serious-looking young lady and they would spend their time scribbling at different tables. This went on for months. One day the telephone rang to ask for Monsieur Sartre. Boubal knew a man called Sartre and he was not there. The caller insisted that he was, so Boubal announced the name. Up got the little man: "I am Monsieur Sartre." The telephone calls became so numerous that Boubal put a special line through to Sartre's coffee table.

  Boubal was witness to the making of Being and Northingness and Sartre's roman-fleuve, Les Chemins de la liberte (The Roads to Freedom). By the time Sartre had got to his first plays— Huis clos (No Exit) was put on at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier at the time of the Normandy landings—he was so well known that he took to hiding in the café Pont-Royal in the distant Septième Arrondissement. Within weeks the term "existentialist" was being applied to the cafés, the restaurants, the jazz cellars and all the mad youth, the zazous, crowding into an ecstatic, liberated Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

  What was an existentialist? The popular weekly Samedi Soir ran an article in May 1947 on the troglodytes of Saint-Germain that defined an existentialist as one who stayed in a Hôtel for a month and didn't pay the bill. When the manager says he will seize his bags the existentialist clambers up the steps on all fours and puts on as many shirts and trousers as he can and slinks off to another hotel. After several months he has only one pair of trousers left, he can't sleep, so he spends his nights in the Bar Vert on Rue Jacob, writing on the lavatory and telephone cabin walls existentialist graffiti. . . And so the article goes on. Parisians remained poor for a long time after the war; conditions were worse in 1947—when there were a series of Communist-led strikes — than they had been at the war's end. People stayed in the cafés because they were warm, they ate in the little restaurants because there was nowhere else one could find food, and photographs of zazous dancing to the jazz bands with trousers held up by string show that the description in Samedi Soir contained a grain of truth. People often looked ragged and dirty (though the women maintained an aura of Parisian chic that had astonished American GIs when they arrived in 1944). Sartre himself was seen, the four seasons round, wearing the same dirty woollen sweater. The historian Alistair Home recalls meeting him shortly after the war: "Smelling like a goat, he rather set the tone. If ever there was a philosopher guilty of the sin Socrates was accused of, being a false corrupter of youth, Sartre seemed to be it." Part of this may have been just appearance (I myself met Sartre, years later, in the Rotonde—he was dressed in a dark blue suit and did not smell like a goat): at the École Normale Superieure right-wing students were known as "the Clean" while the left-wingers were called "the Dirty"; Sartre was one of the Dirty, putting on plays that shocked the Director and hammering out, to the delight even of the Clean, American jazz on the piano. Even when Sartre started earning big money he stayed in a hotel; it was considered "bourgeois" to live in anything as comfortable as a three-room flat. In the last years of the war Sartre kept lodgings in the Louisiane, on Rue de Seine, one of the "pimp-and-prostitute hotels" where Henry Miller lived in the 1930s.*

  In the cafés, the existentialist "family" sat at separate tables from the "bande a Pre'vert" and would rarely even be seen in the same locale as member
s of the Communist "cell." Part of the Germanopratin legend is that spirits were so jubilant around those little tables that all social and political barriers vanished. 'An extreme leftist would talk with an unconditional Gaullist, a Catholic with an anticlerical or ajew," recalled Daniel Gelin. "The only thing de rigueur was tolerance." Claude Mauriac, a Catholic, remembered a truly surrealist scene on the terrace of the Deux Magots one warm evening in June 1946. André Breton, former surrealist and arch-Communist, was surrounded by his old disciples when Antonin Artaud, who had been thrown out of the Party, walked by: "he gave a very low bow and Breton bowed even lower; it was from below the coffee tables that they eventually started talking: a most amiable chat."

  All those imbibers at Saint-Germain would have told you they were "anti-Fascists," but the term was getting a little worn around the edges— even in 1945. Sartre described the atmosphere in the Flore during the Occupation: "The permanent clientele was composed of absolutely closed groups . . . It was like an English club. People would come in, recognizing everybody; each one knew down to the slightest detail the private life of his neighbour; but between groups one never said 'bonjour.'" There was always the fear of mouches (flies) and corbeaux (crows)—spies. Most of those present would have been party to what Jean Cassou, critic and veteran anti-Fascist, called the refus absurde, an absurd refusal to accept the fact of occupation, though often counter to self-interest. But that was hardly enough to create a community of interest; each one stood on his guard. Here were the essential ingredients of the existential mind.

  Étienne Antonetti, a teenager who danced in the cellars of the Liberation, who loved Juliette Greco in her slinky black dresses, and enjoyed being in the company of Camus, Sartre and Picasso, thought there was something about being an "existentialist," even if he did not read Being and Nothingness at the time: "Our two maitres dpenser, Sartre and Ca­mus, brought, each in their manner, a kind of direction, a moral sense to life, and that really marked me, yes. That 'liberty of choice which determines the individual,' that was a part of me, I practised it."

  One should not underestimate the huge impact of Sartre's thought on his age. Sartre's initial understanding of freedom was drawn on two forms of being, the chaos of the universe of objects (the en-soi) and the structured consciousness of man (thepour-sot) which perceives this universe and constantly yearns to colmprehend it. In contrast to the German phenomenology of G. W F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, thepour-soi in Sartre's schema never arrives at its end, which ideally would be a "higher" synthesis in the form of an en-soi-pour-soi: God. Instead the pour-soi is destined to fail in its goal through an unavoidable process of self-negation; as Sartre explained, "man is doomed to be free," though that freedom can never be complete. In a critical chapter on "The Situation" Sartre outlined the limitations which consciousness was constantly running up against: the place I inhabit, my past, my environment (even when changing place), my neighbour and my death—Sartre quotes André Malraux's terrifying comment that "death transforms life {determined by my choices] into destiny [my past as perceived only by others]."

  Being and Nothingness is at times baffling. But persistence is rewarded by a privileged look into the mind of a genius. There are not many writers who have demonstrated such an array of talents as Sartre; he wrote a great philosophical work, a first-rate play (Huts clos), a splendid novel (La Nause'e) and a wonderful work of autobiography (Les Mots)—and he produced a lot else besides. His experience as a novelist and a playwright allowed him to provide graphic examples as demonstrations of his formidable philosophical theories. Being and Nothingness is filled with inkpots, cups, coffee tables, waiters in a rush, suspicious strangers, spies, anonymous crowds, oppressive police forces, anti-Semites, sadists, resisters and an anticipated liberation. It is above all a philosophical work born out of the German occupation of Paris: the reader finds Sartre working at the café de Flore or in the confines of his Hôtel room; there are shortages and absences; one discovers the impotence of an isolated civilian; one shares with him his despair, his hopes, his search for meaningful acts; his disappointment in the face of the constant annihilation of his will.

  To demonstrate how freedom is born not out of its end goal but from its initial negation—"that the practical conception of freedom is wholly negative"—Sartre takes the example of the curfew: "Remove the prohibition to circulate in the streets after the curfew, and what meaning can there be for me to have the freedom . . . to take a walk at night?" It is the negation of freedom which makes one conscious of freedom. That "surging forth," that birth within the pour-soi, the "original choice," the doomed effort to transcend the pour-soi of human consciousness into the en-sot of the objects about us always begins with a negation, with a threatened annihilation of the subject. The mountain outside the window is a colourful part of the landscape during a summer holiday in the Alps until the idea is born in one's consciousness to climb it: then the mountain becomes a challenge, a nightmare, a life-threatening object. This inkpot in front of me is not a coffee cup—it is through that "not" that human consciousness distinguishes one object from the other and imposes order on the chaotic universe.

  But in young Sartre, during the Occupation, that order is never complete, it is frustrated. The fact of frustration creates an existential anguish, a fear of the void and a desire to escape the choices before us. Man escapes the terrifying choices laid before him by putting on a mask of conformity, by living in "bad faith" with his pour-soi, his consciousness. Sartre is very cruel here, and utterly uncompromising. A man suffers from an inferiority complex because he wants to be inferior. A woman behaves as if being exploited because that is the easy way out of her physical condition. AJew in occupied Paris behaves as a Jew; a worker takes himself to be a worker. But it can be otherwise. In a toughly worded passage—remember this was published in 1943 — Sartre laid out the kind of choice facing the individual endowed with freedom, whatever his environment. "The most atrocious situations of war, the worst tortures do not create an inhuman state of affairs," he wrote: "there are no inhuman situations; it is only through fear, through flight and through recourse to superstitious forms of conduct that I decide that conditions are inhuman; but this decision is itself human and in thus acting I bear the total responsibility for my deeds." Acts performed out of fear, evasion or the resort to religion were for young Sartre made in bad faith. One had to take the bitter pill and embrace the situation, alone. Sartre appealed in print, in 1943, for "engagement" to an "authentic" freedom, a commitment to resistance. He contrasted the "partisans of liberty" to the determinists who believed that man's consciousness and his choices were conditioned by something beyond his control—for the Marxists by the economic regime, for the Freudians by the unconscious, for the Christians by God. Sartre's idea of "engagement," as he expressed it in the 1940s, was not simply political; it lay at the base of the individual's whole project of life. The freedom for which man strived, in a universe without God, was the only absolute capable of generating a system of values and of providing his being with meaning. But, though promised in the concluding paragraphs of Being and Nothingness, the work on an existentialist value system never got written; events instead would push Sartre, disastrously, down a more collectivist, political path of engagement.

  THE CAFÉ—JUST like the metro—provided an excellent example of how limited a collective consciousness, the nous-sujet, was. The sense of togetherness in these cafés was a Germanopratin legend that did not have much foundation in fact. Being and Nothingness gives a striking example of what café life was actually like. Sartre is sitting on the terrace of his café observing other clients while they observe him "in the most banal kind of conflict with the Other." Then suddenly on the street opposite a velo-taxi collides with a delivery tricycle: "we watch the event, we take part in it;" temporarily—like the commuters in the metro— one is engaged in the "we." The Sartrean "family," Christians and Communists alike, all participate, but once the event is over they return to their coffee and
silence.

  The abbey was right next to the principal cafés; it marked the central point of the Germanopratin community. Parallel to the boulevard ran the narrow street of Rue Jacob, with its clubs, its restaurants and publishing houses. Virtually opposite the Echelle de Jacob was a small provincial house with a tree in front of it: the house is still there, looking as provincial as ever, and the tree now reaches beyond the roof. In 1946 the editors Paul Flamand and Jean Bardet set up the new publishing firm of Le Seuil here; the top floor became the headquarters of the widely read Catholic journal Esprit. Just down the road was the Eitions Gallimard; its top floor was occupied by Sartre's new journal, Les Temps Modernes, founded in autumn 1945. Christians and existentialists formed a mirror image of each other, and not just in stone.

  A series of events going back to the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s had isolated practising Christians in France from the political and social mainstream. The republican separation of Church and state in 1905 had meant they could expect no support from the state, and the papal ban in 1926 on Action Française — mouthpiece of the extreme right with which the French Church had been identified—suggested that Christianity could not risk political affiliation. Many of the Catholic elite avoided the bitter choice Pope Pius XI presented them: they formally submitted themselves to the ban while secretly flouting it, the kind of hesitancy that made them easy targets for the atheist charge of "bad faith." The novelist Georges Bernanos maintained his political allegiance to Action Française and thus deprived himself of the holy communion for years.