"PAS DE MARCHANDISE"
165
British radio broadcasts. So far as I know, there was no attempt by the
authorities to enforce 'this prohibition. This popular sympathy with De
Gaulle and the English springs entirely from the fact that England is
Hitler's antagonist. The vague rhetoric about 'justice' and 'democracy'
which Churchill and the other British leaders send over the air waves is
taken no
mor~
seriously by the Parisian masses than the counter-propa–
ganda about the 'new order' emanating from Munich. The average Parisian
is realistic enough to know why a 'democratic' crusade led by the Royal–
ist, De Gaulle, and the Tory, Churchill, has to be rather vague as to its
war aims. A catastrophe of the proportions of the one suffered by France
since last May makes
realpolitikers
out of the most innocent-and the
French have never been noted for their innocence in such matters.
By the time I left Paris, there was a perceptible tightening of the
German military rule. The policy of the
Kommandantur
has been to stay
in the background as much as possible, interfering with the civil life of
the city only when absolutely necessary. Thus the enforcement of the laws
in general and even of the German military regulations was left to the
regular French police. The student riots on the Champs Elysees on
November ll, however, were so serious that it was necessary to use Ger–
man troops to put them down, a precedent which will probably have to be
repeated in the future. Even more significant was the
Aujourd'/ut,i
inci- ·
dent. Early in September, a new daily paper,
Aujourd'hui,
appeared on
the Paris newsstands. Its editor was Henri Jeanson, a well-known jour–
nalist who had been jailed by the Daladier government for writing an
article "inciting soldiers to rebellion."
Aujourd'hui
took the same gen–
eral line as Doriot's
Le Cri du Peuple
and Deat's
L'Oeuvre-that
is,
against the old democratic capitalism and for Franco-German collabora–
tion in a 'United States of Europe.' It was distinguished, however, by the
fact that it printed no anti-Semitic material, and by the very popular
campaign it put on to get the Vichy regime to release the anarcho-syndical –
ist, Lecoin, still imprisoned for his anti-war activities. The Germans
allowed
Aujourd'hui
much latitude, apparently to see how much support
&uch ideas would get.
It
was not long, however, before they were forced
lo summarily remove Jeanson and replace him by Suares, a more docile
Pditor.
A final instance was the long-delayed purge of the Seine bookstalls.
For months after the list of forbidden books was issued, one could still
buy quite openly in the second-hand bookshops of the Quartier Latin and
along the Seine, the works of banned authors like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky,
Freud and Thomas Mann. Many students spent their spare cash in mak–
ing large private collections of this illegal literature. Early this year,
however, just before I left Paris, the Gestapo suddenly descended on the
bookshops, demanding that all copies of works on a lon3 list be handed
over within half an hour. I might add that the Bibliotheque Nationale,
closed to all except scholars by the Daladier regime, has not been reopened
to the public.
