Writers and Defeat
Frank Jones
I.
LITERARY JOURNALS
of
F'~"
aTe hold;ng up the;, head, aga;n,
and-considering the circumstances of the resurgence--they manifest
astonishing variety and endurance in the intellectual life of the country.
One dares not surmise how long the resurgence will last; much of
it
may
succumb to a shortage of paper or of patience in high places; hut the
tragic and precious evidences it so far affords are to he treasured, whether
or not we draw from them a moral for our own experience.
These, as far as I can ascertain, were the principal events of 1941 in
French literary journalism. In the unoccupied zone, the
Cahiers du Sud,
organ of the Southern
avant-garde,
issued again from its regular Marseilles
office.
Esprit,
a monthly of liberal-Catholic tendencies, moved from Paris
to Lyons and resumed publication in January, only to he suppressed in
June for views implicit in condemning an anti-Semitic German movie
(interestingly titled
lew Suss)
and quoting Peguy, hero of Catholic social–
ists: "I shall refuse to obey, if justice and freedom require disohedience."
1
Even
Le Figaro,
quite conservative when a Paris daily, was temporarily
banned after maintaining in Vichy territory not only its high literary
standards hut also considerable freedom of expression on the relation of
contemporary literature to society. The venerable
Revue des Deux Mondes
moved toward Vichy geographically, no doctrinal migration being re–
quired: it is dull and respectable as ever, and strongly pro-Petain, pro–
Franco, anti-Marx. The
Revue Universelle
also continued, in a very un–
universal manner, under the editorship of Henri Massis, an authoritarian
Catholic who had long been of philo-fascist persuasions. In Paris, the
Nouvelle Revue Fraru;aise,
founded by Gide and others in 1909, began a
questionable new life as early as December 1940. The Germans were still
being 'correct' then, and Herr Ahetz was anxious to preserve 'intact' such
of the higher things in French life as could he kept politically neutral.
Jean Paulhan, the N.R.F.'s editor, was still in Paris, hut not neutral: his
last editorial before the blitz having offended Nazi susceptibilities, he was
imprisoned for a time shortly after Ahetz took up the reins of culture.
Abetz accordingly replaced him by Drieu la Rochelle, a man with as many
1
Apropos of the last
PR's
correspondence about
Esprit,
a remark of its editor
Emmanuel Mounier in the May issue is eminently quotable. Pierre Gaxotte, in the
course of a plea for press freedom under Vichy, had said: "One cannot imagine a
national revolution having recourse to a lie." Mounier commented: "One cannot
imagine it, but, as the saying has it, truth can sometimes be improbable."
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