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PARTISAN REVIEW
oppressive, even intolerable: yet, in the measure that people live with it,
compromise with it,
experience it as their own>
revolt is always secretly
felt as a crime.
I think the atmosphere of Algiers was truly tragic, at that time;
and there were moments, in the Petain trial, when the most pigskinned
reporters, crowded like clandestine worshippers in the catacombs of
the Palais de Justice, were aware of the presence of a mystery which they
could not define. But a few days ago the atomic bomb had disintegrated
thousands of Japanese at Hiroshima; Stalin had sent his Far Eastern
armies into Manchuria; the last enemy was offering to give up the
fight. Inside France, the drought had come to close the cycle of this
country's calamities; the French people were split over the constitutional
problem; and de Gaulle (I hasten
mode~tly
to remark that I predicted
this, in my last letter) descended truculently from Olympus into the
political arena. Tragedy involves the audience: the concentration upon
the Event of a peculiar kind of spiritual energy; in August, 1945, the
tense and desperately tired French are scarcely capable of rapt attention.
They've been chucking it all and dragging themselves off to the sea–
shore and mountain resorts.
And there, each month, from fifty to a hundred children are still
being slaughtered by the mines the Germans left behind them.
I went down to my office this morning and read some dispatches
about the wild celebrations in New York and San Francisco, then strolled
about for a while, on both sides of the Seine. The city was quite deserted
(today was a national holiday, the Assumption) : no excitement, no flags,
no crowds. A few G.I.'s raced around in Jeeps, waving copies of the
Stars and Stripes.
A forlorn little group of Chinese formed a
monome
and marched up the Champs-Elysees to the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier. Somebody in the Presidency dashed off one of de Gaulle's
what's-in-it-for-us statements.... This reaction, or la·ck of reaction, is
very important, for it involves the two facets of what one might reason–
ably name the French complex, the actual moral atmosphere of post–
war France. On the one hand, the immense fatigue of the masses, the
appalling strain set up by the simplest necessities of living, of finding
enough to eat-and the terror of the coming winter. On the other hand,
French intellectuals know, and the masses vaguely feel that the center of
the world has shifted. For the first time since the creation of the egg–
shaped world we know-i.e. since the Renaissance-France finds herself
on the periphery; weak, divided, her very internal peace dependent upon
the agreement of the two colossi which have emerged from this war.
The morning after the atomic bomb dissolved Hiroshima, the French
press was filled with stories tending to prove that Juliot-Curie and various
other French physicists, were really responsible for the whole thing. The
first reaction to victory in the Pacific, even from professional anti-
