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PARTISAN REVIEW
Rue Montorgueil or the Rue de Clichy) when the
petit peuple
is swarm–
ing about the fish-stands and vegetable carts. These Parisians are tired,
and their very carriage shows their fatigue. One is staggered at the
thought of what they have been through, since the quasi-revolutionary
days of the first Blum ministry, in 1936. Nevertheless, the crowds here
continue to be composed of individuals: one
sees
an astonishing number
of faces. The most insignificant street scene-an overturned bicycle, a
housewife trying to get a refund on a pound of rotten apples-collects
what the French have rather misnamed an
attroupement:
a group of
loiterers (
badauds),
silent, sardonic characters, each with a half-inch
or less of dead, yellow cigarette-stub stuck in the corner of his lip.;,
and each prepared, later, to recount the origin of the affair masterfully,
to late arrivals;
in
the group there is usually at least one young wise-guy
(
titi) ,
who makes jokes at the expense of the principals in a broad Belle–
ville accent; and there are always a few good souls whose function is to
bring to the fore the resources of the French spirit, to lift the incident
from the plane of the banal and the particular to that of the universal:
these are the philosophers who argue with quiet (and usually pulite)
passion about the principles involved in the case of the rotten apples
and who never fail to buttonhole the policeman when he arrives. In one
of his less successful books, Marcel Ayme begins with an uproarious
scene of this sort, but his protagonists are very ill-humored and have to
be fo·rcibly prevented from coming to blows. Marcel Ayme is perhaps
concerned to show tha t, in the period he is describing, the temper of the
Parisian crowds had grown short, just as the moral world of his hero, in
Le Chemin des ecoliers,
is transformed by the conditions of the Occu–
pation. Duvivier's latest picture,
Panique,
involves the study of a crowd
which becomes a lynch-mob. The picture, by the way, is execrable, and
one of the minor reasons for its failure to convince me is that I could
not even begin to believe in Duvivier's mob. I have yet to see, in this
country, a really ill-tempered crowd.
And yet I saw an extraordinarily big one, the other day, when the
CGT called Parisian workers to demonstrate on the Champs de Mars.
Close to 200,000 members filed leisurely through the
beaux quartiers,
obviously happy to walk in the balmy spring air, and with no very clear
idea of what the whole thing was about. I asked one man why he was
manifesting and he answered, smiling:
On en a marre, un point, c'est
tout
(we're just fed up, that's all). When they reached the Champs de
Mars, a great many militants folded up their banners and went home,
without bothering to listen to the CGT speakers. The Communists seem
to have called the workers out in order to make quite clear- in the midst
of
the debate on Indo-China-that no French ministry could govern
without their permission. The other major parties, however, need no
convincing on this point; in fact they are constantly using it as an excuse
