Roger Shattuck
WRITERS FOR THE DEFENSE OF CULTURE
During the last week of June, 1935, the heat in Paris be–
came pitiless.
It
was precisely the moment when scores of intellec–
tuals from Europe and America and Asia had been summoned to
that city to discuss the fate of their world. Inside the sweltering
Palais de la Mutualite in the Latin Quarter, a mixed crowd of close
to three thousand proletarians and mandarins, watched by muscular
ushers, listened to the opening session . They anticipated excitement,
portentous statements to match the tum of events. The newspapers
under their arms were still discussing a financ ial panic and double
cabinet crisis earlier in the month. The year had opened with the
Saar plebiscite in favor of Germany and with Hitler's reestablish–
ment of compulsory military service, followed closely by Ethiopia's
second protest to the League of Nations about Mussolini's interven–
tion in her affairs. In May, Laval, now premier, had brought forth
the Franco-Soviet Mutual Aid Pact, a package which confounded
the French communists, for it was accompanied by an unexpected
statement from Stalin endorsing the long opposed French rearma–
ment policy . The package also included the summary expulsion of
Leon Trotsky after two years of political refuge in France. One
wonders how many of the audience, most of them Soviet sym–
pathizers, could acknowledge to themselves the murder of Kirov in
Russia six months earlier and of the 105 people shot without trial to
foil the "plot." Only a few days later this same auditorium in the
Mutualite would house a mass meeting to celebrate the election in
the Fifth Arrondissement of Paul Rivet, the first candidate in all
Europe put up on a Popular Front ticket. Obviously the assembled
intellectuals had multiple occasions to rise to.
It was Friday, June 21, a little after nine in the evening. When
the people at the head table finally took their places, the audience
could see the startlingly bald and ascetic head of the chairman be–
hind the spider's web of microphones. He opened the session by
reading in a beautifully modulated voice:
Editor's Note: Copyright
<C>
1984 by Roger Shattuck.
