ROGER SHATIUCK
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their own country. The pacifists and the Trotskyite opposition could
do little more than call down a plague on everybody's house.
Dissent and disarray characterize any ideological case. But the
degree of polarization in 1935 almost equaled that caused by the
Dreyfus case. In April Maurice Reynal founded an independent
monthly newspaper to report on art exhibits and publish little–
known writers like Artaud, Queneau, Michel Leiris, and Reverdy.
Its name cannot be improved upon:
La Bete Noire.
But in its four
numbers the paper found very little "artistic and literary" room to
turn around in . The first number devotes the front page to a "mise
au point" by Leon Pierre-Quint. It is a revealing text. He states that
all literary and artistic schools are being deserted wholesale in favor
of the fascist leagues or the Young Socialists. The young are no
longer interested in surrealism, which has now "come into its own in
the university." The public has become so militant in its views that it
is no longer possible to make political jokes in the music halls and
cabarets. An uncommitted writer, Pierre-Quint reports, is con–
sidered either an anarchist or a
petit bourgeois.
The fourth and last
number of
La Bete Noire
was almost entirely devoted, not to an ex–
hibit or a writer, but to the proceedings of the Writers Congress.
Bastille Day in 1935 gives the ultimate illustration to the way
things were going. Organized groups had been jockeying for posi–
tion since May . It turned out to be a perfect summer day . While an
estimated 600 planes flew overhead, the police for once stayed sys–
tematically out of sight . Three successive
difiLes
or processions ran
their course passionately yet peacefully. In the morning, the tradi–
tional military parade took care of the Unknown Solider. In the
afternoon, something approaching half a million communists and
socialists, plus a scattering of radicals and every leftist intellectual
group with any soul, trooped in a joyful mass from the Place de la
Bastille to the Place de Ie Nation. In front of the statue of Baudin
(shot during the brief uprising against Louis Napolean's
coup d'etat
in
1851) they raised their fists and renewed his oath to stand fast on the
barricades. Here in the streets, the Popular Front discovered the
euphoric spirit that carried it to victory a year later. Red Soviet flags
mingled with the
tricouleur;
apparently for the first time in such a
mass meeting, both the Internationale and the Marseillaise could be
sung without catcalls. Every surviving participant testifies to the
semi-delirium of the occasion . Fascism
must
fall back before this
return to revolutionary traditions .
That evening, with torches, between thirty and forty thousand
