400
PARTISAN REVIEW
representatives of the right-wing Croix de
Fe'l
marched down the
Avenue de Champs-Elysees, in step and in uniform.
It
was the most
impressive display of force Colonel de La Rocque's semifascist or–
ganization had ever staged, but from here on its numbers dwindled.
Amid this extreme polarization of opinion that obviously left
many citizens gasping, several forms of expression took on a re–
newed life. Every newspaper and review ran its
enquete
or opinion
survey on some variation of the question: can we avoid a revolution?
Congresses and meetings and assemblies came so fast that the
Mutualite
could not handle them and th..: traffic overflowed to the
Salle Bullier and the Cirque d'Hiver and the Velodromes . Later, at
the critical juncture of May, 1936 while the striking workers waited
for their new government to take office, this energy found a new
form of expression: the sit-in strike.
The only man apparently able to give some direction to these
events was neither a fanatic nor a rabble rouser. Leon Blum began
as a first-rate literary and theater critic and became a courageous
and honest statesman. But even his integrity failed the test of the
Spanish Civil War.
It
is either appropriate or ironic that at this
crucial moment France put itself in the hands of a literary man . In–
evitably he attended the Writers Congress and found himself face to
face ("nose to nose" as the newspaper account reads) with Aragon ,
who had written a wildly antibourgeois poem four years earlier with
the memorable line: "Shoot Leon Blum." At least one reporter was
watching alertly and wrote, "But nobody flapped. The communist
poet-politico cordially shook hands with the socialist politico-poet."
There is the decade in a nutshell. The pop front was a hand–
shake in the wilderness. Today, it has been romanticized by in–
dulgent memories and documentary films
(1936:
Le Grand Tournant)
into the last utopia.
Everyone I have talked to among the organizers of the Con–
gress produces the same explanation for all that effort: antifascism.
Yet the invitation sent out to writers all over the world began in this
bland style which
La Bete Noire
called "equivocal":
In the face of the dangers which threaten culture in a number of
countries, a group of writers are taking the initiative of bringing
together a congress in order to examine and discuss means for
defending that culture . They propose that the congress clarify
the conditions of literary creation and the relations between the
writer and his public.
