When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom Read Free Book Online

from Spain (Republicans fleeing Franco) and from Germany and eastern Europe (Jews and other political dissidents). Their presence infuriated the right, enhancing French nativism. A new government, this time headed by a respected military leader, could put the nation back on a more conservative track.
    One of those who most fretted during this confusing period was the thirty-one-year-old Simone de Beauvoir, a brilliant schoolteacher and writer then unknown to the French public. (She would not publish her first work, a novel—
L’Invitée
[
She Came to Stay
]—until 1943.) A confidante and lover to Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who had gone off to war in 1939, de Beauvoir has left us detailed descriptions of her reactions to the way confused Parisians, especially intellectuals, schoolteachers, writers, and artists, felt as they saw their city invaded by the minions of a gang of thugs. Assigned to meteorological duties near Nancy, in the eastern part of France, Sartre himself would be taken prisoner when the Germans finally invaded. He was then shipped off to a German prisoner of war camp (from which hewould be released in April 1941). De Beauvoir worried about Sartre, though she regularly received letters from him, at least during the so-called phony war (the French called it
drôle de guerre
)—the period between September of 1939 and May of 1940, when the only major battles in Europe were the Polish campaign and the Russo-Finnish (“Winter”) War.
    De Beauvoir noticed almost immediately a change in Parisian temperament as its citizens awaited with anxiety, but not yet dread, the results of their mutual defense pact with Poland. In the diary that she kept during these lonely months, she noted that there was a “mini exodus” out of Paris—nothing like the one that would empty the city nine months later, but still a symptom of Parisians’ bafflement at the threats from new types of warfare. As she accompanied Sartre to his mobilization reporting station in late 1939, she noticed that
    Passy [part of the fashionable 16th arrondissement] was completely deserted. All the homes were closed up and not a single soul in the street, but an unending line of cars passing on the quay, crammed with suitcases and sometimes with kids.… [Later] we walked up Rue de Rennes. The church tower of St. Germain-des-Prés was bathed in beautiful moonlight and could be mistaken for that of a country church. And underlying everything, before me, an incomprehensible horror. It is impossible to foresee anything, imagine anything, or touch anything. In any case, it’s better not to try. I felt frozen and strained inside, strained in order to preserve a void—and an impression of fragility. Just one false move and it could turn suddenly into intolerable suffering. On Rue de Rennes, for a moment, I felt I was dissolving into little pieces. 2
    This feeling of anxiety and of alienation from her familiar environment, of a “narrowing” of her sentient world, would soon spread to all Parisians, before and during the Occupation itself. With these sentiments came another that de Beauvoir was especially attuned to: the fact that anticipation of war, military occupation, and resistance called for a recalibration of psychological as well as physical senses of time. She said often in her diary that she felt “out of time”; that she desperately wanted to know the future and not be seduced by past happier memories, and that she wanted to mitigate her impatience at having constantly to live in the present. “Boredom,” she wrote on September 5, “hasn’t set in yet but is looming on the horizon.” 3 By November, she was writing: “For the last two months I had lived my life simultaneously in the infinite and in the moment. I had to fill the time minute-by-minute, or long hours at a time, but entirely without a tomorrow. I had reached the point that even the news of military leaves, which gave me hope by defining a