In
1944 the Nazi occupation of Paris was in its last deadly phase. The RAF was
bombing the city's railway stations and the Resistance was stepping up its
activities - to be met with fierce repression and mass executions. Following a
show trial, 23 members of a Jewish and other migrant workers' resistance group
led by Armenian communist Missak Manouchian were
executed, most of them in Paris in February 1944.
A
group of artists and writers linked with various degrees of commitment with the
Resistance met and socialised in these conditions, holding parties in each
others houses with quite a guest list.
Pablo
Picasso was living in Paris at the time and wrote a play, Desire Caught by the
Tail, which was performed in the home of surrealist writer Michel
Leiris, with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beavoir and Albert Camus taking part,
and the audience including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Picasso himself.
The party continued after the play: 'Those who stayed after midnight had,
because of the curfew, to stay til dawn; Mouloudji sang 'Les Petits paves',
Sartre sang 'Les Papillons de nuit' and 'J'ai vendu mon ame au diable'.
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George Bataille |
'Eager
to continue the mood of celebration, some of their friends went on to organise a
series of ‘fiestas’, as Leiris called them. The first was held in March at
George Bataille’s flat, where the musician Rene Leibowitz was in hiding; for the
second Bost’s mother lent them her villa in Taverny. They drank and they
clowned. Queneau and Bataille duelled with bottles; Camus and Lemarchand played
tunes on saucepan lids; Sartre conducted an imaginary orchestra from the bottom
of a cupboards…'
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Sartre and de Beauvoir |
'The third fiesta was held in June 1944 at Toulouse’s
flat, where the huge circular drawing room opened on to a garden. The hall and
the rooms had been decorated with flowers, ribbons, garlands, knick-knacks… At
three in the morning, Toulouse [Simone Camille Jollivet] made her appearance,
wearing rouge on her eyelids and blue eye-shadow on her cheeks. Unsteadily she
danced a paso doble with Camus. The party lasted til daylight, and when Sartre
and De Beauvoir, together with Olga [Kosakiewicz] and Bost, were walking through
the deserted Place de Rennes, they saw placards on the station wall: no trains
would run until further notice. Later on in the day it was announced over the
radio that English and American troops had landed in Normandy.’
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Simone Jollivet
('Toulouse') |
Of
course this group of friends were also famous for their socialising in Saint
Germain cafes such as Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. It was while
hanging out at the latter in May 1944 that Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir first
met Jean Genet who came over and introduced himself.
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Jean Genet |
After
the war they continued to party - in 1946 for instance Sartre, de Beauvoir,
Albert Camus and Francine Faure took Arthur and Mamaine Koestler out on the town
'to a little dance hall in the rue des Gravilliers and then to a nightclub, the
Scheherezade' followed at four in the morning 'to a bistro in Les Halles, where
they drank a great deal'. As existentialism became fashionable Sartre popped in
a couple of times to Le Tabou, a nightclub on the rue Dauphine that had became
popular with its black-clad aficionados. In May 1947,
the
news magazine Samedi
Soir published
a report entitled 'This is how the troglodytes of Saint-Germain live!', which
described the 'gigantic orgies organised by filthy young existentialists' who
spent their time 'drinking, dancing and loving their lives away in cellars,
until the atom bomb - which they all perversely long for - drops on Paris'
(quoted in Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey).
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Mamaine and Arthur
Koestler |
It's
tempting to apply Sartre's notions of 'seriality' and 'group-in-fusion' to these
convivial spaces, the former the everyday condition of individuals in isolation
from each other and the latter characterising those situations when individuals
overcome their separation in collective activity (Sartre famously quoted the
storming of the Bastille as the supreme example). If post-rave we can conceive
of the dancefloor or even the cafe as an example of 'group in fusion', Sartre
tended to see the group's fusion being dependent on the individuals within it
define themselves against some 'third' other. He wrote of the cafe as 'a milieu
of indifference, where other people exist without troubling about me while I
don't worry about them', and indeed did much of his writing in cafes on this
basis.
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Francine Faure and Albert
Camus |
Source
of all quotes unless otherwise stated: Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A
Biography of Sartre
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