Patrick Bade
From Liberation to Student Revolution

Patrick Bade - From Liberation to Student Revolution

- I’m going to deal with a 24 year period this evening that from the Liberation of Paris in August, 1944, until the student student riots, you can see at the bottom there in 1968. So here, these extraordinary images show the arrival of the first Allied tanks in Paris at 9:22 PM on the 24th of August, 1944. And these were the tanks of the Free French Army under General Leclerc, so, and really staunching them, you can see the people swarming out of the houses into the streets to greet the tanks. But nothing was quite what it seemed to be with the liberation of Paris, that in fact, everything had been very carefully stage managed behind the scenes, the Americans, the British, the Canadians, had very deliberately held back to allow the Free French, the glory of being the first to enter the city and to give the French the illusion that somehow they had liberated themselves. So that’s the 24th of August. Next day, 25th, this is General von Choltitz signing the surrender of the German forces in Paris. This was, again, not at all what it seemed. Of course, as I’m sure you know, Hitler wanted the total destruction of Paris. He wanted it to be as thoroughly destroyed as Warsaw. And everything had been set up that with explosions on public buildings and public utilities and so on. But General von Choltitz was not an idiot. He knew that if he destroyed Paris, he would be hanged, or at the very least, imprisoned for the rest of his life. And he did not want this.

But on the other hand, of course, he had family back in Germany, so he couldn’t afford to let it be seen that he had voluntarily surrendered and avoided the destruction of Paris. So the whole thing was actually arranged by the Swedish Ambassador, a man called Raoul Nordling. You see the insert there that shows the Swedish Ambassador, and he negotiated with the resistance in Paris and with the Free French and a totally fake battle, like a scene from a movie was arranged around the Hotel Meurice, on the Rue de Rivoli, which was the German high command in Paris. So it looked like that General Van Choltitz had surrendered to force rather than willingly surrendering. And I used to think that there should be a statue put up to him for saving the most beautiful capital city in the world. I changed my mind when I got to know more about him and knew that he was personally responsible for the decision to destroy Rotterdam in 1940. So yes, scenes of incredible jubilation, hysterical joy in the streets of Paris as the Allied troops came into the city of, of course, the Americans were particularly welcome, and I’m quite sure that quite a lot of fraternisation, horizontal fraternisation took place over the next few nights in Paris. And so this is the next stage, big stage managed events. This is the 28th of August, and this is the triumphal entry into Paris of the cavalcade to General de Gaulle. You can see him leaving here, the Place de la Concorde, on the way down the Rue de Rivoli, to the Hotel de Ville where he delivered, what I can only describe as the most outrageous speech, I’ll play you what he said in a minute. He says that Paris has liberated itself with the help of the French people, it’s entirely due to their own efforts that Paris is liberated. Not a hint of acknowledgement that America, Canada, Britain could have had anything to do with the liberation of Paris.

‘Cause it’s totally untrue, totally outrageous. But it was all part of a myth that was being created in order to really offer a fig leaf to French honour at the end of the second World War. Outrageous stuff. But the Allies were prepared to go along with it because even though the Americans in particular really detested de Gaulle, they saw him as the best alternative to the communists who were extremely powerful in France at the time. So that what followed is, I think another really terrible episode in the history of France, in some ways almost worse than the collaboration of during the occupation. And this is the so-called “épuration,” the cleansing, the purification of France. And this épuration took place in several phases. What you are seeing here actually is the so-called, épuration sauvage, the wild cleansing of France. This took place in the very first week or so. Tens of thousands of people died in this épuration sauvage. This was your opportunity to get even with anybody you disliked or had a grudge against, all you had to do was say, oh, well, they were a collaborator and shoot them. And the photograph on the left shows a woman attacking a man who she had accused of having denounced her husband. And on the right we see a victim, somebody who’s just shot down. And there were many of these, without any kind of a trial or tribunal, people who were just effectively lynched and shot at the end of the war. And then even more terrible, of course, was the treatment of women who were accused of collaboration horizontale, head shaved, paraded through the streets.

These are such disgusting photographs. And I think actually what really revolts me about these photographs is the laughing expressions of the bystanders, truly a terrible, terrible episode. And I would say a stain on the history of France. So following the, the, the épuration sauvage, there were a series of trials and tribunals for all the people deemed to have collaborated with the Germans. And these again, took place in phases. And the first trials were of political figures and journalists and writers. And the initial trials were much, much harsher than the later ones. And in fact, quite a lot of the sentences were so harsh in the first set of trials that they were later moderated and rescinded. Of course, you couldn’t rescind a sentence if you’d actually executed the person who’d been on trial. We’ve got three writers here, on the left is Robert Brasillach, a very highly rated intellectual and writer. Before he was a novelist, he was a critic, he was a journalist. And the accusation against him that was, that he was the editor of an a collaborationist newspaper called “Je suis partout.” Well, he knew he was in for trouble, so he went into hiding at the liberation. He hid in an attic, kept a diary, and in the diary, he wrote, ironically, “Jews had been hiding in cupboards for four years. Why not imitate them?” He was flushed out of hiding when the authorities arrested his mother and he came out to save her. The trial was, well, nobody ever said that he actually personally attacked anybody, denounced anybody. But he was the editor of a newspaper with some very ugly views, anti-Semitic views and pro Nazi views. And the other slightly dubious factor in his trial was that he was homosexual. And this was clearly used against by the prosecution to prejudice the judges against them. So he was executed by firing squad.

And his last words before he died were, “Vive la France quand même!” Long live France, all the same. On the right hand side, we see a GI with Jean Luchaire, who was another, he was a newspaper owner and editor. And the girl is his daughter, Corrine, who was briefly a very successful film star and hailed as a possible successor. And even Greta Garbo saw her as a possible successor. I don’t believe that he was a believing Nazi or even a believing antisemite. He employed and protected, he employed as his secretary and protected Simone Signoret, future, great film star, all the way through the occupation, knowing that her real name was Kaminker and that her father was was a Polish Jew who was actually working for the BBC in London. So I think he was just an opportunist. And so, again, you could say, a sentence of death was pretty harsh. The daughter is, of course, she was sentenced to national degradation. That was the end of her career. And in fact, she was suffering from tuberculosis. And she died a couple of years later. But she wrote a short autobiography, it’s a touching book, actually. I found it really quite not exactly appealing, but I couldn’t really dislike her. The book is, if you can read French, I don’t think it’s been translated in English. It’s called, “Ma drôle de vie.” And what you can say about her was that she was unthinking and naive, and she lived a completely hedonistic life through the occupation without really thinking anything through.

Bottom insert is a man who is a great puzzle to me. This is the writer Céline, who a few years ago, was voted by readers of Le Figaro as the greatest writer of the 20th century. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with French friends about Céline. I say to them, “what is good about Céline?” I really, really can’t see it. And I’ve tried to read him in French and I’ve tried to read him in English. The only thing that people always say to me is, “oh, his use of the French language is so brilliant, so original.” Well, it’s so brilliant and so original that I simply can cannot understand it in French. And it certainly doesn’t translate into English, and it comes out in English as complete gaudy. So I always say to them, well, you know, Shakespeare, you can translate into any language in the world, and it’s still great. Whereas I must say to me, Céline translation to English is a pile of merde. And as well as incredibly unpleasant. I mean, he hates, he doesn’t just hate Jews. He certainly hates Jews with a virulence that almost goes beyond the Nazis. But he hates everybody. He’s just a man who is full of hate and nasty. And I absolutely don’t see the point of him. He was very lucky in that he wasn’t in France at the time of liberation. He was in Denmark and the Danes very slow to hand him over. So he was tried actually quite belatedly in 1950 in absentia. And he was sentenced. You can see how the sentences got got milder and milder. He was sentenced to a year in prison and in fact never served it. He appealed against that and that sentence was dropped as well.

So there, of course, amongst the first crop of trials were of the political leaders. This is Marshal Pétain, by this time, he was pretty well out of it. Probably didn’t really understand even what was going on. He was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle, because of his heroic, supposed, heroic role in the first World War, at the Battle of Verdun. His prime minister, Pierre Laval, was not so lucky. His trial was really an absolutely grotesque miscarriage of justice. I mean, there’s no doubt that he was a very, very unpleasant man. He was another opportunist. He was responsible for a lot of terrible things. He was responsible for the anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic laws of the, the Vichy regime. So you could put a lot of responsibility on him for the death of many people. The trial started on the 4th of October, 1944, and he was shot on the 15th. So, I mean, there was no way you could possibly have a serious trial that lasted just over a week. And in fact, Léon Blum, the left wing Prime Minister from before the war, who had, you could say, been one of Laval’s victims, because Laval handed over Jewish and left wing socialist and communist politicians to the Germans. Blum was very lucky to survive. So he could have kept a personal grudge against Laval, but he was shocked and shamed by the inadequacy of the trial. Others, well, I’ve already mentioned last time, great soprano, Germaine Lubin.

I love the comment at the end that nowadays people would be more shocked by the fact that she was wearing a fur coat, which you can see she took with her to her trial. She was treated with incredible harshness. She was sentenced to national degradation for life. Half her property was confiscated, and for a short time she was even exiled from France, couldn’t come back to France. And eventually her punishment again was diminished, but it was a terrible personal tragedy. And her son committed suicide. And she became, not surprisingly, a very embittered woman at what did they have against her? The only thing in the end, she was certainly a very difficult woman. She was not liked by her fellow singers. I can tell you that having read lots of singers autobiographies from this period, I think she probably was a bit of a cow professionally. And a lot of pigeons came home to roost. As she said, she was accused at this trial. She was accused of everything barring eating babies. But in fact, the only thing that could really prove against her was that she had sung “Isolde” with Karajan in 1941, something that she did in order to get the release of her son who was a prisoner of war. This is Sacha Guitry, he was one of the first people to be arrested, and there were a very lengthy series of tribunals against him. And in the end, they couldn’t find a thing against him. All charges had to be dropped. But he too, I think he never really recovered from this experience and became a rather embittered man. Mentioned last time, this is Guitry with his last wife, Lana Marconi. And there he’s in his splendid town chateau with his great art collection. Wanted to leave it donation, but changed his mind after this very bitter experience, left it to his widow, who immediately sold it for redevelopment.

Now Arletty, she too went through that she was imprisoned. She went through a series of trials, was treated quite harshly. But by 1949, she was once again, free to continue her career if she wanted to. And her return role was Blanch DuBois, in a play that the French called, “Un tramway nommé Désir,” it was a Tennessee Williams play, but translated into French by Jean Cocteau. So it was obviously a very carefully calculated risk to bring her back in this role of a woman of tainted reputation. And Cocteau very deliberately mistranslated the famous last line of the play. Excuse my terrible southern accent, but I’m sure you all know the last line. “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” And Cocteau translated that into French as… which means I’ve always gone with foreigners, literally translated, which obviously had a kind of her reference to her wartime record and her wartime German lover. Now, France had been without doubt, Paris had been the intellectual cultural centre of the western world. That’s screeched to a halt, obviously in 1940. As I’ve said, there was a very interesting cultural life going on in Paris, under the German occupation and things really, there’s a wonderful period just post-war where it looks like everything’s going to continue as it was before. Once again, Paris is really centre of exciting things. Here are two of the most in influential intellectuals of the post-war period, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his long-term partner and lover, Simone de Beauvoir. Now, as you can see, they really lived their lives in cafes on the left bank in the area of Saint Germain de Pres.

A lot of these intellectuals and poets and artists, they lived in tiny dingy insalubrious hotel rooms, or they slept in them. But they would spend all day in cafes, they treated the cafe really as their workplace, and their office. And it must have been so thrilling for people coming to Paris just after the war. Remember Eduardo Paolozzi, Scottish artist, Eduardo Paolozzi, used to talk about going to Paris just after the war and how you could meet all these people if you wanted to meet Picasso or Braque or Léger. He wanted to meet Giacometti. He looked his his name up in the telephone book and rang him and said, “can I come round to your studio?” And Giacometti said, “yes.” Here is another great intellectual figure of post-war Paris Albert Camus on the left hand side. In the middle there, the photo, you can see a very beautiful young man that, that is Truman Capote. If you know what he looked like later, you think, oh my goodness, what on earth happened to him? Anyway, he turned up in Paris as this beautiful young man just after the war. And he managed to hook up with Camus and they went out on the razzle and got drunk and they went back somewhere. And according to, to Truman Capote, they had sex. Well, this story is repeated in a book, which I recommend to you. It’s actually on the list I sent out. It’s called Paris Art Liberation, very readable. I got lots of stories, lots of stuff from that book, by Anthony Beaver and Artemis Cooper. But, as I said, they repeat this story and they said no, that it can’t be true. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It simply cannot be true.

Camus was a highly sexed, highly heterosexual man who adored women. He was extremely promiscuous amongst his lovers, at this time was the beautiful Juliette Gréco. And he had the long-term relationship with another beautiful actress, Maria Cazares. I don’t know, I think I wouldn’t dismiss what Truman Capote says. I would think that this kind of a man, highly sexed, extremely promiscuous, not really fussy where he puts it about, it’s just the sort of thing he would do. Not to mention, of course, that Camus had been brought up in Algeria, where such practises were very common. Other intellectuals who attracted to Paris. One, it presumed almost as it was just before the war. So you have James Baldwin, American black, gay, he obviously feels much, much more comfortable, much more at home in Paris than he did back in America. And then Samuel Beckett on the right hand side again, haunting a cafe on the left bank. So this is the great legendary period of Saint Germain des Prés, the period of artists, students, intellectuals, wonderful nightlife in in cellars where people were dancing, jitter bug and all this kind of thing. It’s not like that now, sadly. Or firstly, it’d be far too expensive for any of these people to live in that area anymore. And it’s of course now very touristified, not as it was in the forties. This is Boris Vian, who’s a sort of iconic period, a figure of this period in Saint Germain des Prés, multi-talented, brilliant jazz trumpeter, singer, songwriter, novelist, inventor, apparently a really extraordinary figure. Last night I was listening to a CD of his songs.

I wouldn’t say he’s a particularly good singer, but the songs are wonderful and they have wonderful texts. And he wrote a series of then highly successful novels under a pseudonym. He pretended that they were written by a half black American from the deep South. Who was… The author, was published as Vernon Sullivan. He claimed to have translated Vernon Sullivan’s work, but he was of course Vernon Sullivan. He’d never been to America. So it was really an extreme case of what nowadays will be called cultural appropriation. I must say. I don’t really get the notion of cultural appropriation, cultures thrive. They develop by borrowing from other cultures the idea that, you know, each culture should be totally separate, never borrow from anybody else. Seems to me to be a total absurdity. I did wade my way through, actually, no, it’s quite readable to tell you the truth. Through his most notorious book, “J'irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes,” “I’m going to spit on your grave.” And that was a hugely controversial book, banned in several countries in the 1950s. He is Boris Vian as a jazz trumpeter. If I get time later, I hope to play you his most famous song, “the Deserter.” Now this woman was the muse of Saint Germain. In the years after war. This is the fabulously beautiful alluring, Juliette Gréco. She was the muse and inspiration for Sartre. She was apparently briefly a lover of Camus.

Here she is, in front of the church of Saint Germain. Here she was with her lover, Miles Davis, another American black who found life more comfortable in Paris. And we have to hear a bit of her wonderful smokey, sultry voice. This is Juliette Greco singing. Another popular singer of this period, of course Yves Montand, who real name Livi, but Italian rather than Jewish origin. Starting life in Marsielle, a rather dubious background, really as a bisexual gigolo, the lover of a male singer called, Reda Caire, and then the lover of Piaf. So he was initially popular as a singer and then broke into movies and became, I think, eventually a very great movie actor. I’ll play you a little bit of his voice. One of his great hits of the period, “Autumn Leaves,” “Les Feuilles Mortes,” which he sang in. It was written for the movie “Les Portes de la nuit,” which was one of his first movies. The movie itself, not a success, but of course the song was. Rushing on cause there’s so much to cover. 'Cause the singer that we all know and love from this period is Édith Piaf, and I know David has done a whole talk on her, so I don’t need to say very much. But here she is with a great love of her life, the boxer, Marcel Cerdan. This was the happiest time of her life in 1948 till 1949, until of course he was killed in a disastrous air crash. And she wrote, she wrote the words of this song, which is an expression of her love for Marcel Cerdan. I love this song and I love the words actually, “I would betray my country, I would betray my friends if you asked me to do it.” She sings. I hate having to tear myself away from that wonderful song. But there are many, many other wonderful French singers.

It is at the last golden age, I think of the French chanson is Barbara on the left, Catherine Sauvage, Mouloudji, Henri Salvador, all wonderful singers. Three great singer-songwriters here, Jacques Brel on the left, Léo Ferré and Georges Brassens, all wonderful. My particular favourite really is George Brassens. He’s a naughty boy, Georges Brassens with of some pretty wicked words to his songs 'cause he wrote the words and he composed the music and he accompanied himself on the guitar. Perhaps his most famous song, which I did think about playing is, “le Gorille,” “the Gorilla,” and it’s a story of a sex starved gorilla in a zoo that manages to escape. And he rapes a very authoritarian right wing judge because he’s wearing these flowing robes and he thinks he’s a woman. But no, I’m going to play you the a song I play very often and I love it. It’s very naughty words. “Quand Je Pense À Fernande.” This song. One of my brothers who for a while he was going out with a woman who taught English and French in Norway, and she said to me, “oh, I can always get kids to learn English 'cause they want to know the words of the songs, but it’s more difficult to get them to learn French.” So I said, “well play them this song and at least the boys will want to learn it. It’s the word in French for, to get an erection or a hard on. So I said, "well, I’m sure all the boys will want to learn how to conjugate, bande.”

Classical music. France plays a big role in this period with two major figures from an international point of view, Olivia Messiaen, who we see here on the left, and his pupil and follow up, Pierre Boulez, on the right hand side. The most important, the first really important musical premier of classical music in Paris at the end of the war was of Messiaen’s, “Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine” “three little liturgies of the divine presence.” That title doesn’t really prepare you for the extraordinary nature of this music. It was premiered on the 21st of April, 1945. So technically Hitler was still alive. Germany had not surrendered on the 21st of April. But this piece, which he’d been writing during the occupation, it’s just, well, how can I describe it? It’s, sort of the scene incredible orgiastic jubilation that actually always reminds me of those photographs I showed you earlier of people celebrating in the streets. You just think, what are those nuns on? The wild craziness of that music. A very different, much more conservative piece. But one which is I think won the hearts of many people around the world premiered in 1947 is the Duruflé Requiem. Now, it was probably a very lucky thing for Duruflé that he was a very, very slow worker because this piece was an official commission of the Vichy regime. My guess is if he’d finished it during war being premiered and a success during war, that would probably have been the end of it. But I love it. It’s a very, very beautiful piece. But it does actually, I think, express that the ethos and the kind of conservative Catholicism, which was characteristic of the Vichy Regime.

You could compare it in a way with Carl Orff’s, “Carmina Burana,” which is the only work really that survives from the Nazi period department apart from Richard Strauss, and a work in a way that does also express the ethos of the period. Here’s the opening of the Duruflé Requiem. France was still a country that produced very great musicians, here is three of them, Jeanne-Marie Darré, Alfred Cortot, Marguerite Long, great cellists, Tortelier, Fournier. But the most marvellous French instrumentalist and most tragic loss, of course was the great, Ginette Neveu. I was having a discussion the other day, is she the greatest non-Jewish violinist of the 20th century? It’s a tragic story in that she came to maturity as an artist just at the start of the war. She of course, was not able to travel the world because of the war, began to travel the world to make records and a great reputation. But in 1941, she was on the same aeroplane as Édith Piaf’s lover, Marcel Cerdan. This rather poignant picture shows them just about to board the aeroplane. And she’s allowing Marcel Cerdan to hold her precious Stradivarius. So this plane crash was really an unbelievable disaster for France Not only Ginette Neveu, Marcel Cerdan, a number of very great French leading figures died in this terrible crash. I’m going to skip all of this, 'cause I think we don’t really. Want to talk a bit about the theatre and the cinema. And the first hugely successful play after the war was “la Folle de Chaillot,” “the Mad Woman.” By Jean Giraudoux. And this was a vehicle for the great character actress, Marguerite Moreno. She was a kind of a national treasure, wonderfully outrageous character. I think she was the French equivalent of Miriam Margolyes of her day. She was a very out lesbian for most of her life. And then in her seventies, suddenly married a foreign legionnaire in his twenties.

You can imagine the French newspapers had a field day with headlines of “the mad woman of Chaillot marries mon légionnaire.” Sartre, who’d written his first plays during the war, continues his first great post-war play. I remember studying this for a level and really being incredibly taken with it. “Les Mains Sales,” “Dirty Hands,” still reworking I think some of the same issues around resistance and collaboration. And in the theatre, certainly in the forties and into the fifties, Paris could still claim, I think, to be the theatrical capital of the world as far as the avant-garde is concerned. And so this, we’ve got. Dear having real senior moment here. This is Jean Genet and “the Maids.” And so the theatre of cruelty, I mean the French intelligence, you have always a thing about, had a thing about transgressive, you know, doing outrageous, immoral, impossible things. I’m going right back to Marquis de Sade. And it’s one reason I think why the French have got themselves in a terrible twist about the me too movement and, and political correctness. Jean Genet, of course had he’d been a petty criminal, thief, male prostitute, pimp, all those kind of things. And this actually has kind of endeared him, if anything, to the hearts of French intellectuals. This is Ionescom, great Romanian playwright, one of the most innovative playwrights of the 20th century and the creator of the theatre of the absurd. And this is Samuel Beckett, also one of the key figures of 20th century theatre, who actually by this period, he was writing his plays in French. So “Waiting for Godot,” which you see on the right hand side, was actually premiered as “En attendant Godot.” And films, I talked last week or last time about the wonderful, “les Enfants du Paradis,” which is many people’s favourite film of all time and will be up there amongst my favourite one. But I think if I have, number one for me has to be this, this is Cocteau’s “la Belle et la Bête,” made immediately after the war on a shoestring and such a magically beautiful movie. The most incredible special effects.

The night before last I went to see “Avatar 2,” which is certainly film that relies very heavily on its special effects at a cost of millions of dollars. Jean Cocteau’s special effects are just down to imagination and ingenuity. This wonderful scene where the heroine enters the castle and she walks down a corridor that’s lit by animated arms that are holding up the candles, of course is just an extra standing on the other side of a wall with a hole in it. And this one, this one, this magical, magical scene where she floats down a corridor with these lovely curtains blowing, in fact, she’s on a trolley, which there’s a little person under her skirts who’s pushing the trolley towards you down this corridor. But the effect is total magic. Another very great film of this period, Pierre Clouzot, I talked about it last week. He’s a director who’s period goes back before the war he made “le Corbeau,” which I talked about last time, this 1956 movie, “le Diaboliques,” it was always built as the most frightening horror film ever made. And I don’t really like to be frightened, so I did watch this film with some trepidation, actually, I don’t think, I didn’t find it particularly frightening. It didn’t have me cowering behind the sofa. It is a wonderful movie. It’s a very atmospheric movie. I don’t think I’m going to spoil it for you if I tell you that it was one of those movies where the audience were asked not to tell anybody after they left, what happens at the end. 'Cause there is an incredible twist in the plot at the end. But, it’s a story of a wife and a mistress who conspired together to murder the husband. And then of course, late fifties, you got a revolution in French cinema with the nouvelle vague, new wave. Young, I think rather pretentious directors who dismissed the sort of artiness and the skillfulness of the earlier French movies. They dismissed it as “le Cinema de Papa,” or dad’s cinema.

And so I’m not totally thrilled, really, I can’t say I’m afraid I’m definitely with the cinema of Papa rather than with the young Turks of the nouvelle vague, like Truffaut and Godard. And then of course in the popular cinema that was British Bardot who took not just France, but the whole world by storm at the end of the fifties and into the sixties. I think I’m going to not talk a lot about the art and just say there are, of course the older generation of great modernist artists were still around mostly they were mostly very long lived. So it was Picasso who joined the Communist Party. You can see this image drinking a toast to Stalin after the war. There’s Braque, there’s Le Giacometti who represents and still of course representing the older generation. Once again, there’s a new generation of young Turks, Jean Dubuffet, and Yves Klein with Jean Buffet. It’s “art brut,” art that is, again, rather like the movies of the nouvelle vague, deliberately dismissing the skills of early generation . Rating art by outsiders, by inmates of asylums, by children, of course, completely untrained people and imitating that kind of art. And Yves Klein, who is a pioneer of performance art and the happening and Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle who produced their version, I suppose, of pop art, French pop art. France was clearly very impoverished by the Second World War. And there were hard years, as there were in other European countries of rationing. Still, of course Paris has its reputation for luxury, for hedonism, for pleasure. And if you had the money, you could live a wonderful life in Paris. You could eat very well, of course. And the return of luxury was spliced by the launching of the new look by Christian Dior in 1947. What was so outrageous about this, of course, was that most women were still rationed for the amount of material that you could use in a dress.

So this was a really, a provocative display of luxury and hedonism this new look where, where you need an enormous amounts of expensive material. Not everybody appreciated it. You can see these young men looking discants at a woman in a new look dress on the left. And this is a famous occasion when there was a fashion shoot for Christian Dior in a market in Paris. And the local women attacked the model and ripped the dress off her. France involved after the war in two draining colonial wars, in Vietnam on the left. And Algiers, I’m sure that, William has talked to you about this. And this song, I want to play You a little bit of it by Boris Vian, is inspired of course by the war, the first, the French War in Vietnam. And it became the great protest song for the Vietnam War, the French one, the Algerian War. And later in English, of course, it was a very famous protest song against the American involvement in the Vietnam War. So here is “le Déserteur,” I find it a very moving song of the young man writing a letter to the president explaining why he refuses to fight. So this brings me to 1968 and of course Parisians are always on an incredibly short fuse. Think of the number of revolutions there have been since 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871. And well, the city is on permanent riot and revolution alert. I can tell you every weekend there are riots and protests somewhere rather in the city. But there was a real explosion, I think a true revolution. France changed very radically, I would say in 1968. In many ways it was of course an extremely good thing as the original revolution was.

But I can’t help regretting that I think great many babies were thrown out with the bath water in 1968 from a cultural point of view. Here we see, of course it was the end for General de Gaulle. He lost his nerve and he fled. But I want to end with a song in two versions. I was in France in 1969 on an exchange visit, school exchange visit, and everywhere that you heard this very outrageous song, by Serge Gainsbourg, “Je t'aime moi non plus,” In many countries it was banned. It was banned by the BBC for a while, but it was actually top of the hit parade also for quite some time. So this is the song. Oops, what’s happened there? The song of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s with Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg simulating sex while singing. The English version of “J'taime moi non plus.” Here we go.

SONG BEGINS

♪ J'taime ♪ ♪ Huh, what ♪ ♪ Oh oui, J'taime ♪ ♪ Oh, get over ♪ ♪ Not again, you know what time it is ♪ ♪ It’s half past three ♪ ♪ Oh, get off ♪ ♪ Now stop that, what’s got into you ♪ ♪ It’s not Friday, is it ♪ ♪ Oh look cut that out ♪ ♪ Pull yourself together, woman ♪ ♪ Look, control yourself and get back on your own side ♪ ♪ I’ve got to be on the first tea at half past six ♪ ♪ Oh J'taime ♪ ♪ Speak English woman ♪ ♪ Whatever’s the matter with you ♪ ♪ Leave my scarf alone ♪ ♪ Get your hands off ♪ ♪ Look, if I go down and make you a cup of cocoa ♪ ♪ Will you go back to sleep ♪ ♪ But J'taime ♪ ♪ Dear, all right all right ♪ ♪ But look, don’t go mad ♪ ♪ 'Cause I’m getting on a bit now, you know ♪ ♪ Hang on, wait a minute, I’ll just put my glasses on ♪ ♪ Oh, they’re nice ♪ ♪ Where did you get those ♪ ♪ Here, put that light out ♪ ♪ What are you thinking of ♪ ♪ I want to look at you ♪ ♪ Don’t be disgusting ♪ ♪ I knew I shouldn’t have taken you to see Old Cal Cutter ♪

SONG ENDS

So let’s see what you’ve got to say today.

Q&A and Comments:

The movie “Is Paris Burning?” of course, was about the plot of the German plot to destroy the link that no black soldiers were included in the footage. Yes, I know, it’s shocking. That actually really is shocking. The person who really struggled against it, of course, was Josephine Baker.

This is Monique, who it sounds like she’s French and she oh yeah, she’s a French speaker and she agrees with me about Céline. But as I said, none of my French friends, they do, they all think he’s wonderful.

This is Marion saying she couldn’t finish the most famous book, which is, “Voyage au about de la nuit.” Yeah, I just don’t get it. I really don’t get it.

This is Judy, documentary saw indicted the Jewish members of the resistance were purged partly cause many were communists. That is quite likely. And the French wanted the, well, there was a lot of the resistance was communist actually. No, it was very, the resistance was in different, it wasn’t a unified thing at all. When Ali said, witches on trial, when the judge about the Germans, you let them in. Yeah, that also could have a double meaning. I can see that.

No, Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalie both got away. It was totally irrational and really, I think shockingly unfair. The épuration.

Does Georges Moustaki, I think he’s later, I think than what I was talking about. Yes. Thank you Mickey. I think that résistance is a very good way to learn colloquial French.

Juliette Gréco was very, and her family, her mother and her sister were all very heavily involved in resistance and in fact, Juliette Gréco’s mother and sister were both sent to Ravensbrück. They were caught and sent. She was too young to go.

Sartre, it’s a very, very complicated story. It would need a lecture in itself and maybe David could do that lecture.

Q: Kathrine. Was there any soul searching about the role of Vichy regime by art?

A: Yes. There was a lot of soul searching. I think there was and yeah, I’ve never seen anything about Maurice Chevalier being antisemitic. I don’t think that would be the case, is the case.

This is Karen whose son in the chorus of that amazing, amazing opera, “Saint François d'Assise,” by Messiaen. I’m sure it’s not easy.

Q: Was Braque a Nazi?

A: Never heard that, I don’t think so at all. I wonder where that idea could possibly have come from.

Thank you very much. Your nice comments.

And this Margaret, whose husband studied with the great Paul Portelier. Of course, Portelier was in trouble at the end of the war because he performed in concerts that were broadcast by Radio Paris. And Margaret sang all these wonderful musicians from her youth.

No, I haven’t, Ron, I haven’t seen that film of Godard.

Thank you Nanette. I never knew, that is interesting.

Talk about an obscure piece of information that Johnny Hallyday is a boy in it. It cause part of the film of “le Diabolique” takes place in a boy’s boarding school. That is really weird.

Sally, I don’t know. I don’t know it really, Nadia Boulanger, yes, certainly she’s a very, very important figure over such a long period of time. Of course, she spent most of the war in United States, but continued in France after the war. And of course all leading French, American composers came to study with her.

Well, I think he did lose, well, France was, I’m not going to argue with about de Gaulle, but I think he did actually lose his nerve as a key moment of all of that.

This is Mickey, who was a student at . I bet, but it must been exciting. It must have been a very exciting time to be there.

Yes. Actually, that’s Ron Vick. That’s perfectly true.

“J'taime moi non plus” was actually even recorded with Bridget Bardot, before he recorded the version I played you with Jane Birkin. But the Bardot version was not issued and has never become famous.

Mm. Right. Thank you, “Belle de jour” is too late, really. That’s post, well I suppose it might be right at the very end. It’s 1960s, isn’t it, “Belle de jour?” Or isn’t it seventies? I think it might be seventies.

Thank you all for your very nice comments. And of course we move on. I’ve got a little gap now, but we will be moving on to the Balkan States for our next series. Thank you all very, very much. Bye-bye.