Politics and the Individual in France 1930-1950

Jessica Wardhaugh

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351553803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The crises and conflicts of mid-century Europe highlight the fragility of individual life and commitment. Yet this was a time at which individuals engaged in politics on an unprecedented scale, whether in movements, parties and street politics, through culture, or by the choices confronted in war and occupation. Focusing on France, and bringing together historians of politics, literature, philosophy, art, and film, this volume sheds new light on the imagination and experience of the political individual in the age of the masses. From a controversial art exhibition on Algeria to the private diary of a Jewish lawyer in Occupied Paris, these case studies illuminate the specificities of French ideas and experiences in mid-century Europe. They also contribute to a deeper understanding of memory, agency, and responsibility in times of crisis.

PART I
❖
The Individual and History

CHAPTER 1
❖
In the Shadow of Danton: Theatre, Politics, and Leadership in Interwar France

Jessica Wardhaugh

On 13 July 1936, an historic encounter took place between French leaders, past and present, in the Parisian Arènes de Lutèce. On the stage stood the iconic revolutionary hero Georges Danton, his charismatic personality and electrifying rhetoric brought to life through the words of Romain Rolland’s eponymous play of 1898.¹ In the audience was France’s first Socialist Président du Conseil, Léon Blum — an intellectual leader whose aesthetic demeanour could hardly have been further removed from Danton’s earthy popular appeal. Around them, two intermingled crowds: the actors on stage playing the part of volatile revolutionaries; the mass audience in the Arènes drawn from the equally volatile crowds of 1930s street politics. At the moment when Léon Blum made his appearance in the company of the Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez, the actors on stage greeted them with gusto, with Danton and Saint-Just raising their fists in fraternal salute. Blum applauded Danton; the actors on stage applauded Blum. For a few fleeting moments, the two leaders basked in the adulation of their respective popular supporters. For Danton, the crowd would prove fickle by the end of Act Three; for Blum, the illusion lasted slightly longer.

This performance of Danton is rarely described in detail in histories of the Popular Front and studies of Romain Rolland. The reason is straightforward. On the following day there was a performance that was larger, more widely publicized, and apparently more closely attuned to the sense of left-wing triumph and mass festivity in early summer 1936: Rolland’s Le Quatorze Juillet. Performed at the Théâtre de l’Alhambra in Paris and also broadcast on national radio, this was an optimistic retelling of the storming of the Bastille from which all violence had been excised (at least from the staged version).² In the finale, the enthusiastic acclamation of liberty culminated in a popular festival that Rolland had intended to spill out from the stage into the auditorium, representing ‘le principe d’un art populaire nouveau: le peuple contraint de mêler non seulement sa pensée, mais sa voix à l’action; le peuple devenant acteur lui-même dans la fête du Peuple’³ [the premise of a new popular art: the people obliged to contribute not only their thoughts but also their voices to the action, the people themselves becoming actors in the popular festival]. Rolland himself attended the final performances in August, after many years of self-imposed exile from the theatre.⁴ Little wonder, therefore, that the 1936 revival of Le Quatorze Juillet should be so frequently cited in classic accounts of the Popular Front as representing the climax of their unity and victory — soon to be threatened by ongoing economic crisis and by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.⁵

Yet in many ways, Danton is a far more profound and pertinent reflection than Le Quatorze Juillet on the triangular relationship between masses, leaders, and politics that was to determine the political fortunes of nations during these years of European crisis. Often neglected in the study of Rolland’s experimental Théâtre de la Révolution, the text and performances of Danton can — as this chapter will demonstrate — shed important light on the relationship between the individual and history. They illuminate, for example, Rolland’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the French Revolution and the problems of individual agency within it, contributing to the current re-evaluation of this important intellectual. In so doing, they also reveal an aspect of Rolland’s own writing on popular theatre — and of popular theatre more broadly — that has received relatively little analysis, namely the ambiguous relationship between the people and their leaders (both intellectual and political). Setting Danton, together with Rolland’s reflections on popular theatre, within their wider historical context and with particular reference to the performance of 1936 ultimately offers an insight into the French imagination of political leadership. Blum applauded Danton with gusto, but his own fall from popular and political grace would be similarly dramatic (although fortunately not fatal) when he requested full powers as Président du Conseil in April 1938. The Third Republic had, indeed, a long-standing and difficult relationship with powerful leadership, and some of the reasons why this relationship proved so problematic can be examined through the critics’ and audiences’ reactions to the leaders that Danton brought to the stage in summer 1936. Sudhir Hazareesingh has described the Fifth Republic as in the shadow of de Gaulle:⁶ a different — but equally determining — shadowplay influenced the political imagination of the Third.

Romain Rolland: The Individual, the People, and History

Romain Rolland (1866–1944), now relatively neglected, was one of the intellectual heavyweights of the Third Republic. In his own lifetime he was more widely read than either Paul Valéry or André Gide,⁷ his literary works and political engagement projecting him to both fame and notoriety. Few would dispute his overall literary merit: in 1913, he received the Académie Française’s Grand Prix for literature; in 1915 he was awarded the Nobel Prize after the publication of his Jean-Christophe, a voluminous novel in which the friendship between a Belgian composer and a French intellectual offers a striking contrast to the rising nationalism dividing Europe. Rolland was, moreover, not only a prolific novelist and playwright but equally a renowned biographer whose studies of artistic, literary, and musical genius — Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Beethoven — revealed his own deep-rooted fascination with the heroic individual.

Rolland’s earnest engagement with national politics and international affairs would earn him rejection and resentment as well as admiration. He became notorious for his anti-nationalist essay Au-dessus de la Mêlée (1914) (criticized by George Bernard Shaw, among others, for its abstraction),⁸ and was a guiding force behind the creation of Europe, revue mensuelle, in the 1920s.⁹ Yet he provoked consternation from some of his left-wing friends when in the 1930s he performed the seeming volte-face of joining the French Communist Party. To his socialist friend Jean Guéhenno, who protested that war was unacceptable, Rolland’s response was curt: ‘Pour être “pacifiste” complet, faut-il donc abdiquer le bon sens?’ [Does being an integral pacifist mean rejecting common sense, then?]¹⁰ At his funeral in 1944, Rolland was accorded military honours; and over his coffin waved a banner bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle.

Despite his eventual commitment to the Communist Party, however, Rolland’s political and intellectual engagements were nothing if not complex. Indeed, as recent research is beginning to clarify, a superficial assessment of this writer as a left-wing intellectual glosses over the very tensions and ambiguities that structured his own trajectory.¹¹ Chief among these — especially for the understanding of his theatre — is the conflict between his fervent elitism and his equally fervent belief in the people and their political agency.¹² This was a man who not only conceived of artistic genius and mission in quasi-mystical terms, but who professed with equal sincerity a belief in the people who would make the future their own, even if this would entail destruction or oblivion for the cultural inheritance he cherished. ‘Et vive la mort si elle est nécessaire à fonder la vie nouvelle ! Puisse l’art populaire s’élever sur les ruines du passé!’ [And long live death if it’s essential to the creation of new life! Let popular art arise from the ruins of the past!]¹³

It is important, therefore, to look beyond Le Quatorze Juillet in the analysis of Rolland’s Théâtre de la Révolution, as in the analysis of Rolland himself.¹⁴ A wider appreciation of the complexities of this work — both as a series of texts and also as successive performances — not only develops the understanding of Rolland’s intellectual contradictions; it also sheds new light on the real and imagined relationships between leaders, masses, and politics during the Third Republic.

Despite its important association with the popular festival at the climax of the Popular Front, Le Quatorze Juillet is in many ways unrepresentative of the cycle as a whole. Certainly, it is more nuanced than many evocations of its elision with popular festival would suggest, and its portrayal of the crowd is by no means uncritical. In his dramatic depiction of the storming of the Bastille, which poses obvious challenges in performance, Rolland endeavours to capture both the dangerous volatility of street politics, and equally the naïve inexperience of men and women unprepared for their newly significant historical role. Surely, at the moment when the royalist aristocrat Vintimille doffs his hat to the crowd with the dry observation: ‘Voici donc le Nouveau Roi […] Messieurs, la Canaille’ [So here is the New King […] Gentlemen, the people],¹⁵ Rolland has at least some share in his scepticism. He notes, for example, in his stage directions that the crowd should appear at this point as ‘une marée humaine […] têtes hurlantes’ [a human tide […] screaming heads].¹⁶ Moreover, he also portrays the bloodthirsty women of the people as deflected from killing the Invalides only by the judicious intervention of such revolutionary leaders as Marat, Hulin, and Hoche. It is the last of these who rushes to place the child Julie (a somewhat clumsy personification of the crowd’s childlike sentiments and idealism) in the niche left empty by the displaced statue of the King.

Nevertheless, Rolland allows the crowd’s idealism to triumph over their more animal instincts. It is in this sense significant that the play should culminate with Hoche’s utopian cry of ‘Frères! tous frères! tous libres! … Allons délivrer le monde!’[We’re brothers! All brothers! All free! Let’s go and deliver the world!]¹⁷ Less ambiguous, more optimistic than other contemporaneous plays in the cycle such as Danton or Les Loups, Rolland’s Le Quatorze Juillet was to be more immediately taken up by mainstream theatre.¹⁸ And it is the irrepressible optimism of the play and its centre-stage portrayal of the people that remain the dominant impression, as noted by reviewers of both the 1902 and 1936 performances.¹⁹

Notwithstanding Rolland’s dramatic innovation in placing the crowd at centre stage in Le Quatorze Juillet,²⁰ the Théâtre de la Révolution as a whole favours a more traditional place for the individual, and — as the analysis of Danton also reveals — a more nuanced appreciation of the revolutionary people.²¹ The dilemmas of individual action at times of political tumult and war are, for example, movingly explored in both Les Loups (1898) and Le Jeu de l’amour et de la mort (1925). Les Loups, written in less than a week (20–26 March 1898),²² is set in Mayence in 1793 and centres on the unjust conviction of an army officer, d’Oyron: a revolutionary aristocrat of counter-revolutionary background who is suspected of treachery. ‘Vous ne me pardonnez pas d’être d’une autre race’ [You will not forgive me for being of another race], he observes drily.²³ The parallels with the Dreyfus Affair are self-evident and intentional, and yet the play offers none of the straightforward moralizing or didacticism that some contemporary Dreyfusards expected from its performance.²⁴ At the moral centre of the play is a bitterly impassioned debate between two officers: Teulier, who though personally suspicious of d’Oyron as an individual nonetheless suspects the evidence of his treachery still more strongly, and Quesnel, a pragmatist who believes it expedient for one man to die for the people. For Rolland’s contemporaries, this was of course an incendiary topic. In May 1898, when a performance of Les Loups was attended by some of the key figures in the Dreyfus Affair such as Colonel Picquart and Dupaty de Clam, the exchange of insults across the auditorium rendered the very interchange between Teulier and Quesnel almost inaudible.²⁵

Written almost thirty years later, Le Jeu de l’amour et de la mort likewise centres on an inner drama of personal choice at a time of political tumult. Set in March 1794 — and like Les Loups constrained by its enclosed, threatened interior setting — this is a love triangle against a backdrop of political commitment and Terror. The hero is Jérôme de Courvoisier, a member of the Convention revolted by its ‘dictature de sang’²⁶ [dictatorship of blood] to the point of resolving to make that decisive rupture with r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Brief Chronology
• Introduction
• Part I: The Individual and History
• Part II: Memory, Identity, and Responsibility
• Part III: Toeing the Party Line: Choices and Constraints
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index