Vive la libération!

We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s (the cool French version, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Françoise Hardy). Agnès Poirier, the author of this kaleidoscopic cultural history, certainly has hers: the turbulent 1940s, which saw the French capital endure the hardships of Nazi occupation before throwing off this yoke and embracing freedom in every aspect — sexual, political and intellectual.

Leading the way was that maligned couple, Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, political activist and father of existentialism, and Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant pioneer feminist, who was his life partner, if often errant lover. Poirier lists an impressive cast of over 30 figures who contributed to the Left Bank’s predominance in this entertaining and well-written story.

Most of them are French (including Sartre’s sparring partner Albert Camus). But there are also 13 Americans, such as the novelist Nelson Algren, who became Beauvoir’s grand amour, and the artist Ellsworth Kelly; plus a solitary Briton, the flighty Sonia Brownell, who had promoted resistant writing in Horizon magazine during the war and bedded Sartre’s lieutenant, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A symbolic baton-passing occurred in 1946 when Horizon published a French issue which denounced the ‘lassitude, brain fatigue, apathy and humdrummery of English writers’ and artists, and hailed the new ‘intellectual vitality and confidence’ which ‘blazed’ across the Channel.

Poirier does not miss a trick in her lively accounts of the intense discussions and adulterous liaisons that centred on the Café de Flore or the nearby nightclub Le Tabou; but her real achievement is to contextualise these politically and culturally. When Hemingway, the first of the returning Americans, rolled into Paris in August 1944, the city had been through four years of humiliating German rule, when, along with feats of bravery, it had witnessed harrowing cases of collaboration and compromise.