The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War

This story begins in the Paris of the 1930s, when artists and writers stood at the center of the world stage. In the decade that saw the rise of the Nazis, much of the thinking world sought guidance from this extraordinary group of intellectuals. Herbert Lottman's chronicle follows the influential players—Gide, Malraux, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Koestler, Camus, and their pro-Fascist counterparts—through the German occupation, Liberation, and into the Cold War, when the struggle between superpowers all but drowned out their voices.

"Surprisingly fresh and intense. . . . A retrospective travelogue of the Left Bank in the days when it was the setting for almost all French intellectual activity. . . . Absorbing."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

"As an introduction to a period in French history already legendary, The Left Bank is superb."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"An intellectual history. A history of the interaction between politics and letters. And a rumination on the limitless credulity of intellectuals."—Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Curtain Raiser

Part 1 - The Setting

1. Moving In

2. Making Friends

3. At Home

4. Place of Work, Place of Play

5. Smaller Worlds

Part II - The Thirties

6. Founding Fathers

7. Engagement with Moscow

8. Engagement in Moscow

9. Right and Center

10. Unity of Action

11. In Defense of Culture

12. Malraux and the Intellectuals' War

13. Gide's Return

14. Plunging into Barbarity

15. Fleeing the Left Bank

Part III - The German Years

16. Capturing the N.R.F.

17. Paris vs. Vichy

18. The Structures of Collaboration

19. Everybody Collaborated

20. The Resistance, Through the Looking Glass

21. Midnight Presses

22. CNE and Company

23. Topography of German Paris

24. Parisians Far from Paris

25. Liberation

Part IV - 1944 and After

26. Picking Up the Pieces

27. Consequences

28. New Faces and Old

29. Changing Saint-Germain-des-Prés

30. The Parting of Ways

31. Communists and Anti-Communists

32. Cold Warfare

33. No Third Way

Epilogue

Sources

Index