Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“What is the role of artists in times of political upheaval?” asks Jessa Crispin. “Is it their job to be relentless campaigners for truth and freedom? Or is the production of escapist entertainment just as important for an audience living in fear?”

Crispin considers the question in an interview (for PBS’s “Need to Know”) with former New York Times Paris bureau chief Alan Riding, author of a new book studying the behavior of French artists in Paris during the Nazi occupation, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. They discuss, among other aspects, why we consider some artists who were, shall we say, not unfriendly to the Nazis, such as Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, differently from how we consider others, such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine (subject of a mounting controversy, as this Guardian story notes).

Here’s my favorite part of the exchange:

Were there any figures who, when you started researching this era, you personally wished you’d perhaps stayed ignorant about? Perhaps learning about their politics or activities changed the way you think about them? Myself, reading your book, I spent some time thinking, “Come on, Coco Chanel. Really?”

You’re right that Coco Chanel hardly emerged as an idealist’s role model, not only taking a Nazi lover but also trying to annul the earlier sale of her company to a now-exiled Jewish family. … Perhaps more disturbing to me was the recognition that, for most artists and writers, their art and their writing were more important to them than taking a position on the occupation. And that included those who eventually did join the intellectual resistance. Even Sartre and Camus, for instance, were willing to accept German censorship as the price of publishing their books and plays. In fact, I found it difficult not to agree with the essayist Jean Guéhenno, who on November 30, 1940, wrote in his private journal:

The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species. Incapable of surviving for long in hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print. He can stand it no longer. He quarrels only about his importance, the size of the print in which his name appears, its ranking in the table of contents. It goes without saying that he is full of good reasons. ‘French literature must continue.’ He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him.