Paris, at the dawn of the 20th century, exerted a powerful attraction on writers and artists. For varied reasons, the City of Lights, a hub for elites, drew intellectuals from the provinces and abroad, artists in search of renewal or recognition, and individuals enamored with freedom. While Vienna played this role of intellectual capital in the 19th century, Paris occupied a prominent position in the 20th century, sometimes rivaled by Berlin and New York, exerting a powerful attraction on international elites.
The Allure of Paris
The Parisian myth, associated with the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties, remained vibrant in the interwar period, despite signs of impending crisis. Literary works mentioning Paris, taking it as their subject, or using it as a setting, are innumerable. The recurrence of the word "Paris" in the titles of well-known works demonstrates this attraction.
A distinction must be drawn between writing "from" Paris (where Paris serves as a source of inspiration) and writing "about" Paris. Hemingway clearly expresses this difference in Paris est une fête: "Perhaps, far from Paris, I could write about Paris, as I could write in Paris about Michigan."
Intellectual Hubs and Preferred Quarters
For intellectuals, Paris was the city of their work and their friends. These two dimensions seemed closely linked in the lives of intellectuals at the time, giving intellectual work a place in a collective dimension of pleasure, an impression of happy sociability. According to Maurice Sachs, "It seems that in Paris, each state of society, each class, each chapel of the mind has delegated some members to a sort of 'Estates General', a Chamber of pleasure and knowledge."
The Left Bank: A Bastion of Intellectuality
Since the Middle Ages, the Left Bank has been a center of intellectuality. The Latin Quarter, with its prestigious high schools, Henri IV, Louis-le-Grand, its university, the Sorbonne, its prestigious institutions, the École Normale Supérieure on rue d'Ulm, the Collège de France, the Institut, its bookstores, its editorial or publishing offices, remained a place of intellectuality, a kind of essential home base even for the existence of other places where intellectuals gathered.
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An intellectual life developed around these poles. The booksellers made it accessible to pedestrians; the great literary cafes, the Flore, the Deux Magots, the Brasserie Lipp, the Balzar after 1931, or others less well known, allowed its development. The perimeter of the Latin Quarter was based on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève hill, the Luxembourg Garden, the Odéon district, and the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The Latin Quarter is a kind of home base from which the intellectual elites radiate. Raymond-Laurent, former student of the rue d'Ulm and President of the Municipal Council of Paris, affirmed in 1937 in Paris: "The Latin Quarter remains the intellectual kingdom par excellence… Through the influence of the University of Paris, the Latin Quarter has retained an international character as in the Middle Ages. All races cross paths on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, because people come from all over the world to hear the masters of the Sorbonne, follow the courses of the Faculties, the lessons of the great clinicians in the hospitals, work in the laboratories, consult the collections of the Libraries and Museums."
The extreme Parisian right wing considered the Latin Quarter not only a place of work but also partisan territory, thus contributing to giving the district a political image. For Brasillach, a normalien, a lover of Paris, a member of "Action Française" and familiar with the walks that led him from the Latin Quarter, in the 13th, in the 20th, in the working-class districts to Romainville, the Latin Quarter was the district of "our works" (whereas the Champs-Elysées, the theaters were "districts of our pleasures"), a kind of home base that he called a "homeland" whose territory he marked: "But our homeland always remained the Latin Quarter, our garden the Luxembourg, our cafes the narrow rooms of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and we went to the small cinemas at 3 F of the avenue des Gobelins, to see the old Buster Keaton, the old Harold Lloyd of which we were fond…"
In these different quotes, the perimeter of the Latin Quarter of the interwar period is the same as that studied by Jean-Claude Caron for the Latin Quarter of the 19th century with the Place de la Sorbonne as its center, Place Maubert to the northeast, Place du Panthéon to the southeast, Place Saint-André-des-Arts and Place de l'Odéon to the northwest, and the Luxembourg to the southwest.
Léon Daudet paid homage to its spirit: it was the favorite haunt of the youth of "Action Française", "a mixture of atmosphere and labor, of understanding, of equity and also of youth, of enthusiasm, of love… and of carefree blague that made and still makes the charm of the Latin Quarter. […] In my day, it was republican and it was anti-Boulangist. Today it is royalist and the district swears only by Maurras."
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However, as Jean-François Sirinelli shows, the École Normale Supérieure on rue d'Ulm seemed to lean more to the left.
The Latin Quarter occupies an important place in the "Paris" part of Louis Aragon's Beaux-Quartiers. The "school district," also known as "the Quarter," is where Edmond, Barbentane's son and Armand's brother, lives. Poor, compared to the Beaux-Quartiers, it is a classic place to live for a medical student who normally divides his life between the hospital, study, the Bouillon Chartier, and his hotel room.
In the Latin Quarter, Adrienne Monnier's bookstore at 7 rue de l'Odéon, "La Maison des Amis des Livres," and opposite, Sylvia Beach's at 12 rue de l'Odéon (the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore) were meeting places for certain Parisian networks to which Gide, V. Larbaud, L.-P. Fargue, James Joyce, and certain Americans belonged. Hemingway evokes in Paris est une fête the library-bookstore of Sylvia Beach, 12 rue de l'Odéon which: "put […], in this cold, windswept street, a note of warmth and cheerfulness, with its large stove, in winter, its tables and shelves lined with books, its window reserved for new releases and, on the walls, photographs of famous writers, dead or alive."
In these bookstores, the tradition of reading rooms was revived, books were lent and sold. People met there. Students from the Sorbonne frequented them. This milieu was particularly open to intellectual women, as illustrated by Shari Benstock's book Femmes de la rive gauche. These women lived grouped together in the Latin Quarter, on the Left Bank, in a narrow perimeter around the Odéon, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. They "created, explains Shari Benstock, women's worlds within the walls of the city, and it is in the intimacy of their garden and their library that modern culture was created and nurtured."
Among them Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys played a role as animators, of which they were aware. Adrienne Monnier's bookstore at 7 rue de l'Odéon opened in November 1915: it remained open until 1951: "in the noble district of study […] The Left Bank called me and still calls me, it never ceases to call me and to retain me. I cannot imagine that I could ever leave it, any more than an organ can leave the place that is assigned to it in the body."
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Adrienne Monnier identified with this area of the Latin Quarter and spoke of the moment when she became "odéonienne," of the seduction that her bookstore exerted on other women. Adrienne Monnier spoke of the bookselling profession, a real job for a woman, when one understands that it is not a question of running a salon.
A little marginal in this milieu, Jean Rhys gave a collection of short stories written at this time the generic title Rive gauche. For her, the Left Bank was a place for those on the margins of culture, the uprooted, the disinherited. In the preface to the collection, the American writer Ford Madox Fox noted with a certain sadness: "[…] I must emphasize Jean Rhys's profound knowledge of life on the Left Bank - of life on all the left banks of the world. For something deeply sad - and very difficult to bear! - attaches to almost every sense of the word left. The left hand is less skilled than the right; and every city has its Left Bank. London around Bloomsbury; New York around Greenwich Village, Vienna also…"
The Left Bank was a privileged part of Paris for American intellectuals.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés: A Crossroads of Ideas
A little further on, Saint-Germain-des-Prés was a meeting place for intellectuals in vogue, artistic circles, and those of politics. Less touristy than Montparnasse, the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés was a meeting place for intellectuals. "The Place Saint-Germain [wrote Léon-Paul Fargue], which does not appear in the laïus addressed to Yugoslavs and Scots by the speaker of the 'Paris by night' car, is nevertheless one of the places in the capital where one feels most 'à la page', closest to the true news, to the men who know the ins and outs of the country, the world, and Art."
Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the district of the church, near the Universities, publishing houses, and literary cafes. It exuded an atmosphere favorable to culture and cultivated people. The Saint-Germain district brought together, alongside writers and painters, men from the political world: "art and politics go hand in hand," "three cafes [of Saint-Germain-des-Prés] are as famous as state institutions: the Deux-Magots, the Café de Flore, and the Brasserie Lipp (run by an Auvergnat)."
Of world renown, they attracted a rich American or German clientele, assured of finding there the greatest Parisian intellectuals. Each of these cafes had a specific character. The Deux Magots was frequented by surrealists, Jean Giraudoux, Derain, Jean Cassou, Léo Larguier… The Café de Flore was one of the "cradles of Action Française and Apollinaire's Soirées de Paris." Fargue, for his part, had made a habit of going to Lipp "as to a club." Yet, he said, "it is not" (he felt closer to his native 10th arrondissement), but he could meet personalities as varied as d'Espezel, Rivet, Massis, Thibaud, Monzie, Bérard, Derain, Gide, Léon Blum… The literary, theatrical, and political circles were strongly represented there: "[…] Lipp owed a lot to the Nouvelle Revue Française, to Grasset, to Rieder, to the Divan, to the Revue Universelle, to the old Revue Critique, to the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, to Voilà and to Marianne, to the Conférence Molé, to the Senate, to the Association des Lauréats de la Fondation Blumenthal, to the Front Populaire, to the booksellers, the booksellers, and the intellectual hoteliers of this unique district…"
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