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there were few easy answers. Some of the shrewdest critics of doctrinal rigidity had in fact even drifted into the neo-Fascist camp.
    The sudden arrival of the Germans in Paris in the summer of 1940 caught the intellectuals, like everyone else, unprepared. Some fled abroad, some joined the exodus to the south, among them Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Jean Cocteau, and made their homes in the free zone. Others returned to occupied Paris. But while those on the far right quickly and pleasurably discovered a new popularity among the Nazis and their collaborators, those on the left were faced with the question of how they should react to occupation. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and François Mauriac soon decided that they would coexist with the enemy and let their own work go on appearing, even though the very fact that their articles were published alongside those of the pro-Germans and anti-Semites lent the Fascists a certain legitimacy. (‘Alas!’ remarked Jean Zay, who had been Minister of Education under Léon Blum, ‘How much kneeling and renunciation there is in the world of French literature!’) As Aragon saw it, the role of the man of letters was to speak out, to keep writing, since that was his métier, but to twist the words, giving them new, hidden meanings.
    Other writers found this too shaming. Jean Guéhenno, appalled by the ease with which Pétain had made ‘of dishonour a temptation’, disgusted by those he referred to as an ‘invasion of rats’, had no difficulty in deciding what to do. Because he had effectively been made a prisoner, he would live like a prisoner; since he could not write what he wanted, he would write nothing at all. Before falling silent for the remainder of the war, Guéhenno wrote one final piece. ‘Be proud,’ he told his readers. ‘Retreat into the depths of thought and morality’ but do not, whatever else you do, ‘descend into the servitude of imbeciles.’ A socialist and trade unionist called Jean Texcier wrote what would later be called a ‘manual of dignity’, a list of thirty-three ‘bits of advice to the occupied’. Husband your anger, he counselled, for you may need it. Don’t feel you have to give the Germans the right directions when they ask you the way: these are not your walking companions. And above all, ‘have no illusions: these men are not tourists’. His pamphlet was printed and reprinted, circulated from hand to hand, read and reread, and Texcier was soon a hero to the growing band of resisters. For Betty and Cécile, his jaunty defiance was infectious.
    Along with being a writer, Guéhenno was also a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure. And it was here, as well as in the various faculties of the Sorbonne, that students, returning in the early autumn of 1940 to their classes, began to question their professors and each other about the extent to which they were prepared to accept the Nazi occupiers. They were angry that their Jewish teachers had been declared ‘intellectually feeble’ and ‘undesirable’ in the first anti-Semitic edict. When German officers began to drop in on their classes, they walked out. Some took to wearing a Croix de Lorraine, others to carrying a gaule —another word for a fishing rod.
    Towards the end of October, Morais, the founder and president of a student group called Corpo des Lettres, began to talk to his friends about starting a poster campaign. Number 5 Place Saint-Michel was home to a number of student organisations and here, after office hours, Morais and his friends turned out anti-Vichy and anti-German flyers, distributed next day to lycées and faculties throughout Paris by students. In a rising mood of hostility and mockery, they went around repeating their favourite jokes. ‘Collaborate with the Germans?’ went one. ‘Think of Voltaire… A true Aryan must be blond like Hitler, slender like Göring, tall like Goebbels, young like Pétain, and honest like Laval.’ Another started with the question: ‘Do