Dazzled by the Glitter

...Of the more honest statesmen little is said, though Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum gets a good report card...

...And it is a matter of debate whether anything that happened in the 1930s—in intellectual, artistic or social circles—was any more colorful and dazzling than what took place decades earlier during La Belle Epoque...

...But even here he concentrates on the parties that were involved with the haut monde: the quasi-Royalist groups and particularly the Radicals, that peculiarly French political party whose heterogeneous membership ranged from almost the extreme fascistic Right to the moderate Left...

...Among the people who did not see them, naturally, were the majority of Parisians...

...The ordinary Parisians of the Left Bank, the petty bourgeoisie of areas like Montrouge and Passy, the mixed quarters like Clichy where seedy entertainment merged with working-class squalor, the students and poor people on the edge of whose worlds I moved when I was not busily feasting on the cultural cornucopia being offered, have no real place in Fireworks at Dusk...

...How did all those people?some with ancient or Napoleonic titles, a few of them transformed American commoners—occupy themselves in the long hours between the parties...

...This—along with the city's physical beauty—was what appealed to plebeian visitors like me who never got nearer to Tout-Paris than knowing a young artist patronized by Marie-Louise de Noailles, or a former secretary to Therese de Caraman-Chi-may...

...Other important, albeit unaristocratic, events of the decade are ignored...

...So I recognize that Olivier Bernier's Fireworks at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties may be valid within its own very limited viewpoint, although it projects an entirely other City of Light than the one I first visited in 1934 and returned to each succeeding year until my last visit during the summer of 1939, under the shadow of looming war...

...To be sure, certain artists and writers are introduced as celebrities, and in such cases as Celine and Andre Malraux, as symptoms of a decaying, divided society...

...In most of Europe the '30s was "a low, dishonest decade," as W.H...

...We are told nothing, for example, of the great sit-in strikes that transformed the relationship between capital and labor in France, or of the great Bastille Day processions that drew the French together in the tens of thousands, especially during the Spanish Civil War...

...It is essentially a book about Politics and Society, a narrative in high gossip style of those two parallel and narrow universes, each comprising a tiny minority of Parisians: the largely ci-devant aristocratic society known, with supreme incongruity, as Tout-Paris...

...On the political side, Bernier does give a fairly acute picture of the intrigues and betrayals in Paris that led shortly to the collapse of the Third Republic...

...The accounts are generally taken from gossip writers of the day and fatuously detail the dresses worn as well as the idiocies performed by the rich in their entertainment...

...Perhaps one can describe Bernier as a lesser Proust, except that he does not usually invent (as Proust did) his glittering descriptions of the gatherings of Paris' leading social figures...

...Similarly, no attention is given to students, waiters, prostitutes, or the small workshop craftsmen who then made up much of the city's industry...

...Fireworks at Dusk projects an extraordinary aroma of snobbery in its choice of heroes and heroines, and in its stress on the follies of the rich, when what so many of us valued at this time was the rational freedom and the sense of a life enjoyed as much as endured by ordinary Parisians...

...Auden remarked...

...The only fully realized charactersin Bernier's narrative may be the politicians, men dominated by a lust for power rather than a concern for France's future or the welfare of its citizens...

...But the actual lifestyles of artists and musicians are hardly considered...

...What, if anything, did they create or do for the benefit of mankind...

...Bernier ends his book with this complacent sentence: "Those fireworks, artistic, intellectual and social, did not outlast the decade, but while they roared, full of color and dazzle, across the darkening skies, they thrilled all who saw them...

...The Paris of Marcel Proust, the city of the rich, was a world apart from the city of the poor represented by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in his 1936 masterpiece, Mort a Credit (Death on the Installment Plan...

...Curiously, we also learn very little about the personal lives of the Tout-Paris set...

...partly this was due to fear and partly to callousness...

...Janet Flanner, the American social climber par excellence whose wit redeemed her ardent uppishness, is one of the chroniclers most frequently quoted...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Ever since it became a great capital and one of the main centers of 19th-century culture, Paris has taken on different meanings to many different people...

...The fear belonged to politicians who did not know how to deal with the totalitarian realms threatening Western Europe, and consequently sought compromises to keep or increase their own power in that musical-chairs era of French Cabinet-making...

...The callousness was a hallmark of the wealthy, who were oblivious to the nearby presence of some of Europe's poorest people and worst slums...

...This is a book about the rich and the powerful in 1930s Paris, yet it fails to trap the true richness of Paris as it was enjoyed below the top rung...

...and the sleazy company of politicians, mainly from the Radical Party, who led Paris toward its humiliation during World War II when the German legions once again marched down the Champs Elysees...

...Occasionally something like the notorious Stavisky affair surfaces to expose the entanglement of Radical Party leaders with ingenious crooks...

...Nor are the daily existences of all those behind the scenes who contributed materially to the revelry of the '30s—the domestic servants of Tout-Paris, the seamstresses who worked for Schiaparelli and Chanel, and their like...