A few years my junior, Henri came from what he described as a peasant family in the Orléanais, published his own and his friends’ poetry in small plaquettes or pamphlets with drawings by Helène, for which he also made me write a piece on jazz, and at that time worked for the nationalized railways. He followed Lefebvre in studying sociology and urbanism and eventually taught at the Beaux Arts, thus catching up to some extent with his older brother André, a bona fide thesis-producing academic from the start who was to become the world expert on Islamic guilds and a pillar of French oriental scholarship. Helène, both more cosmopolitan and dramatically Parisian, who had spent the war with her family in Brazil, worked hard to make herself a painter. Frankly, she was never much good, but although people did not like to say so to a charming and extremely attractive young woman, I suspect that she was too intelligent not to be aware of her limitations, and suffered accordingly. Meanwhile she earned her living by working at the Brazilian consulate. Her Polish father, with whom relations were tense, was in business, her brother was something in couture, or at least the friend of one of the first of the beautiful Japanese models who anticipated erotic multiculturalism. Perhaps this helps to explain how she managed to wear Balmain at a time when haute couture labels had not yet been licensed to every department store. Like Henri she was a communist, in a cellule in the proletarian 13th arrondissement, but she had begun on the periphery of the Palestine Jewish terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang, or at least the extreme left-wing part of it. She retained an affinity for direct action. During the period of Algerian OAS terrorism she visited me in London, while she was making purchases of timers on behalf of what she said was a left-wing anti-OAS bombing campaign. I asked where she would get them. ‘At Harrods, naturally,’ she said. Of course, where else?
Though some of the people in the Raymonds’ network were to become well known in their fields, essentially it operated on the lower slopes of the Parisian left-wing intelligentsia, although Helène plausibly claimed to be au fait with the scandals on the more elevated peaks, the gossip about literary prizes and who was on the skids in the CP leadership. It read Le Monde and sometimes still L’Humanité, but most of the people we knew (as distinct from gossiping about them) were not likely to be asked to sign those manifestos of intellectuals on public issues which were so characteristic of the times before the eminent ‘media intellectuals’ had their own regular columns in the dailies and weeklies. It was very much a pre-1968 milieu and the 1950s and 1960s saw it gradually crumble as the old left splintered and shifted over Stalin and Algeria, and the old guard of the French CP increasingly found anyone suggesting change uncongenial, especially intellectuals. My communist friends tended to move from the Party to a smaller body, the Party of Socialist Unity (PSU) and when that proved unviable, into full-time research, writing or, if they wanted to remain in politics, the old Socialist Party. Since I did not then know some of the ex-communists who were to move directly into a passionate anti-communism, or had met them only casually, I was unable to follow the tracks of their political travels.
Inevitably the breakdown of the Raymonds’ marriage changed the pattern of my visits to Paris. In any case from 1961 on my life was transformed by the partnership of Marlene. However permanent the passion, like jazz, Paris could no longer be the same for a then middle-aged man with wife and, eventually, children. And in any case she had, and made, her own friends in France, quite apart from the ones we had, or from then on acquired together. Moreover, since 1957 I had acquired another couple of close Parisian friends who remain our friends to this day: Richard and Elise Marienstras. The Raymonds and I had decided to travel to a small seaside town in the Gargano peninsula of Italy – the ‘spur’ that sticks out of the ‘boot’ of Italy into the Adriatic – on the strength of a novel set there, La Loi, recently published by the then still communist or recently communist writer Roger Vailland, whom Henri had known since Resistance days. There on the beach were the Marienstrases, he a tall broad-chested blond, she tiny, thin and dark, en route for a spell as secondary-school teachers in Tunisia, by then independent but still educationally linked with the French schools system. Never were French intellectuals more involved in North Africa than in the 1950s, when Tunisia and Morocco won their freedom and the Algerians were fighting for theirs. So we had plenty to talk about. In any case, ever since the early nineteenth century the Maghreb has played a major role in the imagination of French painters and writers, but equally so as an intellectual stimulus to the young agrégés who went there as teachers, that is to say as future academics: Fernand Braudel among historians and Pierre Bourdieu among sociologists, to name but two. The Marienstrases’ academic interests were not Mediterranean or Oriental, but Anglo-Saxon, which provided another link. Richard was to become the major French authority on Shakespeare, and Elise was to establish a reputation as a historian of the USA.
Both were from Polish-Jewish families, fortunate to survive in the unoccupied zone of wartime France. Richard had joined the armed Resistance in the south-eastern hills at the age of sixteen, an experience he recalled as the only time in his life when nobody cared, or even asked, whether he was Jewish. Many years later he was deeply moved when, being the only intellectual among his surviving and now ageing Resistance comrades, he was asked to make the commemorative speech at their fiftieth anniversary dinner somewhere in the Rhône valley. Though they were naturally on the left, Marxism did not attract the Marienstrases, but proud of secular, emancipated, diaspora Judaism, neither did Zionism. Theirs was, or perhaps increasingly became, a minority position among French Jewry which in their lifetime, thanks mainly to the massive exodus from formerly French North Africa, became the largest Jewish community in Europe and, since the end of the USSR, in any country of the old world.
There was a third, more academic, reason why my relationship with Paris changed in the 1960s. The convergence between what the French historians were doing in Annales and we in Past & Present was becoming obvious. From about 1960 I was increasingly drawn into Parisian academic life, and especially towards the new academic empire of Fernand Braudel. Indeed, in the 1970s I joined it for a while officially as an associate directeur de recherche for part of the year at the new Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In short, from 1960 on academic engagements increasingly set the rhythm of my, or rather our, visits to Paris.
In a way these changes went together. When I first went to Paris after marrying Marlene, whose knowledge of the academic world was negligible, the Braudels, justifiably charmed by her, invited us to lunch at their apartment and Fernand won her permanent goodwill by assuring her that being a good husband was an essential element of being a good historian. On such occasions grandees of French intellectual life are not on oath, but since they know how to make the statements proper to the occasion in a manner suggesting sincerity without condescension, all of us were satisfied. Conversely, she was the hostess in London both to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie when he stayed with us after I had invited him to a seminar in London and, many years later, to the philosopher Louis Althusser in one of his manic phases, not long before he killed his wife in one of the subsequent depressions. As in other academic households, personal and professional relations were not clearly separable.