Alphonse Boudard (1925–2000)

This is a book that should immediately be translated into English. I decided to buy it as the result of reading a recent French book titled "Ainsi finissent les salauds", about the clandestine kidnappings and executions that took place in the first couple of months after the WWII liberation of occupied Paris. Boudard's novel "Les combattants du petit bonheur", published in was quoted at the beginning of nearly every chapter.

This book is presented as a novel, but it is immediately clear that it's a work of autobiography, with most of the names changed. Alphonse Boudard tells of his adolescence in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, during the German occupation. He lived near the Place d'Italie with his grandmother, in a street full of very poor, but contented people whose lives revolved around life in the community and the local cafés. The working class area was strongly communist party. Boudard's main preoccuption, throughout the novel, was sex and the fact that he wasn't getting any. His political persuasion of the moment depended on the girl he was chasing, as he made clear in a subsequent novel, "Le café du bonheur--Poor People's Coffee", which was a Paris slang expression for making love in the afternoon. If the girl he wanted to bed was a Communist, Trotskyist, Catholic or whatever, Boudard would go along with her beliefs until he bedded her, and then revert to the usual anti-clerical and anti-political stance favored by working-class Parisians of old, cynical about any promises made to them and preferring to believe the evidence of their own two eyes. In "Poor People's Coffee" Boudard wrote a sentence that still makes me laugh out loud every time I think of it: "This isn't about principles. I don't have any."

Boudard's father left his mother soon after he'd made her pregnant at the age of 17. His mother is rarely mentioned. She doesn't live with him and his grandmother, and he makes clear, from the way he describes her whenever she did pop in for a few minutes after months' of absence that she probably worked as a prostitute. After the French capitulation in June 1940, Boudard tried to leave Paris by bike, with a group of friends. But they only got as far as Orleans before they had to turn around and head back for Paris.

The winters of the occupation were deadly: the cold, combined with lack of food and basic amenities, killed off many poor people. Boudard was an honest juvenile delinquent. He saw himself as only fighting for survival, and he would never play a dirty trick on a member of his own gang of friends or one of the older people in the area. His first theft from the Germans, a bicycle, was subsequently stolen from him by the 21 year old elder brother of one of his friends, who was making love to a woman grocery shop keeper three times his age, so that he could get his hands on black market food. Boudard saw young men from a rival gang, barely out of their twenties, join the Petainist and, ultimately, pro-Nazi French Militia. He mentions frequently in the "novel" that it was only by luck that he wasn't forced to join the Militia himself.

Boudard worked as an apprentice type-setter in a printing works. There he met the men who enrolled him in the resistance. He left Paris with a friend of his own age to join a group of resistants in the countryside, but lost his way and arrived late at the meeting point, a remote farm. Struggling through the woodlands to get to the farmhouse, Boudard and his friend heard volleys of shots. A man comes rushing towards them and takes them to hide in his house. The forty young men they were going to liaise with had been massacred by the Nazis and the French Militia. Boudard and his friends dug holes in the ground and hid out for a few days. He participated in an attack against the Germans, managed to seize some of their arms, and then headed back to Paris, where he engaged in clandestine activities until his unit of the Free French Fighters, which he'd made up of his friends in the old gang, was given the task of liberating a part of the Latin Quarter.

One of the young men from another gang, who had gone to primary school with Boudard, and joined the Militia, Stéphane, is "miraculously"--writes a skeptical Boudard, transformed into a leading figure in the Resistance soon after the "25th hour resistants" begin to "fight" the fleeing Germans. In Fresnes prison in 1948, Boudard another young man who had joined the Militia at the same time as Stéphane. He had been found guilty of collaboration, and probably of torturing and killing members of the resistance movement. He was waiting to be taken out and shot at dawn. In spite of everything the Militia had done, Boudard couldn't find it in himself to hate the man. Towards the end of the novel, he gives details of of how "resistants" who had come late to the game dragged women out into the streets, cut off their hair and branded them for sleeping with Germans during the occupation. The book "Ainsi finissent les salauds" researched some of the illegal killings committed after the Liberation, and mostly confirms what Alphonse Boudard wrote in the novel.

When Boudard met the Militia man waiting to be executed, he was being held in the prison for petty crimes committed after being demobilized from the French Army, which he had joined soon after fighting with the (FFI) French Forces of the Interior, to liberate the Latin Quarter. ns qu'il fréquente, certains rejoignent le camp du maréchal Pétain. Les rivalités entre bandes font qu'il s'engage du côté des futurs vainqueurs. Employé dans une imprimerie située à Glacière, il est recruté par un réseau de la résistance et part rejoindre un maquis en Sologne au printemps 1944. Il y découvre une organisation boy-scout inefficace. Après le massacre de la section qu'il devait rejoindre, il décide de rentrer sur Paris. Il participe alors à la Libération de Paris en étant présent près de la place Saint-Michel.… (mais)

Rois de la débrouille, ces combattants du petit bonheur, Phonphonse, Musique, Neunoeil, Milo, nouveaux Pieds-Nickelés, traversent les noires années de guerre armés de cet esprit de drôlerie qui en fera des héros malgré eux. Voici le vol de la bicyclette d'un feldgendarme, larcin bien encombrant. Voici de méchantes explications nocturnes dans la rue, avec des copains passés de l'autre côté. Voici aussi le coup de projecteur inattendu sur l'enfance abandonnée du petit garçon, confié pendant trois ans à des fermiers du Loiret; plus tard la silhouette merveilleuse de la grand-mère à qui il voue une fière gratitude. Voici les roueries du marché noir, les grandes vacances au maquis et la libération de Paris vécue rue Saint-André-des-Arts et place Saint-Michel, et racontées en évitant d'enfler le ton.… (mais)

Outrage aux mœurs ou étude de mœurs ? Alphonse a pondu un petit chef-d'œuvre qui le conduit tout droit au tribunal ! Le roman d'une femme emportée par sa sexualité.
L'érotisme de bon aloi à la portée des masses laborieuses ! N'empêche ! La justice passée, Alphonse s'en prend pour deux mois de cabane... Pourtant, l'outrage n'est-il pas plutôt dans le regard caressant du greffier qui le dévisage langoureusement ? Et dans celui de ces deux flics, Globuleux et Bon Papa, qui fignolent dans la vacherie et lui demandent de balancer un complice en échange d'une visite à l'hosto où sa mère se meurt... Et que dire de ces minables qui s'en paye une bonne tranche sur le dos de Princesse Gladys et de Saïgon...
Clodos ou poètes, taulards ou pouilleux, que cherchent-ils tous ? La tendresse, bordel !… (mais)