Prewar France experienced 1939-40 as a somnambulistic, paralyzed waiting

Evidence

There was,” Gracq observed in 1971, “the sentiment of a void, the sense of an enormous blank. Nothing occurred: there was an utterly somnambulistic aspect to everything. For everything continued as if nothing had happened. There was a paralysis, a putting-in-parenthesis, a prelude—to what? No one knew. It was pure anticipation. — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 21

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 21
• XREF: connects to: The summer of 1939 marked the end of peacetime for French intellectuals — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 436