Sartre’s Second Century

Sartre’s Second Century

Edited by

Benedict O’Donohoe and Roy Elveton

 Sartre’s Second Century, Edited by Benedict O’Donohoe and Roy Elveton

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2009 by Benedict O’Donohoe and Roy Elveton and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-0161-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0161-4

 To

Heather

and to

Kevin and Solveig

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ ix
ROY ELVETON AND BENEDICT O’DONOHOE

CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................. 1

SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
DAVID DRAKE

CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 17

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONTOLOGY AND RESPONSIBILITY
ROY ELVETON

CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 35

LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY IN SARTRE’S EARLY WRITINGS
ALAIN FLAJOLIET

CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 46

TEMPORALITY AND THE DEATH OF LUCIENNE IN NAUSEA
CAM CLAYTON

CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 56
SARTRE AND NIETZSCHE: BROTHERS IN ARMS
CHRISTINE DAIGLE

CHAPTER SIX.............................................................................................. 73
1945 – 2005: EXISTENTIALISM AND HUMANISM SIXTY YEARS ON
DEBORAH EVANS

CHAPTER SEVEN ........................................................................................ 86

SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS
ROY ELVETON

CHAPTER EIGHT ....................................................................................... 104

THE NEW SARTRE: A POSTMODERN PROGENITOR?
NICHOLAS FARRELL FOX
viii Table of Contents

CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 123

A SURREPTITIOUS ROMANTIC? READING SARTRE WITH VICTOR HUGO
BRADLEY STEPHENS

CHAPTER TEN .......................................................................................... 142

HIDDEN WORDPLAY IN THE WORKS OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
PETER ROYLE

CHAPTER ELEVEN .................................................................................... 155

DESTABILIZING IDENTITIES AND DISTINCTIONS:
THE LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE OF HOPE NOW
IAN RHOAD

CHAPTER TWELVE.................................................................................... 173

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES:
SARTRE, CLOONEY, MCCARTHY, MURAKAMI
BENEDICT O’DONOHOE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ................................................................................. 191

SARTRE’S IMPACT ON THE WRITINGS AND MOVIES OF ÔSHIMA NAGISA
SIMONE MÜLLER

CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................ 202

SARTRE’S LEGACY IN AN ERA OF OBSCURANTISM
WILLIE THOMPSON

CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 215

 INTRODUCTION

ROY ELVETON AND BENEDICT O’DONOHOE

It is reasonable to claim—as does Bernard-Henri Lévy, for example, in

the title of his landmark study, Le Siècle de Sartre (2000)—that the
twentieth century was “Sartre’s century”. But what might be Sartre’s
legacy to the twenty-first?
Sartre’s life encompassed two world wars, together with the Cold War
that dominated the latter half of the twentieth century. As a political
activist and prolific political commentator, Sartre was both immersed in,
and an engaged reporter of, the significant events of his century. Being and
Nothingness, a philosophical best-seller, confirmed the 1950s as the
“existentialist” age—and the age of anxiety—and sounded themes that
reverberated in much literature, poetry, film and philosophy. Sartre the
phenomenologist extended the relevance of continental European
philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Sartre the
Marxist philosopher, initially siding with Stalin’s Russia, voiced his
support for the proletariat and the victims of colonialism, and effectively
aligned his public stances with important themes of western democracies,
such as the fight against racism and the centrality of individual freedom.
Although philosophical culture in the later twentieth century tended to
celebrate the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein above that of Sartre, a
good deal of Sartre’s philosophical contributions have become standards
of philosophical culture: “bad faith”, “authenticity”, “the look”, the themes
of consciousness and intentionality, to name only a few.
A second dimension of Sartre’s enduring significance is his reliance
upon the resources of literature—in the forms of drama and the novel,
biography and autobiography—and, together with the requirements of
ontological analysis, the study of history and historical events, and
engaged political commentary. The pathways leading to his exploration of
freedom are as diverse as is the richness of their content. The novel and
the theatre offer vehicles for communicating the metaphysical depths of
human experience that Sartre’s ontology, historical analysis and dialectical
methodology may supplement, but not replace. Is there an educated
westerner who cannot quote: “Hell is other people”? Sartre’s work is
x Introduction

unique in embracing such a diversity of genres. The sheer variety of those

methods will surely continue to encourage a unique breadth of readership.
A third reason for the likely vigour of Sartre’s “second century” is the
fact that the great creativity of his later years has only recently been made
available. Though unfinished, his Notebooks for an Ethics, for example,
can be read as, at least, a sketch of the study of ethics promised in the
concluding chapter of Being and Nothingness. Likewise, though
unfinished, the Critique of Dialectical Reason appears to signal a
considerable shift in his ontology of human consciousness, the “for-itself”.
Taken together, Notebook and Critique can prompt a serious re-reading of
Being and Nothingness, no doubt Sartre’s most famous work. Great works
of literature and philosophy invite continued study and reinterpretation, in
the light of repeated close readings and the products of subsequent writers
and thinkers. The last century had only just begun the careful study of
these late manuscripts. Sartre’s “second century” offers the possibility for
a substantial re-reading of his entire œuvre.
The centenary of Sartre’s birth in 2005 was the primary occasion for
many of the essays collected in the present volume. Hosted by the UK or
North American Sartre Societies, contributors participating in Sartre’s
centennial celebrations were asked to address the central themes and
overall development of his life and thought. It was to be expected, then,
that there would be a retrospective dimension to these contributions.
However, it quickly became apparent that attempts to view Sartre in a
synoptic and retrospective light also provided a basis for assessing aspects
of his work that are important here and now, and would probably remain
so for the new century.
Thus, the following essays reflect the richness of Sartre’s vision of the
human condition, the diversity of the means he employed in grappling
with it, and the lengthy trajectory of his enquiry, in a variety of wider
cultural perspectives. Is Sartre a humanist? How persuasively can he be
read as a romantic, a nihilist, an existentialist, a phenomenologist, a post-
modernist? Are there significant cultural traditions that Sartre effectively
advances by whole-heartedly embracing them or by substantially
modifying them, or even by fusing or transcending them? How is it
possible to bring him into fruitful dialogue not only with a living Japanese
novelist, but also with contemporary movie-makers in Tokyo and
Hollywood? What was his life, what was his death? What is his legacy in
an “era of obscurantism”? Given the multi-layered quality of that legacy,
such questions are less a matter of historical labels than of measuring the
plurality of themes, motifs, approaches and genres that make up Sartre’s
unique bequest.
 Sartre's Second Century xi

It is difficult to imagine that Sartre’s preoccupation with the question

of human freedom would not remain crucial for the continued influence of
that bequest. His treatment of this central theme is complex and nuanced.
Nausea and The Flies present human freedom as unsettling and disruptive.
Being and Nothingness couples his ontological account of freedom with
distinctive phenomenological descriptions of freedom in its embodiment,
temporality and intersubjectivity. Notebooks for an Ethics relates freedom
to ethical, social and political themes. The unfinished Critique of
Dialectical Reason fuses the freedom of the for-itself with the objective
structures of society and material existence. The biographies of Genet and
Flaubert offer detailed accounts of historically situated freedoms. These
diverse approaches to the fundamental question of individual human
liberty comprise a multi-facetedness of vision, an acuity of perception, and
an elegance of expression that will guarantee its continued relevance for
the generations of the twenty-first century.
No less so, we assert, will Sartre’s salient translations of his theoretical
stances into the practical sphere of political writing and action: for, if the
obverse face of the coin is freedom, its reverse is responsibility. Where
(alas!) is there a playwright of genius capable of stigmatising torture in
Guantanamo Bay, or anywhere else, as Sartre denounced French
brutalities in Algeria with the allegorical Condemned of Altona? Where is
the committed global intellectual capable of denouncing illegal wars and
their concomitant crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan—“the world’s richest
nations bombing the world’s poorest”—with the eloquence of Sartre,
chairing the Russell Tribunal on American genocide in Vietnam? Where is
the unsurpassed polemicist capable of writing a fitting sequel to Sartre’s
“Élections, piège à cons” (“Elections, idiot-traps”), critiquing the
grotesque distortions of supposedly democratic systems that gave the
world Tony Blair and George W. Bush? If Sartre could write his
devastating “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth,
spectacularly exposing the murderous colonialising mindset, in 1961,
why—almost fifty years later—can we not find a worthy successor to
decry the hegemonic western institutions that continue to hold poor
African nations in thrall? And if Sartre, sometimes called “the first third-
worldist”, could write (as early as 1970!) a coruscating piece entitled “Le
tiers monde commence en banlieue” (“The Third World starts in the
suburbs”), why, nearly forty years on, is that still true—not only in France,
xii Introduction

but throughout western Europe and in the US—and who will say so?
“There is somebody missing here: it’s Sartre.”1
It is incumbent upon those of us who read and discuss Sartre to keep
asking such questions, to make his voice ceaselessly heard, in absentia:
there is never a good time for not asking difficult questions, and the
irrepressibly contestatory (and incorrigibly self-contestatory) discourse of
the pugnacious little polymath, Sartre, was never more needed than now.
Whilst predominantly American and British forces enter their sixth year of
illegal occupation of countries in the Middle East; whilst the “free market”
of western capitalism—allegedly, irreversibly triumphant over Eastern
Bloc communism only twenty years ago—finds itself (at the time of
writing) apparently in complete meltdown; whilst some partially medieval
regimes—China (murdering up to 8,000 of its own citizens annually for
petty offences), or India (with its handful of super-rich and tens of millions
of super-poor), or Saudi Arabia (still forbidding women to go out alone,
much less vote)—continue to earn the fawning respect of post-
Enlightenment western democracies, where is Sartre? Vivant (alive), as he
himself wrote in his touching tribute to the lately deceased André Gide, for
example.2
In the absence of any comparable colossus, however, the onus is on us
(as the word suggests) to keep asking awkward questions. Not merely to
turn political satire into harmless TV comedy (like Jon Stewart in the US
or Rory Bremner in the UK), nor even to campaign earnestly, if not always
effectually (like the brilliant and admirable journalists, John Pilger in the
UK or Michael Moore in the US), but at least to keep interrogating—like
Voltaire, like Hugo, like Zola—the mindless clichés of a smug bourgeois,
or first-world, elitism. What is a “terrorist”? And what an “extremist”?
And what a “fundamentalist”? And what an “asylum-seeker”? And what
an “immigrant”? And what a “refugee”? Are we really “all middle-class
now”? Who cares, and what would it matter? We need a Sartre to question
the unthinking shibboleths of a self-deceiving western quietism, of a
consumerist capitalism radically “in bad faith”, and to do so by way of
every available medium. For want of any obvious successor—Bernard-
Henri Lévy is manifestly more photogenic than Sartre, but markedly less
subversive—Sartre himself must continue to speak to the present age, and
he still has plenty to say that we would do well to heed.

1
“Il y a quelqu’un qui manque ici: c’est Sartre” (Sartre, Les Mots, Paris :
Gallimard, 1964, 93).
2
The time of writing being October-November 2008, it is with relief and optimism
that we welcome a shaft of light suddenly penetrating this gathering gloom,
namely the election to the US Presidency of Senator Barack Obama.
 Sartre's Second Century xiii

We venture to hope, therefore, that the present collection—bringing

together essays by promising postgraduates, young academics in their
prime, established and emeritus professors as well as formally retired
scholars from the UK, USA, Canada and continental Europe, and covering
many aspects of Sartre’s astoundingly multi-dimensional work—will play
some small part in making Sartre’s indispensable voice heard in this, his
“second century”.
 CHAPTER ONE

SARTRE: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

DAVID DRAKE

Paris, Saturday 19 April 1980. An estimated 50,000 people are lining

the streets of the capital to pay their final respects as the funeral cortege of
the most important French intellectual of the twentieth century wends its
way to Montparnasse cemetery. Jean-Paul Sartre eclipsed all his fellow-
intellectuals not only in terms of the fame and notoriety he enjoyed, but
also in the sheer volume and variety of his œuvre. For example, Albert
Camus, like Sartre, was a novelist and a playwright but a lightweight as far
as philosophy was concerned; Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a serious
philosopher but, unlike Sartre had no literary aspirations. Nor did
Raymond Aron, the self-styled spectateur engagé (committed spectator)
whom Sartre had known during his student days, make any claims as a
literary figure. He, like Sartre, penned articles on contemporary politics,
but his sober liberal writings were the antithesis of Sartre’s polemical
prose. How and why did Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, born in Paris
on 21 June 1905, become one of the most famous Frenchmen of modern
times? This is the question that this mini-biography will attempt to
answer.1
Following the death of Jean-Paul’s father, a mere fifteen months after
Sartre’s birth, Jean-Paul and his mother were obliged to move in with her
parents, first in the Paris suburb of Meudon and later in a flat near the
Sorbonne University. Jean-Paul was a rather sickly child and, around the
age of three or four, an infantile infection caused him to lose most of the
use of his right eye. “Poulou”, as Sartre was known within the family, had
a very isolated early childhood: he only attended school very intermittently
and until the age of ten remained alone with an old man (his maternal
grandfather) and two women (his maternal grandmother and his mother).
He was largely educated at home by his grandfather, a former teacher who

1
This chapter was contributed by the author at the invitation of the editors.
2 Chapter One

had come out of retirement in order to fund his newly-expanded

household. For his part, Sartre would later claim that he had taught himself
to read and write on his own and was soon writing stories inspired by the
tales of derring-do that he loved reading.
In his autobiography Les Mots (Words), Sartre asserts that this passion
for writing that he discovered at an early age provided him with a
justification for his existence. In October 1915, he enrolled at the Lycée
Henri IV, and by the end of the year was deemed to be excellent from
every point of view. In April 1917, Sartre’s mother remarried, this time to
Joseph Mancy, a factory manager. Sartre was mortified: another had
appropriated his mother, who had been more like a sister to him. A month
later, M. et Mme Mancy—with Sartre in tow—moved to La Rochelle,
where Mancy took up a new post as head of a shipyard and Sartre started
attending the local boys’ lycée. He would later describe the next three or
four years as the worst years of his life. He had been snatched away from
new-found school-friends in Paris, including Paul Nizan, who shared his
passion for writing. He disliked and continued to be jealous of his
stepfather. Mancy, for his part, was hostile to Sartre’s literary aspirations
and attempted to steer him towards science and maths. Furthermore, Sartre
found it difficult to adjust to his new school, where the perception of him
as a precocious Parisian led to him being subjected to much bullying. His
unhappiness led him to abandon his efforts at writing and, in 1920,
although his school results were quite satisfactory, his mother and Mancy
decided to send him back to school in Paris, where he would be away from
“bad influences”.
Sartre was now reunited with Nizan and the two became inseparable.
While they pursued their secondary school studies, they discussed
literature endlessly and, importantly, they wrote. In 1924, both Nizan and
Sartre passed the competitive entry examination to the prestigious École
Normale Supérieure (ENS) that, Sartre later observed, marked the
beginning of his independence and the start of four years of happiness. At
the ENS, although he decided to specialise in philosophy, he read as
widely as he did voluminously, devouring contemporary literature,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, in an attempt, as he
expressed it, to become the man who knows most. His reputation as a
diligent worker with a frighteningly powerful intellect co-existed with that
of an anti-authoritarian rebel renowned for his pranks against symbols of
authority and convention. However, while his friends turned towards
political commitment—Raymond Aron towards the socialists of the
Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the
Workers’ International, or SFIO), and Nizan towards the French Communist
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 3

Party (PCF)—Sartre displayed no such inclination. He remained a rebel

but, for the moment, a rebel without a cause.
In 1928, to the astonishment of his fellow-students, Sartre failed the
final exam (l’Agrégation) because, he later said, he had tried to be too
original. The following July, while revising for the re-sit, he met Simone
de Beauvoir, known to her friends as le Castor,2 and who was to become
his life-long companion. Soon after the publication of the exam results—
in which Sartre came first and Beauvoir was placed second—Beauvoir
accepted Sartre’s terms for their relationship. They would not get married,
nor would their relationship be monogamous: theirs would be “a necessary
love”, but they would also experience “contingent loves”.
After completing his military service, Sartre took up a post as a
philosophy teacher at the lycée in the port of Le Havre, while Beauvoir
was appointed to a girls’ school in Marseille, hundreds of miles away.
Since the Agrégation was the highest teaching qualification, working in a
lycée was the logical progression from the ENS. And yet Sartre had mixed
feelings about the prospect. On the one hand, it was not too onerous, a
secure job that offered a reasonable salary and long holidays which would
allow plenty of time for writing and travelling. On the other hand, as a
teacher, he would be expected to be an authority figure who enforced rules
and regulations and set an example to his pupils. Furthermore, by now
Sartre had extended the deep antipathy he felt for his stepfather to the class
of which he was a typical representative, namely the bourgeoisie. Sartre
tried to square the circle of his new situation by living in a somewhat run-
down hotel near the station and refusing to conform to the role of teacher
as it was conventionally defined. Not only did he give a talk at the end-of-
year prize-giving ceremony on the cinema, which was definitely not
considered a “proper” topic, but he also adopted a very relaxed manner
with his pupils in school, and went drinking and playing cards—and even
visited a brothel with them—outside class. It was shortly after his arrival
in Le Havre that he began his work on what he called his “factum on
contingency”. The book, which was both literary and philosophical (and
would become La Nausée), was set in Bouville (“Mudtown”), a French
provincial port that drew on both La Rochelle and Le Havre.
Sartre spent the academic year 1933-34 in Berlin while Raymond Aron
replaced him at Le Havre. Aron had talked to Sartre about the German
philosopher Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. Sartre was keen to find
out more about Husserl’s notion of intentionality that posited that

2
A punning conceit: “castor” means “beaver” (cf. “Beauvoir”) in Latin, and
beavers are notoriously industrious, as was Simone de Beauvoir.
4 Chapter One

consciousness is always conscious of something. In Berlin, Sartre’s main

intellectual activities involved engaging with Husserl’s writings and
working on his novel on contingency. While he found himself in
agreement with much of Husserl, Sartre concluded that the ego was not
located within consciousness, as Husserl contended, but was itself an
object of consciousness. When he was not writing and researching, Sartre
spent much time hanging around in the bars and cabarets of the capital,
apparently little concerned by the political drama unfolding around him,
following Hitler’s seizure of power the previous January.
In the autumn of 1934, Sartre returned to Le Havre in time for the new
academic year. Despite the fact that Beauvoir was now teaching in Rouen,
only an hour away, Sartre was soon plunged into depression. He disliked
being a teacher and saw himself as a balding, portly, failed writer. This
sentiment was reinforced when, in 1936, Gallimard rejected his novel on
contingency. In the course of the same year, Sartre and Beauvoir formed
an intense three-way relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz, a former pupil
of Beauvoir’s, upon whom Sartre became fixated. Beauvoir later published
a fictionalised account of this episode entitled L’Invitée (She Came to
Stay). Sartre supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War,
which had just begun, and welcomed the victory of the Popular Front in
France, although he had abstained from voting. But despite his sympathy
for leftwing or progressive causes, Sartre continued to abstain from
political activity.
By 1937, Beauvoir had secured a teaching job in Paris while Sartre
was now teaching in the well-heeled western suburb of Neuilly. Both were
living (in separate rooms) in a hotel in the 14th arrondissement of Paris,
and Sartre’s future as a writer was now looking more promising. In 1936
his book entitled L’Imagination appeared, and the following year saw the
publication of his critique of Husserl, La Transcendance de l’ego (The
Transcendence of the Ego), and of a short story, “Le Mur” (“The Wall”),
which appeared in France’s most prestigious literary review, La Nouvelle
Revue française (NRF). Other short stories appeared in 1938 and were
subsequently published in a single collection as Le Mur. In 1938,
Gallimard finally published Sartre’s work on contingency, whose title had
been changed from Sartre’s Melancholia to Gallimard’s La Nausée
(Nausea). Nausea is the record of Antoine Roquentin’s attempts to
understand the nature of a deep sense of unease that he periodically
experiences. After considering and discarding various hypotheses,
Roquentin understands, in a blinding insight, that everything in the world,
including himself, is contingent, that is to say exists without any a priori
reason: it just is.
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 5

By the end of the 1930s, Sartre was beginning to establish himself on

the Paris literary scene. La Nausée had been well received, as had Le Mur,
and he was contributing book reviews on a regular basis to the NRF,
including a highly critical one on François Mauriac, which provoked an
outcry.3 However, in September 1939 Sartre’s life, like that of millions of
other French people, was thrown into disarray by the declaration of war.
Sartre was one of the five million Frenchmen mobilised in the first ten
days of September. Suddenly, the anti-conformist, anti-authoritarian,
passionately independent budding writer was thrust into the world of rules,
regulations and uniforms. To begin with he had a pretty easy time of it.
Throughout the “Phoney War” (from September 1939 to May 1940) he
was assigned to a meteorological unit operating in the east of France
where his duties were far from onerous, leaving plenty of time for reading,
thinking and writing. He continued with his novel L’Age de raison (The
Age of Reason) that he had begun in the autumn of 1938. He kept
notebooks, published posthumously as Carnets de la drôle de guerre (War
Diaries), in which he recorded his thoughts about his daily life and his life
hitherto, as well as his thoughts about ethics and the philosophy of
existence, which were informed by his reading of Kierkegaard, Heidegger
and Hegel. He also wrote daily to his mother as well as to Beauvoir and
other friends. In all, it is estimated that he wrote over a million words
during this period.
This somewhat tranquil and largely uneventful existence was shattered
by the German offensive of May 1940. On 23 May, Paul Nizan was killed
near Dunkirk. Almost a month later, on his thirty-fifth birthday (21 June),
Sartre was captured and incarcerated in a POW camp near Trier where,
despite his uncompromising atheism, he made friends with a number of
priests. He later stated that he had found in the camp a “form of collective
existence” that he had not known since his time at the ENS, and that on the
whole he was happy there. At Christmas 1940, Sartre wrote, directed and
performed in an allegorical “nativity” play, Bariona, which he hoped
would act as an antidote to the pervasive spirit of defeatism and
resignation. In mid-March 1941, he managed to wangle his release from
the camp and made his way back to Paris, where he expressed his intention
to form a resistance group. This he duly did by gathering together a
number of friends, including Simone de Beauvoir, and joining forces with
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embryonic resistance group, Sous la botte
(Under the Jackboot), to create Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and
Freedom).

3
Sartre, “M. François Mauriac et la liberté”.
6 Chapter One

In the summer of 1941, Sartre and Beauvoir cycled to the south of

France where they attempted unsuccessfully to persuade André Gide,
André Malraux and Daniel Mayer (who had replaced Léon Blum as leader
of the SFIO) to join their resistance group. In the autumn, Sartre took up a
teaching post at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, and at the same time he and
Merleau-Ponty decided to dissolve Socialisme et Liberté. They had failed
to break out of their isolation and the risks were out of all proportion to the
effectiveness of the group which was, to say the least, very limited.
With the end of Socialisme et Liberté, Sartre returned to writing with a
vengeance. He began Le Sursis (The Reprieve), the sequel to L’Age de
raison, and at the same time was writing a dense treatise that fleshed out
many of the philosophical ideas he had developed during the Phoney War.
It was finally published in April 1943 under the title L’Être et le néant
(Being and Nothingness), but made very little impact at the time. Early in
1943, Sartre accepted the invitation from Jean Paulhan, former editor of
the NRF, to join the Comité national des écrivains (National Writers’
Committee, or CNE), a PCF-sponsored, broad-front writers’ resistance
organisation. He had already contributed articles to resistance publications,
including a review of Camus’s L’Étranger (The Outsider), and now began
writing for the CNE’s clandestine publication, Les Lettres françaises. In
June, Sartre’s play, Les Mouches (The Flies), based on the Greek myth of
Orestes and Electra, with Olga Kosakiewicz in the role of the latter, began
a short run in Paris. Sartre was convinced that he had fooled the German
censors and had succeeded in presenting a resistance play in occupied
Paris. While it is true that the play argued for a rejection of passivity and
bad faith, and embraced the notion of taking responsibility for one’s
actions, it remains debatable whether the audiences understood it as a
resistance play per se. The following year saw the staging of what is
probably Sartre’s most famous play, Huis clos, known in English as In
Camera, or No Exit, and containing the celebrated, if misunderstood line:
“Hell is other people.” The play, in which two women and a man are
condemned to live for eternity within the same enclosed space, is a
dramatisation of sections of L’Être et le néant that explore the difficulty of
establishing authentic interpersonal relations. In August 1944, Paris was
liberated and an account of these historic days appeared under Sartre’s
name in the newspaper Combat, with which Camus had been closely
associated. Summing up his role during the war long after the event, Sartre
stated that he was a writer who resisted and not a resistant who wrote.4

4
Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, lviii.
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 7

The war, Sartre later remarked, had divided his life in two. His
experiences as a soldier and as a POW had taught him that he was,
whether he liked it or not, a social being, and that he could no longer stand
apart from society and his historical context. It was this desire to engage
with his times that had led him to write Bariona and Les Mouches, and to
try to form a resistance group.
In the wake of the Liberation, Sartre’s public persona underwent a
dramatic transformation. Whereas before the war he was becoming known
in Parisian literary circles as a writer, in the autumn of 1945 he was front-
page news, leading him to observe that it was not pleasant to be treated as
a public monument in one’s own lifetime. September saw the
simultaneous publication of his novels, L’Age de raison and Le Sursis, and
the following month the first issue of Les Temps modernes, a review
launched by Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, appeared. Sartre’s
preface, in which he argued that the writer was inevitably implicated in his
times, either by his words or by his silences, provoked uproar in the
literary world. These publications underpinned what Beauvoir called “the
existentialist offensive” of the autumn of 1945.
In post-Liberation Paris, Sartre’s name was inextricably linked to the
term “existentialism”. Such was the popularity of existentialism, and so
widespread was the misunderstanding of what it meant, that in October
Sartre felt obliged to give a public lecture to set the record straight.5
Briefly put, Sartre’s atheistic “philosophy of existence” posited that
existence preceded essence, that is to say we exist but we are not “fixed”.
We embark on a continual process of becoming through the choices we
make. At the core of this philosophy lies the notion of freedom: we are
free and we alone are responsible for the choices we make. To pretend
otherwise is to fall into “bad faith”.
“Freedom” after the dark years of Nazi occupation caught the spirit of
the times, especially when coupled with responsibility. An “existential”
perspective allowed people to take responsibility for what they had (or had
not) done during the Occupation and also gave them a philosophical and
moral basis on which to re-invent themselves. “Existentialism” was also
used to refer to a fashionable “anything goes” life-style particularly
adopted by middle-class youth, whose habitat was the caves (cellars) of St
Germain-des-Prés. In this context, the popular press carried lurid stories of
Sartre’s allegedly sordid, bohemian existence that inevitably dwelt on his
“immoral relationship” with Simone de Beauvoir.

5
Later published as L’Existentialisme est un humanisme.
8 Chapter One

Sartre had hoped to express his political commitment through working

closely with the PCF, as he had done at the end of the war in the CNE.
However, this was not to be. While he was sympathetic to the Party’s aims
and recognised that it had the support of the bulk of the working class with
whom he sympathised, he rejected its espousal of historical and dialectical
materialism and objected to many of its political methods. The Party, for
its part, launched unremitting attacks on Sartre’s novels, plays and
philosophy, as well as his petit-bourgeois background, and his politics.
The main reason for the ferocity of the attacks, which lasted throughout
the 1940s, was that the PCF was threatened by the popularity of Sartre’s
ideas, especially among young people whom the Party was keen to recruit.
In the second half of the 1940s, Sartre continued to provoke scandal
and upset amongst both individuals and groups across the political
spectrum. In November 1946, he presented as a double-bill Morts sans
sépulture (usually translated as Men Without Shadows),6 and La Putain
respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute).7 The first, set during the
Occupation, provoked a walk-out by Raymond Aron and his wife on the
opening night because of the violence of scenes depicting the torture of
resistants; the second, an attack on racism in the USA, led to charges of
anti-Americanism. A year later, Sartre caused uproar again when a radio
programme, presented by the team of Les Temps modernes, compared de
Gaulle with Hitler; and in April 1948 his play, Les Mains sales (Dirty
Hands),8 inspired in part by the assassination of Leon Trotsky, brought
forth yet more bile from the PCF who condemned it as an anti-Communist
work. In the same year, the Vatican placed Sartre’s works on the infamous
Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of forbidden books). By now the
Cold War was an undisputed fact of life, and political differences were
taking their toll on Sartre’s friendships. In 1947, he broke with Aron and a
more recent acquaintance, Arthur Koestler, a former Communist now
turned rabid anti-communist. Relations with Camus, another former
Communist who objected to Sartre’s refusal to condemn the USSR, were
also somewhat strained.
Sartre had visited the USA immediately after the war and, although
there were aspects of the USA that he liked, he was opposed to American
foreign policy. At the same time, despite a degree of sympathy for the
USSR, he was of the opinion that “the politics of Stalinist communism

6
Although the French literally means “dead persons without tombs”, or “unburied
dead”.
7
Frequently mistranslated as The Respectable Prostitute.
8
Originally mistranslated in the US as Red Gloves and in the UK as Crime
passionnel.
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 9

were incompatible with the honest practice of being a professional

writer”.9 Early in 1948, Sartre joined the Rassemblement démocratique
révolutionnaire (RDR), a newly formed revolutionary socialist movement
which rejected both Soviet-style communism and American-style
capitalism. The group failed, both in its attempt to form a mass
organisation and to maintain a “democratic, revolutionary socialist”
middle way. After the organisation lurched to the right, Sartre resigned in
October 1949.
In the second half of the decade, Sartre expressed an interest in the
Jewish question. In 1946, he had published Réflexions sur la question juive
(Reflections on the Jewish Question), and in February 1948 he appeared as
a witness for a former pupil accused of storing arms for the terrorist group
Stern, who were fighting the British in Palestine. The following month,
Sartre declared his support for the creation of the state of Israel.
At Les Temps modernes it was Merleau-Ponty who was de facto the
political editor. Initially on good terms with the PCF and more
sympathetic to Marxism than was Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was becoming
increasingly disillusioned with the USSR. In January 1950, an article
written by Merleau-Ponty, and signed by him and Sartre, appeared in Les
Temps modernes denouncing the Soviet camps. That summer, the outbreak
of the Korean War was the tipping point for Merleau-Ponty, who viewed
the crossing of the 38th parallel by Soviet-backed North Korean troops as
incontrovertible evidence that the USSR was as bellicose and expansionist
as the USA. He declared that he would refuse to comment, and urged that
Les Temps modernes do the same. Sartre, for his part, remained sceptical
but unsettled by Merleau-Ponty’s stance. Sartre’s political uncertainty
reflected his inability to resolve the contradiction between the intellectual
and the man of action, a dilemma articulated by Goetz, the hero of Sartre’s
play, Le Diable et le bon Dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), which
opened in June 1951.
The growing polarisation of the Cold War, Sartre’s sympathy for the
working class, who continued to support the PCF, and the Party’s desire to
broaden its support among the French intelligentsia were creating the
conditions for a rapprochement between Sartre and the Communists. It
came in 1952, when Sartre accepted an offer from leading members of the
Party to join its campaign to free Henri Martin, a sailor imprisoned for five
years for his opposition to French military involvement in Indochina.
Sartre secured an interview with Vincent Auriol, the French president, and

9
“[L]a politique du communisme stalinien est incompatible avec l’exercice
honnête du métier littéraire: [...]” (“Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, 280, my
translation).
10 Chapter One

undertook to write a book about the affair. In the summer, while he was in
Italy, Sartre learned of a massive anti-Communist crackdown in Paris
following violent demonstrations against Ridgway, an American general,
accused (wrongly) of sanctioning the use of chemical weapons in Korea.
Seething with rage and suspecting that the French ruling élite were
preparing a coup d’état, Sartre returned to Paris where he wrote furiously
day and night to produce Les Communistes et la paix (The Communists
and Peace), which marked the beginning of a four-year period as a fellow-
traveller. In the summer of 1952, Les Temps modernes published Sartre’s
acerbic response to a letter by Albert Camus, written after Les Temps
modernes had published a scathing review of Camus’s book, L’Homme
révolté (The Rebel). The two men never spoke again.
Between 1952 and 1956, Sartre’s literary output was far lower than in
previous years. He wrote two plays. Kean, based on the life of the English
Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean (and first performed in November
1953), and Nekrassov, a biting satire on the bourgeois popular press (first
performed in June 1955). He also produced a lengthy biographical essay
on the playwright Jean Genet. But most of his energy was being expended
supporting the Communist-backed peace movement and encouraging
contacts between writers from the East and West. In 1952, he attended the
international peace conference in Vienna, an event to which he attached
the same importance as the victory of the Popular Front and the
Liberation. In 1954, he made the first of a number of visits to the USSR,
and in 1955 he and Beauvoir visited China where Sartre met Chairman
Mao Zedong. In November 1956, as a result of the Soviet invasion of
Hungary and the PCF’s enthusiastic endorsement of it, Sartre distanced
himself from the French Communists and also resigned from the Franco-
Soviet Friendship Society, of which he had been elected Vice-President in
1954.
For Sartre, the next few years were dominated by his engagement with
the theory and practice of Marxism and his increasingly radical opposition
to French involvement in Algeria. In relation to Marxism, Sartre was
attempting to understand what the Soviet intervention in Hungary revealed
about the USSR, and concluded that it could only escape its state of
ossification by a comprehensive process of de-Stalinisation. Sartre had
earlier expressed his sympathy for Tito’s Yugoslavia and now supported
the beginnings of liberalisation in Poland which he visited in January
1957. He was also starting to explore the compatibility between Marxism
and existentialism that resulted in an article “Questions de méthode”
(“Search for a Method”) which appeared in Les Temps modernes in
September and October 1957. By now, Sartre, fuelled by amphetamine-
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 11

based drugs, was frenetically working on a substantial philosophical

treatise in which he attempted to extricate Marxism from the impasse in
which it was locked, to develop it and adapt it to contemporary conditions.
It was published in 1960 as Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of
Dialectical Reason).
January 1956, the month in which Sartre made his first speech on
events in Algeria, coincided with the appointment of Guy Mollet as Prime
Minister. Mollet soon secured “special powers” and doubled the number
of French soldiers serving in Algeria. As the independence movement
headed by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) gathered momentum,
disturbing accounts of the use of torture by the French army began to
circulate. Sartre initially attacked the oppression, super-exploitation and
violence to which the colonized peoples of Algeria were subjected and
which condemned them to a life of misery and ignorance, but he was soon
denouncing the use of torture by the French army as well.
In May 1958, with France threatened by an army coup, de Gaulle
returned to power, an event that prompted a resurgence of Sartre’s
antipathy to le Général, whom he now suspected of intending to establish
a dictatorship. The massive endorsement, by referendum, of de Gaulle and
a new Constitution in September only served to increase Sartre’s sense of
foreboding and his despair with his fellow-citizens, whom he was soon
lambasting for their indifference over Algeria where the war continued. In
September 1959, he staged a new play, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The
Condemned of Altona), which explored notions of torture, guilt and
national responsibility. Although the play was set in post-Nazi Germany, it
clearly resonated with events in Algeria.
In February and March 1960, Sartre and Beauvoir visited Cuba for a
month where they met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and announced their
enthusiastic support for the Cuban revolution. In May, Sartre went to
Yugoslavia where Tito received him. Back in France, he was soon
expressing his support for conscripts who refused to serve in Algeria, and
asserting his solidarity with a clandestine FLN support network headed by
a former colleague at Les Temps modernes, Francis Jeanson. Not only did
Sartre march and continue to protest against French policy in Algeria, but
he was also now explicitly supporting the use of unrestrained violence by
the FLN against Europeans in Algeria, as his notorious preface to Frantz
Fanon’s book, Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), clearly
illustrated.10 Sartre’s vigorous opposition to French policy in Algeria had
already led to an anti-Sartre backlash when, in October 1960, pro-French

10
See Sartre, “Préface”.
12 Chapter One

Algeria demonstrators took to the streets chanting “Fusillez Sartre!”

(“Shoot Sartre!”). In July 1961, Sartre’s Paris flat was bombed by right-
wing ultras, and was bombed again the following January.
After the declaration of Algerian independence in June 1962, Sartre
again turned his attention towards the USSR, which he visited nine times
over the next four years. His official motivation was to resume his role as
a builder of bridges between writers in the East and West (which he had
relinquished in 1956) and to support “progressive oppositionists” among
the Soviet intellectuals. But another reason for his visits was that he had
formed an amorous relationship with his guide and interpreter, Léna
Zonina. In the early 1960s, Sartre returned to an earlier project, namely
revisiting his childhood in order to understand the source of his obsession
with writing and being a writer. The resulting account of his life, up to the
time of his mother’s remarriage, was published as Les Mots (Words) in Les
Temps modernes in 1963 and in book form, dedicated to “Madame Z”
(Léna Zonina), a year later. In the same year, Sartre was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature, which he declined as he thought this distinction
would turn him into a “literary monument” and limit his freedom to speak
out on political issues.
From the mid-1960s, Sartre demonstrated his opposition to American
involvement in Vietnam. In 1965, he turned down an invitation to speak at
Cornell University and the following July accepted Bertrand Russell’s
invitation to join the “tribunal” that Russell was establishing to investigate
American war crimes: in May 1967, Sartre became its executive president.
The Middle East, with its seemingly intractable question of Arab-Israeli
relations, was another area of renewed interest for Sartre at this time. He
had been an unconditional supporter of Israel’s right to exist since the end
of World War II, but by the mid-1960s he had become more sensitive to
the plight of the Palestinians. In 1967 he travelled to Egypt with Beauvoir
and their friend (and her lover), Claude Lanzmann, where they were joined
by one of Sartre’s former mistresses, Arlette El Kaïm, whom he had
legally adopted as his daughter in 1965.
Sartre’s international reputation as a philosopher, as a writer, and as
the very personification of “the committed intellectual”, was at its zenith.
In France, existentialism was no longer fashionable and Sartre was being
eclipsed by a new generation of structuralist and post-structuralist
philosophers that included Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Sartre
was now perceived as something of an elder statesman on the intellectual
stage but—like many elder statesmen—he seemed to have lost much of his
relevance and his ability to inspire.
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 13

However, when the revolt by students and workers erupted in May

1968, Sartre was quick to reach for his pen and sign petitions to support
the students, to castigate the French system of university education, to
denounce the repressive actions of the riot police, and to urge unity
between workers and students. After the revolt fizzled out in June, Sartre
turned on the PCF, whom he accused of objectively siding with de Gaulle
and of opposing student-worker unity—in short, of betraying the “May
revolution”. In the summer, Sartre also broke definitively with the USSR,
following its invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”
programme of reform initiated a few months earlier by Alexander Dubcek.
The “events” of May–June 1968 had revealed the existence of a
vibrant revolutionary potential within French society, but also led Sartre to
reconsider the persona of the committed intellectual that he had epitomised
hitherto. He now concluded that it was not enough for the intellectual
simply to support those in struggle against oppression, the intellectual had
to be an integrated part of the struggle. This was a far cry from his view
of the intellectual that he had outlined in a series of talks in Japan in 1965,
when he presented the intellectual as living in a kind of no man’s land
viewed with suspicion by the working class, as a traitor by the ruling class,
and as a would-be fugitive from his own class which he never quite
manages to escape.11
Sartre soon had the opportunity to put into practice his notion of what
he called the “revolutionary intellectual” or “new intellectual”. In April
1970, leaders of the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left), a Maoist
group, asked Sartre to take legal responsibility for the group’s newspaper
La Cause du peuple (The People’s Cause). Although Sartre had his
political differences with the Maoists, he approved of their spontaneous
approach to revolutionary politics, their refusal to respect “bourgeois”
legality, and their willingness to embark on “symbolically violent actions”,
as when they openly stole food from an up-market store and distributed it
among the down-at-heel inhabitants of the suburbs. He admired the
militants who had “de-intellectualised” themselves by abandoning their
studies and going to work in factories. Sartre was on very friendly terms
with the Maoist leadership, especially Benny Lévy (alias, Pierre Victor),
with whom he would discuss politics and philosophy for hours on end.
Also, unlike his experience as a Communist fellow traveller when the
Party discouraged any contact between workers and intellectuals, Sartre’s
involvement with the Maoists led to exchanges with workers, in particular
with Renault car workers and with miners from the Pas de Calais.

11
See Sartre, “Plaidoyer”, 426.
14 Chapter One

Despite his age and frail health, Sartre engaged in actions with the
Maoists. He sold La Cause du peuple on the streets at a time when
possession of a single copy could mean a fine or even a prison sentence.
He addressed the workers outside the Renault car plant, and on another
occasion even tried to hold a meeting inside the factory. He took part in an
illegal occupation of the Sacré Coeur basilica to protest at police brutality.
Sartre’s Maoist period was the most politically radical of his life. It
also coincided with one of his most ambitious literary projects, namely his
multi-volume study of the nineteenth-century novelist, Gustave Flaubert.
Sartre had read Flaubert as a child, returning to him again during his time
at the ENS, and again during the Occupation. In the 1950s, he wrote about
1,000 pages of an existentialist analysis of the author of Madame Bovary
before abandoning it. In 1971, the first two volumes of L’Idiot de la
famille (The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857) were published,
followed by a third in 1972, making a total of over 3,000 pages. Two more
volumes were promised, but in June 1973 disaster struck when Sartre lost
the use of his “good” eye, rendering him almost blind. He realised that he,
who had written for up to ten hours a day for fifty years, would never write
again. Undeterred, he began work with Benny Lévy on a political history
of the twentieth century for television, but opposition from the political
establishment resulted in the project being aborted. Now Sartre turned to
collaborative writing with Lévy, who had been his secretary since 1973
and with whom he had formed a close relationship. Some thought Lévy’s
challenging engagement with Sartre’s views had a rejuvenating effect on
him. Others, especially Sartre’s old friends—and in particular Simone de
Beauvoir—who were marginalised by Lévy’s forceful presence,
considered Lévy to be an interloper, taking advantage of a frail old man
and forcing Sartre to accept Lévy’s views as his own. Despite his
infirmity, Sartre travelled to Germany in December 1974 to visit Andreas
Baader, co-founder of the Red Army Fraction, in prison; and in April 1975
he went to Portugal to see what life was like after the overthrow of the
fascist régime. In June 1979 there was a rapprochement of sorts with
Raymond Aron, when both went to the Palais de l’Elysée, trying to secure
assistance for the Vietnamese boat people from the then-President, Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing.
Lévy continued to play a prominent role in Sartre’s life and, in 1979,
organised a meeting of Arab and Israeli intellectuals in Paris, but it was
not a success, and Sartre played a minor part. In March 1980, Le Nouvel
Observateur’s intention to publish three dialogues between Lévy and
Sartre confirmed the worst fears of Sartre’s entourage, for it appeared to
them that Lévy had pressured Sartre into denying some of the
 Sartre: A Biographical Sketch 15

philosophical notions he had held most dear. Was it a case of an old man
taking the line of least resistance, or of a philosopher doing once again
what he had always done, namely to think against himself? In any event,
Sartre rejected attempts by Beauvoir and others to prevent publication, and
personally telephoned the editor of the weekly magazine to insist that the
articles appear. On 20 March, while the dispute was still raging, Sartre was
rushed to hospital and died three weeks later, on 15 April.
Despite a large exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 2005 to
mark the centenary of Sartre’s birth, the celebration of the man and his
works in his native country was more muted than in the rest of the world,
where Sartre is still (as it were) alive and well. Sartre’s reputation rests on
the staggering breadth of his œuvre for—as a leading North American
Sartre scholar, Ronald Aronson, has observed—it is possible to study
Sartre in relation to topics as diverse as Marxism, colonialism, the
developing world, violence, racism, art, music, fiction, the theatre and the
cinema.12
Whereas Sartre remains one of the most studied of all French thinkers
or literary figures, his relevance and significance are not restricted to the
relatively closed world of academia. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom is a
practical philosophy, as he himself demonstrated. His willingness to
question himself, to think against himself, to explore the tensions between
the man he had been, the man he was, and the man he wanted to become,
underpins the dynamic nature of his life. His philosophy, both at a
personal level and at a broader level, is an optimistic and generous one.
From 1945 until his death, he marched (until he was too frail), wrote,
proclaimed and agitated to oppose all forms of oppression and
exploitation, in particular racism, colonialism and imperialism. He was
convinced that the world could be a different and better place, although,
true to his anti-determinist philosophy, he never assumed that it
necessarily would be.

Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. “Meanwhile: Jean-Paul Sartre at 100: Still Troubling Us
Today”, International Herald Tribune, 22 June 2005.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “M. François Mauriac et la liberté”, La Nouvelle Revue
française, no. 305, February 1939, 212-32; and in Situations, I. Paris:
Gallimard, 1947.

12
See Aronson, “Meanwhile”.
16 Chapter One

—. Œuvres romanesques, (eds Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka). Paris:

Gallimard, 1981.
—. L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1946.
—. “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, in Situations, II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
—. “Préface”, in Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: Maspero,
1961.
—. “Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels”, in Situations, VIII. Paris: Gallimard,
1972.