Sartre’s Stratagem
Passing Acquaintances 4
If you lived in Paris and somehow got your hands on Situations III in those first years after the Second World War — maybe a used copy at your favorite bouquiniste — you would have found an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the opening line leaps out, an assertion guaranteed to infuriate while deranging your sense of what you’d been through during those 55 months:
We were never so free as we were during the German occupation.
Outrageous. And yet it’s hard not to be intrigued, to wonder how the writer can justify such a bald assertion like that. You want to see if he can pull it off.
“We were never so free as we were during the German occupation. We’d lost all our rights, first that of speaking freely : we were insulted to our faces every day and had to keep quiet; they deported us en masse, workers, Jews or political prisoners; everywhere, on the walls, in the journals, on the screen, we encountered the revolting, withered face our oppressors wanted to us to have : all of this freed us. Once the Nazi venom had crawled into our way of thinking, every thought was a conquest; once the all-powerful police wanted to force us to be silent, every word became as precious as a declaration of principles; once we were hunted, every gesture had the weight of a commitment. The often atrocious circumstances of our battle forced us to live without make-up, openly, this divided, unbearable situation we call the human condition. Exile, captivity, the death above all that we so cleverly mask during our happy days, we turned into the perpetual objects of our concern, we learned that these aren’t avoidable accidents, nor even of constant menaces coming from outside: this must be our lot, our destiny, the deep source of our reality as human beings; we lived every second fully, in the sense of that banal phrase, “All men are mortal.” And the choice each made was authentic since he made it in the presence of death, since it would always be expressed as “Better death than…” I’m not talking here about that elite who were the the real Resistants, but of all the French who, every hour day and night for four years, said No. The cruelty of the enemy pushed us to the extremes of our condition by forcing us to pose the questions that elude us during peacetime: every one of us — and what French person didn’t find himself in this position at one time or another ? — who knew a few details about the Resistance had to anxiously ask himself, “If they torture me, will I hold up ?” That was the way the question of liberty was put and we were close to the most profound knowledge man can have of himself. Because a man’s secret isn’t the Oedipal complex or his inferiority, it’s the very limit of his liberty, it’s his power of resistance to torture and death.”
That imaginary reader who found himself outraged at Sartre’s stratagem, now finds himself asking if he was really such a hero. Like the writer or not, the essay does what philosophy is supposed to do: turn everything on its head.
The opening paragraph of the essay “La Republique du silence” published in Les lettres françaises 1944, reprinted in Situations III (Gallimard 1949) and recently reëdited, functions as kind of crystalisation of existentialism, that over-worked word that was soon to become all the rage and is now a prop in the lingo of journalists and politicians alike. It must have struck Sartre as strange to hear teenagers who knew nothing of the betrayals and deprivations of the war years saying their were in the midst of an exitential crisis while asking Daddy for spending money. But it’s true then, too.
Why read Sartre now ? He isn’t a cult favorite like Camus. Still, you might find him ‘profound, innovative and terribly touching’, in Laurent Greilsamer’s words in the current issue of Le 1. To steal a few more, Greilsamer neatly characterizes Sartre as a man who dreamed of being both Spinoza and Stendhal at one and the same time, a fair assessment of the philosopher who wrote Being and Nothingness and the writer who wrote plays, biographies (Baudelaire, Genet, Tintoretto, Flaubert), and novels that are — better than any lengthy criticism could take up your time trying to convince you — still quite readable, Nausea first among them but not alone. He had style, which is something they can’t teach in the universities, and wasn’t afraid, in Mailer’s phrase, to say Fuck You to the reader. He was ahead of the game when he denounced colonialism and looked out for minorities. If he was combative about politics, harsh on the fate of writers he deemed collaborateurs, and wrong about some things, that’s the way it goes. People who are always right about politics are terrific bores. Sartre went out on a limb and he didn’t have the internet to hide behind. He’s due for a revival, even if it looks like humanism is down for the count after a few rounds with the algorithm boys. Beauvoir said his intelligence was always on high alert. And that’s how he comes across, as a roving conscience not a professional writer.
Critics go after Sartre for not leaving during the war, for staying in Paris and living, as he always did, modestly, as if that weren’t the Stoics’ response in every generation. Should he have left town two steps ahead of stormtroopers and settled in Princeton, where he would have mystified generations of young American students ? Should all the cobblers, car mechanics and vélo-taxi drivers have split, too ? That’s upper-class thinking in a nutshell. If Sartre had caught the last boat from Marseilles and headed to Harvard, Existentialism would be something you look up in the archives. It’s just a salad word in America anyway.
There’s something hopeful in the passage above, isn’t there ? Hard to put your finger on exactly. It’s very Protestant, with men and women confronting their consciences continuously. And yet he’s saying, you didn’t go to church to do it, you did it when confronted by a superior, negative power. You weren’t the elite of the resistance but you held on in a shared, impossible existence. Real hope is always in short supply, never less so than now, with the Army of Control barging in everywhere, throwing billions around like play money and telling us what we were allowed to think and say.
Photographer André Kertész encountered a young Sartre in one of the cafés he was typically thrown out of for bouncing from table to table and nudging a single cup of coffee for hours on end. It’s a rarely seen image, and the quality here is definitely not great, taken from a book at the Doisneau house in Gentilly. Worth seeing anyway, and maybe it gives you some sense of what de Beauvoir meant.
Sartre called Camus ‘a fine writer but France is full of fine writers,’ a classic example of damning with faint praise. He was Celine’s bête noire, and every avantish American scribbler grows up adoring Louis-Ferdinand and knowing next to nothing about Sartre except when to use the word existential to maximum effect. He wrote about Faulkner alongside Proust in the ’40s when the backwoods Homer was ignored and nearly out of print. Let the debate begin.
The full French text of Sartre’s essay can be found here. I’ll translate the whole thing (3 pages) when and if this post gets to five hundred readers. Le 1 is online here. My big wordpile is at https://continentalriffs.substack.com/ but I’m always grateful for commentary here at Medium.
Previous Acquaintances : Henri Michaux André Kertèsz Georges Brassens
