Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre: I think we have to start with ’36. At that time I wasn’t involved in politics. This means that I was a liberal intellectual of the “Republic of Professors,” as the French Republic was sometimes called. I was entirely in favor of the Popular Front, but it never would have occurred to me to vote to give a decisive meaning to my opinion. This is hardly admissible, if we consider the question rationally.

But when ideology crumbles, beliefs are left over that give thought a magical aspect. What was still left to me were the principles of individualism. I felt myself attracted by the crowds that made the popular front, but I didn’t really understand that I was part of this and that my place was among them: I saw myself as a solitary.

The positive element in this was a dim repugnance for universal suffrage, and the vague idea that a vote could never represent the concrete thought of a man. I only understood much later what it was that always bothered me about universal suffrage: it’s that it could only serve indirect democracy, which is a dupery.

So I remained inactive until ’39, limiting myself to writing, but in perfect sympathy with the men of the left. The war opened my eyes: I had lived the period 1918–1939 as if it were the dawn of a lasting peace, and I saw that it was in fact the preparation for a new war. As for the lovely clean little atom that I thought myself to be, powerful forces took hold of him and sent him to the front without asking his opinion.

The whole length of the war, and especially my captivity in Germany (from which I escaped by passing myself off as a civilian), were the occasion for me of a lasting plunge into the crowd, which I thought I’d left and which, in fact, I had never quitted. The Nazi victory had completely upset me and upset all the ideas of mine that were still inspired by liberalism.

Aside from that, political obligation had come to seek all of us in the prison camp. Already several individuals, prisoners like us, wanted to organize against French fascism. From that moment, we were placed before a political reality from which we’d always wanted to escape. We had to fight our German and French enemies in the name of democracy. But that which we defended was no longer exactly liberal democracy.

Upon my return to Paris after nine months of captivity, I sought — still convinced of the sovereign powers of the individual — to constitute a resistance group whose name Socialisme et Liberté indicated clearly enough the principal concern, but which, like many small groups at that time, was only made up of petit-bourgeois intellectuals. We didn’t do much hard work; above all, we wrote leaflets.

When the USSR entered the war we set out to establish an alliance with the Communists. One of us got in contact with them at the university — yet again, intellectuals. They contacted the highest levels of the French Communist Party (PCF) and brought back the response: “There’s no question of working with them; Sartre was freed by the Nazis to slip into resistance circles and to spy on them for the Germans.”

This Communist distrust sickened us, and made us aware of our powerlessness. We dissolved a little bit later, but only after one of us was arrested by the Germans: she died in deportation. Disgusted, I did nothing for eighteen months: I was a professor at the Lycée Condorcet.

At the end of this period I was contacted by some old Communist friends, who proposed my entering the CNE (Comité National des Écrivains — National Writers Committee), which edited a clandestine journal, Les Lettres Francaises, and I did the kind of work you would expect of writers carefully cut off by the PC from the armed and the mass resistance.

It was at the beginning of ’43 that my first common undertaking with the PCF began. To start with, I asked them if they weren’t afraid to have a spy freed by the Nazis to give the names of resistance fighters enter the CNE. They laughed, saying it was a misunderstanding, and that everything was going to work out. And in fact, there was never again to be a Communist in Paris spreading slanderous remarks about me.

In the free zone, nevertheless, the Communists circulated a blacklist of collaborationist writers, on which my name figured. I became angry, and I was assured that there was a mistake, and that the list would never come out again with my name on it, which was the case, I think.

From this first undertaking with the Communists, I remember meetings on fixed dates at Edith Thomas’s house. There’s not much to say about this, aside from the editing of Lettres Françaises, where I wrote a few articles that [Jean] Paulhan edited. We did nothing practical. More than anything I had the feeling that they were isolating us.

This was especially noticeable during the combats of the Liberation. Many of us having asked to take an active part in this, we were assigned to the guarding of the Comédie-Francaise which, of course, was never attacked. Nevertheless, there was fighting for a day around the Place de la Théatre-Français, though not for us, who were assigned the function of nurses.

After the Liberation, the PC completely changed its attitude towards me: Les Lettres Françaises attacked me, as well as Action (less violently, but more insidiously). I attribute this break to the fact that I was beginning to become known, particularly as the author of Being and Nothingness, which could only displease them.

One of the leaders said to me at the time that I was putting a brake on the movement that was leading young intellectuals to the Party. This was a moment of real confusion: it was the era when I could draw conclusions from what I was taught by the Resistance which, as we all know, had turned increasingly to the Left and which, at that very moment, was beginning to be dismantled by De Gaulle.

As for me, I’d become a convinced socialist, but anti-hierarchical and libertarian, that is, for direct democracy. I knew full well that my objectives weren’t those of the PC, but I thought we could travel along the same road for a while. This abrupt break profoundly disconcerted me.

And then there was my review, Les Temps Modernes. It was not yet militant, but I sought to perfect different forms of inquiry there, permitting a demonstration that all social realities equally reflect, though at different levels, the structures of the societies that produce them and that, in this regard, a fait divers is as meaningful as an event that is, properly speaking, political in the sense it then had.

Something I’d translate now with these words: everything is political, i.e., everything puts in question society in its entirety, and opens onto contestation. This was the starting point of Temps Modernes. Obviously, this presupposed the taking of a political position (but not in the sense of political parties; rather, in the sense of how we should orient our inquiries), and I’d given Merleau-Ponty complete freedom in the area of political formulation.

He had taken the same position as that of many Frenchmen, which consisted of relying on the Socialist Party (PS), and even sometimes the MRP, which at that time was tripartiste, in order to effect a rapprochement with the Communists. For example, he thought that the Rights of Man in our bourgeois republic were abstract and empty, and he counted on the attraction that the PC exercised on the two other parties to force them to give this some kind of social content.

Personally, I didn’t do much on the political level, but I approved him. This was the attitude of the review around ’45–’50. The result was that the Communists, though distrustful of Merleau-Ponty, treated him better than they treated me. But this type of rapprochement was tainted from the start, because it presupposed a tripartiste government.

The first breach was made during the strike wave that brought about the resignation of the PC from the government. From this point on, back in opposition, the PCF hardened its positions, while the PS, through an opposite movement, became more or less the left of the right.

And people like us, who thought we could contribute to reestablishing a bridge between the PC and the parties in the government, found ourselves with our backsides between two chairs. Our position was untenable. Merleau-Ponty couldn’t conceive of extending his hand to the PC unless it had support to its right.

After the break there were three possibilities: move closer to the PC, move closer to the PS-MRP, which was the government, or abandon politics. To make matters worse, at this time there was the first serious scuffle — I mean the war in Korea. Merleau-Ponty was very shaken up by this, and he said to me: “The cannons are talking. There’s nothing for us to do but shut up.”

He accepted as true the news from American agencies, had taken his distance from the Party, and had chosen the second solution. He grew increasingly distant from us. I, nevertheless, had chosen the first solution: I doubted the news that he took seriously. Above all, at that time I considered the PC the organic representative of the working class.

In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything else on the Left. I didn’t realize that democratic centralism and the hierarchical structure of the apparatus of the PC were one and the same thing; even if it sought the votes and the membership of workers, its policies were never decided at the base, but from on high.

It was also necessary that a rapprochement with the PCF even be possible. And in fact, they didn’t want to hear anything about it. In the preceding years, I had joined the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire (RDR), an organization founded by [David] Rousset. Merleau didn’t go there immediately, and only joined it later so as not to abandon me.

This was my first political step, and I have to admit it wasn’t a happy one. The Rassemblement didn’t want its members to be only those not in any party; it wanted Communists and Socialists to come to us, without their ceasing to be militants in the PC or the PS. This was total idiocy.

As long as we — Merleau-Ponty and I — were only at Les Temps Modernes, a review read by 10,000 people, our criticisms didn’t bother the Communists: they had the interest of not being inspired by any party. They sometimes even accepted to respond.

But from the moment when, in the RDR, we wanted to recruit their militants (accepting, of course, that they remain Communists, though this was a simple stylistic clause), the PC fired on us with all barrels blazing. There weren’t many of us, maybe from 10,000 to 20,000. But this didn’t matter; this was the embryo of a party and we were attacked as such.

In fact, the RDR never left this first phase. Our ideas were extremely vague; grossly speaking, it seems, it was a new version of that third force that so many men wanted to create in France. We wanted to try to push our government to join with other European governments in attempting to mediate between the USSR and the US.