[lit-ideas] On Sartre and the French Resistance
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2012 19:08:46 -0700
David Ritchie asks, ?Who exaggerated Sartre?s involvement in the
Resistance?? I haven?t read a biography of Sartre but I have been
interested in the Vichy period and its aftermath and have run across several
comments about Sartre and his exaggerated claims about his association with
the Resistance:
Michael Curtis in his Verdict on Vichy, Power and Prejudice in the Vichy
France Regime written in 2002 wrote ?The Myth of a heroic Resistance
movement, cultivated by the media and intellectuals in post-war years, has
been dispelled in many works over the last two decades. Relatively few,
such as the writers Rene Char and Paul Eluard, were courageous in defying
the Occupation in their work. On the part or prominent writers ? Andre
Gide, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Jules Romains, Roger Martin du Gard,
even Andre Malraux until nearly the end of the war ? the rule was silence or
inaction. This silence was even more deafening in the case of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who so strongly influenced the climate of
intellectual opinion after the war, because of their claim not only that
they took part in the Resistance in a significant way, but that their
courageous defiance inspired their conduct in peacetime.?
On page 232 Curtis writes, ?In view of Sartre?s well-constructed self-image
as a courageous fighter for freedom against oppression and discrimination .
. . [Curtis then discusses some of Sartre?s works].
On page 235 Curtis writes, ?One of Jean-Paul Sartre?s magisterial utterances
is that ?the writer is situation in his time: each word has its
reverberation, each silence also. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible
for the repression that followed the Commune because they did not write a
line to prevent it. Balsas, many great writers were silent about Vichy:
Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Jules Romains, Roger Martin du
Gard, Andre Malraux until the eleventh hour, and Jean-Paul Sartre.?
On Page 236 Curtis writes, ?Barely leaving his table at the Café de Flore in
Paris, Sartre began assuming his various mantles; popular author, admired
intellectual, sponsor of avant-garde literature, formulator of a new French
form of philosophy and potential endorser of resistance. He wrote in
Comoedia, a collaborationist weekly backed by German money. His play Les
Mouches and his book Being and Nothingness were approved by the German
censors. He even, according to one critic, drank champagne with the Nazis
at the opening of his play. He was blind to Auschwitz.?
Tony Judt on page 46 of Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956
wrote, ?The initial postwar myth claimed that although fighting Resistance
may have been a minority, it was supported and assisted by ?the mass of the
nation,? united in its desire for a German defeat. Only Laval, Petain, and
their henchmen felt or acted otherwise. This was the official Communist
position. It was largely echoed by the Gaullists, who insisted in their
turn that the Resistance had been the natural reflex of a nation faithful to
its historical traditions; the ?insurrection? of the summer of 1944 was
singled out as a ?popular tidal wave surpassing in its dimensions all such
uprisings in the past.? Although there were from the start those who
acknowledged how small and isolated resistance had been, their voice was
drowned by the chorus of mutual admiration. In a book published in 1945,
Louis Parrot would write of the ?pure heroism? of Aragon and his wife Elsa
Triolet, the ?audacious courage? of Paul Eluard, and the ?subtly dangerous
game? played by Jean-Paul Sartre, practicing ?open clandestinity? in the
face of the occupying authorities. This is drivel of course, but it is at
least ecumenical drivel: everyone was good.?
Earlier Judt (on page 32) wrote ?After the fall of France . . . when excuses
for collaboration or compromise became harder to find, intellectuals would
find themselves discovering in the very act of political disobedience the
freedom they would later defend. The dilemma between ?being? and ?doing,?
which had seemed so significant before the war, collapsed. To do was to be:
no longer a universal consciousness vested in a singular self, the
intellectual was bound within the organic community and there presented with
apparently simple choices, all of which entailed action of one sort or
another. Being part of the common purpose, accepting as one?s own the
meaning given to a collective action, offered certainty in place of doubt:
the intellectual resister took on a mantle of confidence and shed the cloak
of insecurity that had shrouded the previous generation.
?Why did some intellectuals find this confidence and others not? For some
people, the explanation lies in their disillusion with the initial
expectations placed in Vichy; others never harbored illusions in the first
place but could only be brought to defend what became the values of the
resistance once they had recovered from the shock of defeat and had been
sufficiently moved to protest the policies and practices of occupiers and
collaborators alike. Third category, which should include men such as
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, seem to have been waiting for some such moment all
their lives, so enthusiastically did they welcome the chance to be part of a
romantic commitment whose scope and meaning would transcend, transform, and
give practical effect to their earlier writings. The chance was welcomed
mostly in theory, however, in practice only a minority of intellectual
resisters saw real action of any sustained sort, whether in the Free French
armies, the armed resistance, or clandestine networks of all kinds. For
most of the rest, it was the association with the community of resisters
that counted, the sense of being part of something larger than oneself ? a
circle of dissenting writers, a resistance group, a clandestine political
organization, or History itself.?
Antony Beevor in his Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 references Judt
(although I can?t tell which of Judt?s books he has in mind) when he writes
?On the subject of Politically engaged intellectuals in France ? whether
Drieu, Brasillach, Malraux or Sartre ? Professor Judt has observed that
their fascination with violence contained a ?quasi-erotic charge?. It
underlines the fact that while it has long been long been easy to mock
Hemingway, the posturing of French intellectuals, although more
sophisticated, demonstrated an arrogant irresponsibility which was far more
dangerous and dishonest. Sartre tried to reconcile existentialism with his
new phase of revolutionary commitment, but predictably it failed to be
anything more and an exercise in verbose sophistry. By the end of his life
he even began to justify terrorist action.?
A book I haven?t read is Quiet Moments in a War, a collection of letters
written by Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir which Amazon.com describes as ?A
collection of letters by the author of Being and Nothingness depicts Sartre
as a soldier, a prisoner of the Germans, and a man of Resistance and charts
his path to fame with the publication of his major works.?
Jonathan Fenby in France on the Brink on page 269 wrote ?. . . one French
literary historian remarked acidly of the country?s most famous post-war
couple; ?On 11 August 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir entered
the Resistance, at the same moment as the Paris police.?
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