Abstract
Patrick Baert, who has been working for some time on the sociology of intellectuals and has also written on the reception, or rather non-reception, of twentieth-century French theory in his home university, Cambridge (Morgan and Baert, 2015) has documented here, in an extremely convincing manner, the way in which Sartre and other existentialists achieved massive prominence in France immediately after the Second World War. The fact of their prominence is not of course in dispute; Sartre’s funeral over two decades later, in 1980, notoriously attracted crowds of around 50,000. When he was breaking the law in 1968 by selling copies of a banned Maoist newspaper, President de Gaulle famously pronounced that ‘you don’t arrest Voltaire’. What Baert shows, however, is how precisely Sartre’s role was linked to the last months of the war and the immediate aftermath. He became, in a sense, the conscience of France, drawing the conclusion of the importance of resistance and engagement in a country where a minority of writers and intellectuals had actively supported the German Occupation and/or the puppet Vichy regime, and the majority had done little or nothing to resist them, demoralized and demobilized in a way which those of us who voted Remain in June 2016 in the UK now perhaps understand better. His essays of 1944 and 1945 on ‘Paris under the Occupation’ and ‘What is a Collaborator?’ remain classic texts on the period.
Sartre had hardly been in the forefront of resistance, confining his activity largely to writing for underground publications and participating after a time in the CNE, the Comité national des écrivains, established under communist leadership after the war came to involve the USSR. He had, however, a clean and respectable record at a time when many leading writers had been discredited by their collaboration or, less drastically, their inactivity. His message fitted the spirit of the times in a way which won over large masses of people who would not otherwise have been attracted to a radical atheist close to Marxism, just as the Communist Party enjoyed mass support for its belated but in the end overwhelming role in the Resistance. (The Party rightly saw Sartre as a dangerous rival to its own intellectual efforts.) Paradoxically, and the contradiction is in reality, not in Baert’s analysis, there was both something of a vacuum on the intellectual scene and a ferment of novel and often wacky ideas across Europe. The Virgin Mary, for example, clocked up more appearances than usual, as did witchcraft, and without wishing to draw a parallel between these ideas and those of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I would suggest that they may also have benefited from this general atmosphere.
Baert stresses that, unlike the First World War, which ended at a precise time, the end of the Second World War dragged on for over a year, with parts of France liberated while many citizens remained in prison or forced labour camps, if not worse. This is perhaps a peculiarity of the French situation, unlike that in Germany or the smaller countries of western and central Europe, though it is also part of a more general phenomenon; there were more war dead between January and April 1945 than during all the rest of the war. The long interregnum added to the complexities of what, again after more recent events such as the end of apartheid or communist rule in Europe, we recognize in the complex processes and dilemmas of lustration and retribution. As Baert points out, retribution was particularly severe in the early months and gradually became less so. The novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example, who fled to Denmark, was merely sentenced in absentia to a year’s imprisonment and was granted an amnesty in 1951.
Sartre, as Baert shows, benefited particularly from the publisher Gaston Gallimard’s efforts to rehabilitate himself after collaborating in the war by publishing works by Resistance writers, and, from as early as October 1945, from Sartre’s journal, Les temps modernes, planned a year earlier but delayed by the paper shortage. This served as an exceptionally valuable platform, as did his numerous radio appearances and public speeches. There is an interesting parallel to be traced with Adorno, who also enjoyed good access to press and radio a little later, in the relatively progressive atmosphere of Frankfurt in the early 1950s, and who also thematized German war guilt against the prevailing ‘inability’ or unwillingness to mourn. Adorno’s focus on the Holocaust also points up Sartre’s relative silence about it and about specifically French rather than German responsibility in relation to the deportations, even in his analysis of anti-Semitism and his ‘reflections on the Jewish question’. We may speculate whether he was unconsciously following the nationalist emphasis of much of the discussion of the war and the Resistance, or consciously downplaying a further area of potential embarrassment, perhaps also his own.
Sartre’s model of autobiography, which inspired a number of his collaborators, notably André Gorz (1958) and Simone de Beauvoir (1958 onwards), and which he practised himself in the first draft of 1953 and then the published version of Les Mots (1964), shifted, as the late Michael Sheringham brilliantly traced in the chapter on existentialist autobiography in his French Autobiography (1993), from a purely existentialist emphasis on the choice of a guiding ‘project’ of the author’s life to a recognition of the way this project is shaped by childhood and social context and developed often in opposition to them. Baert’s ‘positioning’ model, which draws creatively on social psychological analyses of face-to-face interaction, by Rom Harré and others, and on work in marketing and the sociology of science, stresses effects rather than intentions. In a démarche eerily similar to Sartre’s own reformulation of his conception of the project, but taking it much further, Baert writes: ‘We do not think it is fruitful to conceive of intellectuals as pursuing authentic projects that correspond to their views about their identity and values’ (p. 162).
I remain keen, however, to know more about how far Sartre was consciously positioning himself and how far he was simply surfing a wave which carried him along. Baert stresses the relational aspect of positioning and the way in which it ‘depends on broader intellectual networks’ (p. 177). In Sartre’s case, the theme of responsibility is crucial. It was already at the centre of his thinking before the war, but he must also have realized at an early stage its centrality not just to the chosen commitments of engaged intellectuals, but to all citizens at a time of crisis. Sartre himself wrote in 1948, in ‘What is Literature?’, cited by Bourdieu in ‘Intellectual field and creative project’ (1966), that ‘There are some qualities that come to us entirely from the judgements of other people.’ The related question is one which Sartre famously posed himself, with his remark that ‘Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.’ Sartre sets the question here as a problem for reductionist versions of Marxism, but it is broader than that. Andreas Hess has framed it as ‘making sense of individual creativity’, noting incidentally (Hess, 2014: 39) that the intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock has come to devote more attention to the question of reception and effects, which, as we have seen, is the focus of positioning theory.
My final question concerns the end of the existentialist moment and the extent to which Sartre’s prominence necessarily went into eclipse in the 1960s. Here we confront questions of fashion, in a culture where the star quality of intellectuals is particularly strong, and more internal developments, such as the rise of the social sciences in France and the concomitant eclipse of the general or philosophical intellectual or the difficulty, which Baert also points to, for Sartre to reconcile existentialism with the Marxism which became increasingly strong in his later thinking. There is no doubt about the appeal of structuralism and its stress on rigour and scientificity, but it is not clear that Sartre’s version of Marxism was thereby doomed to the margins. Thinkers as different as Cornelius Castoriadis, with his concept of the imaginary institution (or, better, constitution) of society, and Alain Touraine (in his Sociologie de l’action of 1965), continued important elements of Sartre’s later thought. And the success for a time of the nouveaux philosophes, who, with the possible exception of André Glucksmann, were not particularly impressive as philosophers, suggests that the shift to a more specialized and professionalized intellectual environment may be over-estimated. In the 1980s, Foucault and Bourdieu railed against the tradition of generalistic essayism in France, and one of the leading nouveaux philosophes, Bernard-Henri Lévy, came eventually to recognize, in a book of 2000 on ‘Sartre’s century’, the similarities in many areas between Sartre and the structuralists (who of course mostly rejected the label). Baert’s term ‘demise’ in the title of Chapter 6 of this superb book is perhaps a little over-stated. Sartre himself may have rather lost his way in the late 1960s and 1970s, but the trails he blazed are still well trodden.