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A Child in the Hall of Mirrors

One appears to begin at the beginning … but the end is already there and it transforms everything. For us, the guy is already the hero of the story.

La Nausée

On 17 September 1906 a certain Jean-Baptiste Sartre lay dying in a small farm near Thiviers in southwest France. As the enterocolitis he had contracted seven years earlier in China closed down his body, he would doubtless have been perplexed to learn that 80 years hence an assiduous scholar would visit his birthplace, scrutinize records of his naval career, and read letters he had written home from his overseas postings in an attempt to find out what kind of man he had been. What had he done to deserve such attention? Nothing but his duty – his duty as a husband, that is: one day in the autumn of 1904 he had inseminated Anne-Marie Sartre, née Schweitzer, whom he had married the previous May. The issue of this ‘immense stupidity’ was at that moment in September 1906 giving vent to his resentment in the home of the wet nurse where he had been placed in order to allow his mother to devote her energies to nursing her dying husband. The baby, born on 21 June 1905 and baptized Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard Sartre, would one day become ‘Sartre’, thus rescuing his father from oblivion and endowing him with a kind of vicarious immortality: the son gives birth to the father. But when, half a century later, Sartre came to put his own life into words, his father merited no more than a few lines: ‘Even today, I am amazed at how little I know about him. And yet, he loved, he tried to live, he found himself dying; that is enough to make a whole man.’¹ We should not be misled by the terseness of this obituary: to learn to be a ‘whole man’ is no little thing in Sartre’s view of humanity.

The death of Jean-Baptiste left Anne-Marie virtually without financial support and without a roof over her head, so she went back to live with her parents in Meudon. Her father, Charles Schweitzer, had taken early retirement from teaching, but with extra mouths to feed, he rescinded his notice. There was not a word of complaint, everyone behaved impeccably, but the reproaches were no less real for not being articulated: ‘families, of course, prefer widows to young single mothers, but only just’.² In the bourgeois worldview that sees marriage as more of a business partnership than an expression of love, Anne-Marie had clearly been fobbed off with damaged goods. Sartre himself later saw the loss of his father as the determining moment of his life: condemning his mother to ten years of filial servitude, it liberated the child, in advance, from a father–son relationship that would inevitably, he imagined, have crushed him: ‘The death of Jean-Baptiste … returned my mother to her chains and gave me my freedom.’³

And so began ten years of ‘happiness’ for ‘Poulou’.

Les Mots (the autobiography that Sartre wrote in his fifties) lays no claim to objective truthfulness. Indeed, after 50 pages, we are disconcerted to read: ‘What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false, like everything one writes about madmen, about men.’⁴ In later years Sartre took to referring to the biographies he wrote as ‘true novels’, adding that he would like Les Mots, too, to be read as a novel, albeit ‘one in which [I] believe’. Bearing in mind these caveats surrounding the veracity of the account, let us now sketch the outline of the story that Sartre tells about his own childhood in Les Mots.

All artists are victims of a fundamental ambiguity: with one foot in the imaginary and one in the real, they are – to use an image beloved of Sartre – like mermaids whose human form finishes in a fish’s tail. In short, they are monsters. Les Mots is marked by this tension between the real and the imaginary, and is Sartre’s attempt to account for the choices that led him to become such a monster. Poulou – as the child Sartre was known in his family – appears in the Schweitzer household as the result of an almost immaculate conception: Anne-Marie is, after all, ‘a virgin with a stain’. Deprived of a father, he is also deprived of a destiny. A father would at least have given him something to revolt against. But, burdensome as it may be, the Father’s law at least keeps the son anchored in reality. The absence of a father had endowed him with an ‘incredible lightness’ that, at times, became unbearable.

As ill luck would have it, the environment in which he was to spend his early childhood was less likely than most to provide him with solid roots in reality. Throughout Les Mots Sartre employs the pun available in French on the adjective vrai: both ‘true’ and ‘real’. The Schweitzers enact, on a daily basis, the comédie familiale, presided over by the arch buffoon himself, Charles. In this comedy of manners, nothing is ever quite true (true feelings are translated into the rituals of bourgeois politeness) and nothing is ever quite real. Poulou discovers that he has been given the leading role: he is to play the bundle of joy, and later the child prodigy who will enable Charles to perfect the ‘Art of Being a Grandfather’; Louise and Anne-Marie have walk-on parts: Louise is the cynical, somewhat grumpy grandmother who is not taken in by Poulou’s playacting; Anne-Marie has few lines: ever the dutiful daughter.

In short, Poulou became an imaginary child locked in an imaginary world. Worse, he became an ‘appalling little child-king’,⁵ ministered to by an entourage of simpering courtiers. The company of his peers could have ‘saved’ him, but he was educated at home until the age of ten by his grandfather and his mother.

Paradoxically, the disease turned out to be the cure: ‘everything took place in my head; an imaginary child, I defended myself by imagination’.⁶ Soon he would ‘defend himself’ with a pen in his hand, but before writing came reading. Having, apparently, taught himself to read, Poulou proceeded to devour the contents of his grandfather’s library. The latter contained everything one might expect to find in the library of a nineteenth-century citizen of the Republic of Letters, and so it was that the child became imbued with the culture and ideology that had held sway a half-century before, during the Second Empire. Whether Poulou actually enjoyed reading Rabelais, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire and Vigny is uncertain, but it is clear that he could have understood very little of them: how does a seven-year-old grasp the notion of honour in Corneille? And just what were Emma Bovary and Léon doing in the back of that carriage as it careered through the streets of Rouen? Constantly under the gaze of the adults, mimicking the posture of the reader-engrossed-in-his-book, Poulou was as much a phoney reader as he was a phoney child. Fortunately for him, his mother and grandmother were less enthusiastic than Charles at the prospect of his metamorphosis into a bookworm before their very eyes. The remedy was simply to provide him with reading more suited to his age and understanding. This initially took the form of popular comic books and, very soon, the children’s classics: Jules Verne, Nicholas Nickelby, The Last of the Mohicans. Sartre refers to these as ‘de vraies lectures’ (‘real books’). It is interesting that, in the so-potent opposition between real and imaginary, the ‘real’ or the ‘true’ is associated with the minor: minor literature (comics, children’s books, detective fiction), cinema (as an art form in its infancy) and minors themselves: the children whose games in the Jardins du Luxembourg he could only witness from the lonely sidelines.

While these books may have put him back in touch with the truth of his childhood, they did so by deploying ‘falsehood’: the real can only be approached through the imaginary. Long before he discovered philosophical idealism, Poulou was – like all children – a thoroughgoing idealist: encountering the world first in the pages of the Grand Larousse encyclopædia, he fell victim to a fallacy that he would take 30 years to grow out of:

It was in books that I first encountered the world: assimilated, classified, labeled, filtered through thought, but still redoubtable; and I confused the disorder of my reading experiences with the random course of events in the world. That is the origin of the idealism that it has taken me thirty years to get rid of.⁷

Carried over from reading into writing, this idealism had decisive consequences.

His first ‘novel’ was called ‘For a Butterfly’ and it was plagiarized in its entirety from a comic book he had read. The idealist illusion is intact: ‘Each thing humbly asked to be named, and to do so was, in the same movement, to create it and to appropriate it. Without this capital illusion, I would never have become a writer.’⁸ The invention of writing by the child was his means of self-invention: the child-monster, contorted and twisted out of shape by the mutilating gaze of the adults, could now start to become simply a child: ‘I was born of writing; before writing there was just a play of reflections; I knew, when I wrote my first novel, that a child had slipped into the hall of mirrors.’⁹ Everything hinges on the passage from one pronoun to another: from ‘I’ to ‘He’. It matters little that the ‘He’ is the simple embodiment of the desires, fears and fantasies of the ‘I’, what counts is that they are formally distinct. This translation affords the writer the secret pleasure of indulging and disavowing his desires at one and the same time: ‘I experienced the thrill of being him, without his being entirely me.’¹⁰

However, this enabling discovery was accompanied by an additional imposture. Dismayed at the prospect of his grandson becoming a professional writer – a class of person for whom he had the utmost contempt – Charles diverted Poulou’s ambitions towards an altogether nobler goal: he would become – like generations of Schweitzers – a teacher; a teacher who would, incidentally, also write. Charles foresaw a destiny of quiet mediocrity for Poulou; the child transformed it into a dream of literary immortality. He would exercise the thankless profession of teacher in some small provincial town, but would all the while be filling notebook after notebook with unread and unrecognized masterpieces. The fantasy varied, but one version went like this: upon his death, some former students would take it upon themselves to sort out and edit his notes; amongst these notes they would discover the Lost Masterpiece, the work that would save humanity. Other versions saw fame arrive in the lifetime of the author, but always too late: recognition coincided with death:

One thing strikes me in this tale repeated a thousand times: the day that I see my name in the paper, something snaps inside me, I am finished … The two dénouements amount to the same thing: whether I die to be reborn into glory, or glory comes first and kills me, the desire to write conceals a refusal to live.¹¹

What Sartre refers to as his ‘neurosis’ in Les Mots was, essentially, the belief in the possibility of salvation through art. On the one hand, this was a salvation of each moment: the physical practice of writing – conducted daily throughout his life with the meticulousness of a monk going about his spiritual exercises – provided an instant ‘fix’ of salvation: the limp, formless, meaningless flow of existence was replaced by a world that had a beginning, a middle and an end. What is more, the end reflected its necessity back onto the beginning and the middle. The imaginary child becomes real by proxy: ‘Depicting real objects with real words traced with a real pen, it would be pretty damn surprising if I didn’t become real too.’¹² Additionally, the neurosis was a veritable eschatology. From the age of nine – if we are to believe Les Mots – Sartre was convinced that he was already a great writer. Great writers produce great works but they need a lifetime to do so; death cannot come before the work is complete: as long as the work is ‘in progress’ the writer cannot die. Thus the œuvre becomes a talisman, and the daily practice of writing – as in the story of Scheherezade – becomes a matter of life and death.

In October 1915 Sartre entered the Lycée Henri-IV. In the two years he spent there his ‘neurosis’ seems to have entered a kind of ‘latency period’: ‘as for that mandate that had been deposited inside me in a sealed envelope by the adults, I no longer thought about it, but it was still there.’¹³

The narrative of Les Mots effectively ends in 1917, when Sartre was in cinquième (the equivalent of Year 7 in the UK). The reason for this was that 1917 marked a veritable rupture in his life. On 28 April of that year, Anne-Marie married Joseph Mancy, a graduate – like her brother Georges – of the prestigious science and engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique. The marriage solved all of Anne-Marie’s problems at a stroke: she was acquiring financial security, social standing, an end to the prolonged dependency on her parents, an ally in the interminable and unseemly wrangles over property inheritance in Thiviers that had been the bane of her existence since her first husband’s death, and a father for her soon-to-be teenage son. It is certain, however, that Poulou did not view this new situation quite so positively. How could he? As for Mancy, he could have combined the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job, and the boy would still have loathed him, seeing him as the usurper come to contest his ‘untroubled possession’¹⁴ of his mother. In any case, what little is known of Mancy suggests that he did not possess these biblical qualities in abundance. The son of a Lyon railway worker, Mancy had, in 1917, risen to become the director of the Delaunay-Belleville shipyards in La Rochelle, where in 1920 he would distinguish himself as a strike-breaker. Such was his bourgeois conventionality that he refused to the end of his life even to meet Sartre’s companion, Simone de Beauvoir, on the grounds that she and Sartre were neither married nor engaged! Worse, he was a ‘scientist’. Out went the liberal arts and in came the exact sciences. We will never know how Mancy himself viewed his responsibilities towards his stepson, nor how he actually acquitted himself of these, but it is certain that the moment he stepped into that role he was destined to join Commander Aupick in the ranks of literature’s most-hated stepfathers.¹⁵ What was evidently a cultural dislocation for the child was accompanied by a no less significant physical relocation: at the end of the school year of 1917, the new family unit moved to La Rochelle.

On the rare occasions that Sartre could be persuaded to recall his adolescence, the themes that recur are violence and humiliation. The violence was probably little more than the banal violence of adolescent boys, but it is likely that the routine cruelty of adolescence was exacerbated by the fact that France was at war. Although La Rochelle was far removed from the front, the war was ever-present: supply ships were torpedoed off the coast, and the town’s station was constantly awash with reinforcements on their way to the front and with prisoners-of-war returning from it. More importantly, the men were away at the war, leaving the boys with the impression that they had suddenly become the man of the household. Sartre’s retrospective interpretation of this violence saw in it a form of class warfare specific to the social demographics of La Rochelle. He was at the boys’ grammar school of La Rochelle. This school found itself caught between the decidedly aristocratic pupils of the Collège Fénelon and the ‘yobs’ who had already left school in order to embrace a trade. The streets of La Rochelle were the scene of frequent running battles between these factions. As if the daily violence outside the school were not enough, the young Sartre had to suffer the bullying and the taunts of his classmates. With his Parisian accent, his precious speech habits, his antiquated literary culture – not to mention his plus fours and his outrageous squint – Sartre presented eccentricities aplenty. He became, by his account at least, the whipping-boy of the school, but fought back with all the force that his diminutive stature afforded him. In order to curry favour with his tormentors, he once again defended himself with his imagination, inventing fictional girlfriends. His confabulations were discovered for what they were and simply added to the scorn poured on his head. If the prestige of an unlikely sexual prowess eluded him, perhaps he could purchase the good will of his peers? He took to stealing small change from his mother in order to offer sweets and cakes to his ‘friends’. When the thefts were discovered, his misery was compounded. The torture of La Rochelle came to an end when Sartre fell ill in the summer of 1920 and was repatriated to Paris.

He re-entered Henri-IV as a day-boarder and was reunited with his friend Paul Nizan whom he had met there three years earlier. Having taken the baccalauréat in 1922, he decided, with Nizan, to move to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in order to prepare the entrance examination for the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). The ENS was, at the time, the most prestigious of the so-called Grandes Ecoles which formed the Republic’s political elites. Two years of intensive preparation – hypokhâgne and khâgne – were required in order to take the highly competitive entrance examination. The years 1922–24 saw the appearance of Sartre’s first published fiction. His ‘vocation’ was spurred by competition with the more precociously talented Nizan, as evidenced by the relationship between their fictional counterparts in La Semence et le Scaphandre.¹⁶ This tale revolves around the birth of a literary review, and it was just such a studentrun review – bearing the vaguely Surrealist title La Revue sans Titre – that published Sartre’s L’Ange du morbide and several chapters of Jésus la Chouette. The style of these early pieces is stilted and frequently sententious. Yet there are elements here that a reader of the mature Sartre would immediately recognize as ‘Sartrean’: the portrayal of morbid sexuality (in L’Ange du morbide); or, more generally, the fierce satire of bourgeois respectability and the practice of narrative irony. The narrator of La Semence et le Scaphandre remarks at one point:

Finally, I made a short novel out of an adventure that had befallen me some little time before; it earned me a certain success amongst a narrow circle of readers and this modest triumph prompted in me the resolution no longer to write anything that was not founded in the events of my own life.¹⁷

The use of a first-person narrator and the heavy reliance on autobiographical elements are common enough in juvenilia, but this quotation raises a question that is of central concern to us: what is the relation that binds the works of a writer to the life in which those works are inscribed as events? There are other recognizably Sartrean traits in these very early texts that are worthy of mention. Betrayal, for example. The narrators of Jésus la Chouette and La Semence et le Scaphandre undoubtedly embody important aspects of Sartre’s own self, but they are distanced (through irony), disavowed and, finally, betrayed by their creator in a characteristic movement of dissociation. These literary creatures are, to use the language of psychoanalysis, simultaneously ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ objects.¹⁸

When Sartre entered prépa in 1922, what exactly was he preparing himself for? Death or Glory! In Sartre’s personal mythology, death was the sad mediocrity of the provincial teacher who was also a ‘Sunday writer’: the destiny foretold by his grandfather. Since the ENS led most surely into a teaching career of some description, to choose that path was clearly to flirt with death itself. Glory was a far less certain outcome than a secure teaching job in a lycée or a university.

It was not until his second year at Louis-le-Grand that Sartre discovered the joys of philosophy, having previously regarded it as a rather dry discipline. It was thus as a philosophy student that Sartre entered the ENS in 1924. In so doing, he was joining a veritable intellectual elite. The style of philosophy that held sway at the ENS at that time was the critical, or rationalist, idealism practised by its leading philosopher, Léon Brunschvicg. For his part, Sartre apparently harboured at that point no ambition to become an original philosopher. In at least two respects, he regarded philosophy as a mere adjunct to the real activity of his life – writing. First, he would have to support himself while writing, and teaching philosophy was one way of earning a living. Second, he saw philosophical investigation as complementing the activity of the writer: the writer’s job was to unveil truths about the world and about the human condition, and where better to discover these truths than in philosophy? But the dominant mode of continental philosophy did not quite fit the bill: ‘I was a realist at the time, out of a taste for feeling the resistance of things … I couldn’t enjoy a landscape or a sky unless I thought it was exactly as I saw it.’¹⁹ His realism was also, characteristically, a reaction against himself – against the chronic idealism of the writer who privileges the word over the object. It was only when he discovered phenomenology, several years later, that he was able to effect some kind of resolution of these warring idealist and realist tendencies.

The 18-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre described the years he spent at ENS as the happiest of his life, and it is not hard to appreciate why. It was at Normale Sup’ that he started fashioning for himself an enduring persona in the eyes of others: he was the voracious reader, the tireless writer with a seemingly infinite capacity for hard work; but he was also the multi-talented variety artist: singing (he had a fine voice), acting, performing impressions of his peers and his professors, playing the piano, improvising sketches, organizing rags. In short, he turned himself into the court-jester, but woe betide anyone who got on the wrong side of him: he had a fearsome reputation for sarcasm, wit and verbal violence. He made himself into the very opposite of the too-delicate, too-cosseted little boy who had shivered on the sidelines as the other boys went about their rough-and-tumble in the Luxembourg Gardens.

In 1925, at the funeral of his young cousin Annie in Thiviers, Sartre met Simone Jollivet and commenced his first serious love affair – conducted, albeit, at long distance: Simone lived in Toulouse. The affair was tempestuous and hit the rocks many times before petering out into ‘mere’ friendship. But the surviving letters that Sartre wrote to her in 1926–28 reveal a great deal about his intellectual and sentimental development. A letter of 1926 contains the earliest known autobiographical sketch. In this letter, he comments on the construction of his persona: ‘I took an early dislike to myself and the first thing that I really constructed was my own character.’²⁰ But the creation of a ‘character’ or ‘persona’ implies a certain relation to other people. They are needed insofar as they serve as mirrors in which the ‘I’ can contemplate the ‘me’ he has created. Sartre’s advice to Simone on relations with other people has a distinctly ‘Nietzschean’ ring about it: ‘Obviously, you have to live with others, but you must never allow them to gain … so much influence over you, or become so indispensable to you that you can’t just tell them to go to hell when you feel like it.’²¹ His ideas on what it is to be free were even more Nietzschean: ‘If … you develop in yourself the strength and the violence of the passions, whilst suppressing all scruples and all pity, then you will be absolutely free.’²² No surprise to learn, then, that Sartre and Nizan thought of themselves as ‘supermen’, condemned to live apart from the common herd by virtue of their superior intellect and their ascetic morality. Already, Sartre saw himself as the man who sets out to think outside of and against existing authority and existing systems of morality; the man who contests even himself; the self-creation, the creature of his own works; the outsider … It was for Simone Jollivet that Sartre wrote a novel entitled Une Défaite, based very closely on the famous triangle of Nietzsche, Wagner and Cosima. The novel remained, thankfully, unpublished.

Sartre’s four years at the ENS should have culminated in 1928 with the written paper of the agrégation de philosophie. To general astonishment, he failed: he had tried to be too original in his treatment of the given subject and had been penalized for it. Not that he seems to have taken it too badly. Indeed, failure, in this instance, may well have saved him from a life of bourgeois mediocrity: he had, some little time before, become ‘vaguely engaged’ to the sister of one of his friends; clearly deciding that the young man had no future, her parents promptly called off the engagement. When he retook the examination in 1929 he was placed first. The written subject was ‘Contingency and Freedom’. The term ‘contingent’ belongs to the technical vocabulary of philosophy, and denotes the opposite of ‘necessary’: a contingent event is one that may or may not occur; a contingent thing is one that may or may not be. It remains thereafter at the centre of all of his reflections, unassailable, like a mathematical or logical axiom. The philosopher Raymond Aron – who had been Sartre’s friend at ENS – recalled that he first heard Sartre develop his personal ideas on contingency in a paper that he gave in one of Brunschvicg’s seminars in 1927–28. But the intuition of contingency had more distant origins. Sartre asserts in Les Mots that he had such an intuition from a very early age. Deprived of a ‘mandate to exist’, the child experienced himself as one of nature’s random events: writing was what he had invented in order to justify the fact of his being there.

At some point in the academic year 1928–29 – accounts vary as to exactly when – Sartre began a relationship that would shape the rest of his life. He had noticed a young woman in the year below (the year he now rejoined, of course) whom he had declared to be ‘nice, pretty, but terribly dressed’. She, for her part, had long been aware of the ringleader of a prestigious group of students in the year above, reputed to be brilliant but ‘dangerous’: there were dark rumours of excessive drinking, turbulent behaviour, and even womanizing. The young woman, Simone de Beauvoir, was from a Catholic bourgeois family but was in the process of kicking over the traces of a stultifyingly conventional and sheltered education. She saw in Sartre just the man to help her do precisely that. It is impossible, here, to do justice to the importance of this relationship for both parties: for the next 51 years they were constant companions. The strength of the relationship seems to have derived from a powerful intellectual and affective complementarity. Each had found the double s/he had been seeking (one of Sartre’s favourite terms of endearment for his companion was ‘you other myself’). Once they had found each other, all other friendships became secondary. The term ‘double’ should also be taken here with its full psychoanalytic charge: in their voluminous published correspondence, it is striking how much Sartre masculinizes Beauvoir and feminizes himself. She is his ‘judge’, his ‘stern censor’, his ‘paragon’. Gleefully confessing his misdeeds, he appears to wish to draw down upon himself the full severity of her judgement: he is the child and she the mother. At other times the roles are reversed and she becomes her father’s little girl. Presumably the strength of the bond lay in the reversibility of the roles. Mutual infantilization, of course, is part of any love relationship – a glance at the personal columns on Valentine’s Day is enough to confirm this – but one senses a profound catharsis here: the ‘masculinity’ of Beauvoir allowed Sartre to acknowledge a feminine side to himself, which had been firmly suppressed in the aggressively male atmosphere of khâgne and ENS. Only occasionally had it been discernible: for example, in the ‘indefinable tenderness’ of the relationship between Sartre and Nizan as it is dramatized in La Semence et le Scaphandre.

No sooner had the relationship begun that it was interrupted. In autumn 1929 Sartre left to do his military service. At St-Cyr, he was initiated into the mysteries of meteorology. Before the separation he had laid down some ground-rules, proposing a two-year ‘lease’: travel, transparency (complete mutual honesty) and polygamy! In fact, this was an ingenious rationalization, deploying the notion of contingency to good effect: he explained to her that they could each have ‘contingent’ love affairs, but that the only ‘necessary’ one was theirs. Initially at least, Sartre made freer use of this arrangement than did Beauvoir.

Still horrified at the prospect of becoming a provincial teacher, Sartre had applied for a post as lecteur in Japan, to commence on his release from the army. It was therefore with dismay that he learned in 1931 that, rather than Japan, he was to be sent to teach at the lycée in Le Havre. To make matters worse, Beauvoir was appointed in Marseille, at the other end of France.

For a man who considered ambition to be his deepest character trait, and who planned his life like a novel with a happy ending, the posting to Le Havre represented a severe setback. His literary ambitions, in particular, had taken a knock when Une défaite and La Légende de la vérité were rejected by publishers. Perhaps he had been mistaken about his genius? Perhaps he was destined to end his days, like ‘Jésus la Chouette’, as a reviled teacher in some provincial backwater? His reaction was characteristic: to go back to his books, to work harder, to read more and to write more. This is a pattern that was repeated throughout his life: every time he made an expansive movement towards the world, towards other people, that was rebuffed, his first movement was to retreat back into himself to repair his wounded narcissism, back into the imaginary or into the pure exercise of the intellect – into a place where it was always safe and warm. But this is not to imply that he lived like a hermit in Le Havre. On the contrary, one tactic he had evolved to protect himself was, paradoxically, to vivre public (to live publicly). This involved the construction of a public persona that he could then joyfully abandon to other people. This persona was not necessarily false or at odds with some mysterious, incommunicable inner self, but the very fact that it had been disowned served to differentiate it from the ‘I’ that had disowned it, thus setting in motion an endless cycle of ‘dissociation’. Sartre would later describe this way of being with other people as ‘a total lack of solidarity with myself’.²³

At the Lycée François 1^er where he taught, he was, by all accounts, unconventional, informal, inspirational and occasionally daunting. As early as this, he instinctively championed the individual over the system – giving pass marks to students whom other teachers would have failed without compunction, and challenging his students to think for themselves. There may seem nothing exceptional in this, but one must remember that for most of the twentieth century the French education system did little to foster or encourage original thought. From this time, he started to collect ‘disciples’ amongst his students: most of those who would join his closest circle of friends – the so-called ‘family’ – were his or Beauvoir’s former students. The first of these ‘disciples’ was a young man named Jacques-Laurent Bost, who was the younger brother of the novelist and screenwriter Pierre Bost. ‘Little Bost’ would later be immortalized in the character of Boris in Sartre’s novel trilogy, Les Chemins de la liberté.

Despite his near despair at being in Le Havre in the first place, he threw himself enthusiastically into the intellectual life of the lycée and the city, giving a memorable speech on the cinema at the 1931 prize-giving, and delivering a series of public lectures on topics ranging from German philosophy to the contemporary novel. His ‘real’ life was elsewhere, however. In a letter of October 1931 to Beauvoir, Sartre confides that he had been to

that quarter of Le Havre that I like so much and that I’ve decided to put into my ‘factum’ on Contingency. It’s true, everything really is contingent there, even the sky, which by any measure of meteorological likelihood should be the same over the whole of Le Havre: but it isn’t.²⁴

The ‘factum’ was the name Sartre gave to his new philosophicoliterary project – a ‘factum’ being a polemical pamphlet. From the outset, the project was a hybrid: neither philosophical treatise nor novel, it would occupy Sartre for the next seven years, and pass through numerous mutations before emerging in 1938 as La Nausée. Le Havre appears in that novel, thinly disguised, as ‘Bouville’; on Sartre’s death, the town would repay that ambiguous homage: the street where the lycée is situated was renamed rue Jean-Paul Sartre.

Early in 1933 an encounter took place that was to prove as decisive for Sartre’s philosophical orientation as it did for his literary development. One evening, he and Beauvoir met for a drink with their friend Raymond Aron – who was taking a sabbatical year at the French Institute in Berlin. Pointing to a glass, Aron said: ‘You see, my little friend, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and its philosophy!’²⁵ Upon which, reportedly, Sartre paled with emotion! Phenomenology was a philosophical method developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl that involved bracketing-off, or setting aside all preconceptions and prior knowledge about the world in order to describe the phenomenon as it appears to consciousness. The noumenal essence of the object (what it is in itself) can only be discovered by means of this stage of pure description of the phenomenon (the way the object presents itself to consciousness). Sartre had long been hostile to introspection and self-indulgent subjectivism; he had also long been aware of his ‘characterological’ tendency to dissociate his present self from his past selves – even to the point where the very notion of a ‘stable’ self becomes problematic. In Husserl he found confirmation of ‘this necessity for consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself’.²⁶ A necessity that renders introspection futile. When we look ‘inside’ consciousness, we find only ‘a flight from itself, a slipping outside of itself’.²⁷ This is what Husserl – borrowing from the Austrian philosopher Brentano – calls intentionality, and which can be summarized in the dictum ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something’.

The meeting with Aron prompted Sartre to apply to succeed him in Berlin for the academic year 1933–34. That year was spent in the intensive study of Husserl (morning), writing the ‘factum’ (late afternoon), strolling in Berlin and pursuing various ‘contingent’ love affairs. Sartre’s total immersion in Husserl, for the next six years, did not imply a master–student relationship: how could the consummate narcissist accept the tutelage of a master – even a maître à penser? Indeed, in 1937 he published a work – La Transcendance de l’ego – whose premise contradicts Husserl’s view of the ego while radicalizing the latter’s anti-subjectivism. In this work Sartre seeks to demonstrate that, far from being ‘inside’ consciousness, the ego is itself ‘out there in the world’, an object for consciousness, but transcendent of any single moment of consciousness: as (in)accessible to oneself as it is to others.

The return to Le Havre and the life of the provincial teacher was hard. Some things had changed for the better: Beauvoir was much closer – she now had a post in Rouen. Others had got worse: he recounts in Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre how he had looked in the mirror one day to notice that his hair was starting to thin. Moreover, he was approaching that symbolic age of 30, and fame still eluded him! In his notepad he had copied an aphorism to the effect that the man who is not famous by the age of 28 can forget about glory forever. Well, 28 had been and gone. The comparisons with his friend Nizan were all too obvious: by 1934 Nizan was already an established author with two novels under his belt; since 1927 he had also thrown himself into a life of political activism with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). Things that stayed the same were perhaps even more depressing. The relationship with Beauvoir, for example, appeared to have settled into something resembling a routine.

But the stability of the couple was shaken by the irruption into their lives in 1934 of one of Beauvoir’s formers pupils at Rouen, Olga Kosakiewicz, who was the daughter of a White Russian émigré and a French woman. The couple became a trio, a pattern that would recur throughout Sartre and Beauvoir’s long relationship. Sartre conceived a passion for Olga that had all the force of a premature midlife crisis. The distorting filter of his infatuation, coupled with anxiety over the stagnation of his own existence, transformed what a more dispassionate observer might have seen as immaturity, insecurity and posturing on the part of the young woman into spontaneity, unpredictability and ‘authenticity’. Beauvoir’s fictionalized account of the trio in her first novel, L’Invitée (1943), suggests that she was more clear-sighted about the virtues of Olga, despite, or perhaps because of, her evident jealousy. It is clear from the long and detailed account that Beauvoir gives of the trio in her memoirs that Sartre’s mood swung violently between besotted indulgence and jealous rage; he would drive Beauvoir to distraction by insisting on analysing, with her, the merest word that Olga had uttered, the subtlest inflection of tone, the slightest glance she had given him. This mode of mental functioning comes close to paranoia, and there is no doubt that Sartre’s mental state at this period had not exactly been helped by another, quite unrelated incident. As part of the research for a book he was writing on the image, Sartre had had himself injected with mescaline – by a doctor friend – in order to explore the nature of hallucinations. The hallucinations lasted for far longer than is normal and took a decidedly nastier turn than Sartre had expected. Still worse, in spring 1936, Melancholia – as the ‘factum’ was now called – was rejected by Gallimard. It would be hard to overstate the impact of this blow. But things were about to take a turn for the better. The novel may have been rejected, but he was, finally, emerging into print: the book on the image, L’Imagination, was published in 1936 and La Transcendance de l’ego a year later. Then finally, in April 1937, thanks to the efforts of a former pupil, Jacques-Laurent Bost, and the husband of a former lover, the theatre director Charles Dullin, who had married Simone Jollivet, Melancholia was provisionally accepted for publication by Gallimard. Not only was the novel accepted, but Gallimard also agreed to publish in the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française a number of Sartre’s short stories, starting with ‘Le Mur’ in July 1937. Moreover, Sartre had transferred his passion for Olga onto her younger sister Wanda, who proved, eventually, to be more accommodating than her older sister had been when it came to the physical consummation of that passion. Finally, from 1937 both Sartre and Beauvoir were at last ‘back home’, having secured posts in Paris at the Lycée Pasteur and the Lycée Molière respectively. ‘Little Bost’ incidentally (is it really ‘incidental’?) would later marry Olga Kosakiewicz, whilst secretly she remained Beauvoir’s lover for a further fifteen years: from the outset, Sartre’s ‘family’ had an incestuous cohesion.

Of all Sartre’s works, his first novel undoubtedly owes the most to the hand of others, starting with the title. Brice Parain – the Gallimard editor assigned to the project – told Sartre that ‘Melancholia’ would not do. What about Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Antoine Roquentin?, responded Sartre. Finally, it was Gaston Gallimard himself who came up with the title that now seems so self-evident: La Nausée. The text itself was severely cut at Parain’s insistence and on Beauvoir’s advice; these cuts were designed to make the text sharper and less ponderous, but also to make it less scabrous: this was 1938 after all, and even the title was considered by some to be in bad taste. The novel that hit the book stalls in April 1938 was a much leaner and more focused text than the one submitted a year earlier. The novel is now recognized as a ‘classic’ of twentieth-century world literature, and its protagonist – Antoine Roquentin – has been identified, along with Camus’s Meursault, as one of the iconic ‘outsiders’ of that century.

Despite the passing years, La Nausée has retained its ability to disorientate, and not only on first reading. The novel is presented as the diary of one Antoine Roquentin. It is unclear as to why we should be reading this diary: a note from ‘The Editors’ tells us that it was found among the papers of Roquentin, but we never know whether Roquentin is dead or alive, or what great deeds – laudable or ignominious – may have caused the ‘Editors’ to deem his diary worthy of publication. An internally consistent dating places the ‘action’ in one month: from Monday 25 January 1932 to Wednesday 24 February 1932. The diary entries chronicle the banal existence of their author. Having travelled extensively in the Far East, Roquentin has returned to live in Bouville in order to conduct historical research in the town library for a biography of an eighteenth-century aristocratic adventurer, M. de Rollebon. A man of independent means, Roquentin has little or no contact with the Bouvillois, beyond the occasional reluctant lunch with a self-taught man (the ‘autodidact’) he has met at the library, and perfunctory couplings with the landlady of a local bar. The ‘incidents’ that occur are few and far between: a visit to the local art gallery; lunch with the autodidact; sex with the landlady; research for his book; a meeting in Paris with an old flame, Anny; the abandonment of the Rollebon biography; a traumatic encounter with a chestnut tree in the local park … the decision to leave Bouville and return to Paris. The action, such as it is, takes place outside of Roquentin, whose attitude throughout is that of the silent observer, studying the vain agitation of a world from which he feels increasingly alienated.

The diary form itself is, of essence, episodic, separating lived experience into self-contained parcels bounded by the arbitrary divisions of the calendar. And yet, if one defines ‘plot’ as the deferred resolution of an enigma, then something resembling a plot exists in La Nausée, for all its deceptive formlessness. The first diary entry begins: ‘Something has happened to me, I can no longer doubt that.’²⁸ Something has changed ‘But where … is it me that has changed?’²⁹ The keeping of the diary is motivated by the desire to keep track of this change and, eventually, perhaps, to understand it: ‘The best thing would be to write down what happens daily. To keep a diary in order to understand it.’³⁰ The symptom of Roquentin’s malaise is a feeling of nausea that has been assailing him with increasing frequency and which initially appears to be linked to objects. A pebble that is dry on one side and slimy on the other; a fork; a door handle; a person’s hand that metamorphoses into a flaccid white maggot; a pair of mauve braces that cannot decide whether they want to be red or blue; the bench-seat in a tram; a piece of muddy scrap-paper lying by a puddle … In this way, Roquentin’s malaise is presented to us like the corpse in the drawing room; the enigma is: who-or what-dunnit? It is no accident if La Nausée resembles a metaphysical detective story. Sartre and Beauvoir were great aficionados of detective fiction; indeed, it was largely thanks to Beauvoir that Sartre had been persuaded to abandon the original, stilted narrative form of his ‘factum’ and to ‘spice it up’ with intrigue, sex and suspense. True to the genre, there are red herrings in this mystery: different possible culprits fall under suspicion, only to be released by the narrator for lack of evidence. Suspicion falls first on the subject: ‘I think it is me that has changed: that is the simplest solution.’³¹ Perhaps Roquentin’s solitary lifestyle, coupled with the fact that he had always been ‘subject to brusque transformations’ is sufficient explanation in itself? But on reflection Roquentin is more inclined to situate the blame outside of himself, in the object: ‘It was a kind of sickly sweet feeling … and it was coming from the pebble. I am sure of it, it was passing from the pebble into my hands.’³² For much of the novel, there is a hesitation, a fluctuation, a coming-and-going between these two positions, before a third possibility is introduced. This also concerns the subject–object dichotomy, but here the subject is consciousness and the object the physical body. In a particularly virulent attack of nausea, following his abandonment of the biographical project, the non-philosopher Roquentin discovers for himself the old Cartesian mind–body dualism: ‘Me, the body: it lives all by itself once it’s started. But I’m the one who prolongs my thought … my thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop, I exist because I think … and I can’t stop myself from thinking.’³³ If the body is both an object in the world and the object that I exist, then nausea must reside not at one or other pole, but in the relation between the two poles of lived experience. Roquentin’s nausea, it is now revealed, is nothing more than the taste of himself: ‘there’s frothy water in my mouth. I swallow it, it slides down my throat, it strokes me – and there it is back in my mouth again … And that little pool of water is me too. And the tongue. And the throat: all me!’³⁴ But the mystery is not yet fully elucidated; at the climax of all good whodunnits comes the naming of the culprit, and Roquentin has not yet succeeded in putting a name to the cause of his malaise. This revelation is delayed for a further 40 pages, and it takes place not before the suspects assembled in the drawing room but before the mute and massive presence of a chestnut tree in the local park. As Roquentin, already in the throes of an attack of nausea, contemplates the tree, the scales abruptly fall from his eyes: ‘Suddenly, existence had unveiled itself.’³⁵ The names we give to things, the uses we put them to, the categories we place them in are but ‘faint marks that men have traced on their surface’.³⁶ Remove these traces and what remains is the meaning of existence, and the meaning of existence is, precisely, that it has none. Anything and anybody could disappear from this world and it would remain just as full as it was before: ‘None of us had the slightest reason to be there. Each existent felt embarrassed, vaguely anxious, somehow excessive or ‘in the way’ [de trop] in relation to all the others’.³⁷ ‘De trop’ is the first term that occurs to Roquentin to describe our existence; a little later another occurs to him: ‘The word Absurdity now comes to life under my pen.’³⁸ ‘Absurd’ is closer but not quite there: ‘I’m struggling with words … Oh! How could I pin that down with words?’³⁹ Still too close to the overwhelming lived experience, Roquentin is incapable of conceptualizing it, but, when reflecting on it a little later, the task appears easier:

To be honest, I wasn’t really formulating my discovery. But now I think it would be easy to put it into words. The essential thing is contingency. What I mean is that existence is not, by definition, necessity … there were people who understood that, I think. Only they tried to surmount this contingency by inventing a necessary being that was its own cause. But no necessary being can explain existence.⁴⁰

So there we are finally: the villain of the piece was contingency all along! The irony being that it is the unmasking of contingency that imparts necessity to every word of the narrative.

All the other themes of the novel depend on the intuition of contingency, and two of them are of particular importance, as they go right to the heart of Sartre’s relation to writing and, more generally, the creative act. Beauvoir reports that Sartre’s thought on necessity and contingency had first crystallized through an aesthetic experience: ‘It was as he watched the images on a cinema screen that he had had the revelation of the necessity of art and had discovered, by an effect of contrast, the deplorable contingency of things in the world.’⁴¹ While Sartre himself had ‘intuited’ contingency in the contrast between life and the images of a movie, Roquentin makes this discovery whilst listening to music. As he slumps over his beer in the Rendez-vous des cheminots, a record comes on the gramophone; it is Some of these Days, a well-known jazz-blues song. As the refrain approaches, he thinks ‘it seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music’.⁴² And, magically, his nausea subsides, as if vanquished by this dose of sheer necessity. Roquentin is yearning for a life of rigorous necessity: ‘what summits could I not reach if my own life was the substance of the tune’.⁴³ But melodies do not exist in this world; they simply are. As he listens one last time to the record, he fancies that he glimpses a possible connection. He starts to think of the composer of the song: He imagines a fat, sweating Jew, stuck in an apartment in a sweltering Brooklyn summer, beset with problems: money, women, health … but concludes: he made that song. And then he thinks of the singer – ‘the Negress’ – and concludes: ‘The Jew and the Negress: those two are saved at least.’⁴⁴ From there, it is but a short step to wondering whether he, too, perhaps … ‘It would have to be a book: that’s all I know how to do.’⁴⁵ A book that would induce its readers to think of him in precisely the way that he thinks of the creators of Some of these Days. But how, exactly, does he think of them? If he brings them back to life, it is through a combination of biographical and fictionalizing impulses. On the one hand he states that ‘I’d like to know a few things about that guy’; on the other, he freely embroiders – or fictionalizes – on an empty canvas: the ‘life’ of the ‘Jew’ in ‘Brooklyn’ is pure fiction. A fiction, interestingly enough, of Sartre’s creation, not Roquentin’s: Some of these Days was actually written by a black Canadian composer called Shelton Brooks, and sung by a white, Jewish singer, Sophie Tucker. If Sartre supposes it to have been the other way round, it is probably because his own imagination has followed the groove of a well-worn cliché of the Jazz Age: the Jewish composer and the black singer. In any case, fiction prevails: ‘For me they are … a bit like heroes in a novel; they’ve cleansed themselves of the sin of existing.’⁴⁶ So salvation for Roquentin would consist in being transformed into ‘a hero in a novel’ by his future readers.

Any reader of existing biographies of Sartre, of Beauvoir’s memoirs or of the heavily annotated Pléiade edition of the uvres romanesques will be aware of the myriad points of contact between the real life of Sartre and the fictional life of Roquentin. When he wrote in Les Mots ‘I was Roquentin, I showed in him, quite dispassionately, the very texture of my life’,⁴⁷ he was no doubt intending to echo Flaubert’s famous ‘Mme Bovary, c’est moi’, and it is a no less problematic claim. On the face of it, Sartre appears to have deliberately multiplied the dissimilarities with his protagonist, but these differences are entirely superficial, given that the ‘texture’ of their lives is supposedly identical. Most importantly, both produce texts, and it is in the way they relate to the activity of writing that the nature and limits of the identification must be sought. They are writers of different kinds. Roquentin is a dilettante, a ‘Sunday writer’. The writing of the Rollebon biography was not driven by necessity, and there is no indication that writing had ever played an important part in Roquentin’s previous existence. Sartre, on the other hand, lived in order to write: writing had been the fundamental activity of his life since childhood. ‘Fundamental’ in the strong sense of the word: writing was the very foundation on which his life had been constructed: everything else was subordinated to it. It is only when Roquentin’s life starts to crumble about him, and he fears for his sanity, that writing – for him too – becomes a matter of life and death. He notes in his diary: ‘The truth is, I’m afraid to let go of my pen.’⁴⁸ It is writing, in the physical sense of tracing letters on a page, that staves off nausea: every day, Roquentin awakens to a blank page, the blankness signifying that nothing ever happens and that anything could happen. Writing gives a sense (direction) to that page, even if it is only the left to right and top to bottom of his cursive script: writing takes place between death and madness, between the blankness of banality and the unbridled phantasmagoria that threaten to fill that blank. Sartre’s daily existence might have been as nauseatingly contingent as the next man’s, but this was compensated by the fact that his life had a shape. He had a vocation. He did not need to choose between ‘living’ and ‘recounting’: his life story was already written: had he not been living out the life of the Great Writer ever since he fell victim to the biographical illusion as a child?

La Nausée was widely reviewed and the praise was lavish and virtually unanimous. A few dissenting voices were ‘nauseated’ by its dark vision of the world; others – more perspicacious – criticized the ‘whiff of the philosophy teacher’ that hung over the text. But most were enthusiastic, heralding ‘one of our greatest novelists’, an ‘enormous talent’, a ‘French Kafka’, etc.⁴⁹ In fact, when La Nausée was published, Sartre’s name was already known to the literary cognoscenti of Paris, if not yet to a wider reading public: the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française had already published four of his short stories, starting in July 1937.

In many ways, the short stories represent a more startling achievement than the novel: the latter had been written and rewritten over a period of eight years, whereas the short stories seemed to spring from nowhere. If the novel had been formally innovative – so much so that many have seen it as a forerunner of the nouveau roman – the short stories demonstrate a virtuosic mastery of the conventions of the genre. There are several common strands in the five stories of Le Mur. One of these is a preoccupation with pathological psychology. This was not new: Sartre had been as interested in psychology as he was in philosophy at the ENS; he had made several visits to psychiatric hospitals, including one in 1936 that is recounted in grizzly detail by Beauvoir in her memoirs; his bad experience with mescaline and the power of his obsession with Olga had given him grounds to question his own mental stability. The theme of madness underlies virtually all of his work, and is particularly explicit in the later theatre, but it undergoes considerable modification over the years. In Les Mots, he goes so far as to suggest that a certain insanity is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human; in the early works he was more concerned with the question of whether madness involved an external modification of consciousness, or whether it was, in a sense, ‘chosen’ by the subject. The problem was of central importance to the radically anti-deterministic theory of consciousness that he had been trying to elaborate for many years. He was convinced that freedom is the defining characteristic of ‘human reality’, that our every action is freely chosen as a function of the ‘fundamental choice we make of ourselves’. He was equally convinced that deterministic explanations of human behaviour were, at heart, attempts to deny an uncomfortable truth: if we are free, we are also totally responsible for our acts and their consequences. Clearly, ‘madness’ poses a problem for this theory: does an unfortunate soul in the advanced stages of dementia choose his madness? Sartre could easily have sidestepped the problem by invoking notions of normality and abnormality, so freedom would hold good for ‘normal’ subjects but not for subjects whose mental functioning was in some sense abnormal. But such was Sartre’s radicality that he chose instead to see the very opposition between normality and abnormality as part of the problem, rather than the solution to it. The question is broached in the short story titled ‘La chambre’, where the aetiology of Pierre’s premature dementia is clearly physiological, whilst the specific content of his delirium is clearly analysable in psychological terms.

Two of the other stories also concern pathological psychology: ‘Intimité’ deals with a ‘case’ of female frigidity, and ‘Erostrate’ has as its narrator-protagonist a sociopath who derives sexual pleasure from the humiliation of prostitutes and who aims to gain posthumous notoriety by embarking on a random killing spree in the streets of Paris.

In his brief preface to the collection, Sartre wrote: ‘Nobody wants to face up to Existence. Here are five little routs in the face of Existence – some tragic, some comic – five lives.’⁵⁰ For ‘Existence’ read ‘Contingency’: to exist is, as we have seen, to exist without necessity or reason. But why, then, do we not all live our lives in a state of constant anxiety? From where do we draw the certainties that allow us to carry on? Sartre’s answer is that we all have an intuitive comprehension, or ‘grasp’ of our contingency, but that we avoid confronting, and therefore ‘assuming’ this state of affairs by employing a range of evasive strategies that he calls mauvaise foi (bad faith). Beauvoir tells us that he had ‘forged’ this notion in the 1930s initially to account for the apparent manifestations of the Freudian unconscious (a notion that he found philosophically nonsensical). Each of the stories in Le Mur involves characters who are in bad faith and who try to run away from existence. Thus Lulu, in ‘Intimité’ succeeds in doing precisely what she profoundly wants to do, whilst persuading other people, and herself, that she is doing it against her will. She makes Fate or Force of Circumstance responsible for her own choices: ‘You get caught in the current and carried off, that’s life; you can’t judge, or understand, you just have to let yourself go with the flow.’⁵¹ Her self-deception is neither unconscious nor fully conscious: it inhabits the region described by Sartre as ‘pre-reflexive’.

Bad faith is not only applicable to individual psychology: it can define the conduct and attitudes of whole social groups. This much was already evident from the savage presentation of the bourgeoisie in La Nausée. Bourgeois ideology has the effect of transforming historical contingency into eternal essence: the bourgeoisie is Good, Right, Normal, etc., by definition. But how does the bourgeoisie ensure the continuance of its hegemony? In other words, how does a child born into this class become what Sartre terms a salaud (a swine or bastard), convinced of his right to exist? The longest story in Le Mur, ‘L’Enfance d’un chef’, provides an answer. With a mixture of comic satire and burlesque, the story traces the development of Lucien Fleurier from infancy through to the ‘mature’ assumption of his rights and duties as a solid citizen. From his preface, it is clear that Sartre sees Lucien as of the same breed as the salauds of La Nausée: ‘Lucien Fleurier comes closest of all the characters to feeling that he exists, but he does not want that, he escapes, he takes refuge in the contemplation of his rights … ‘.⁵² Given the worrying resemblances between Lucien’s childhood and Sartre’s own – as later described in Les Mots – a more intriguing question would be: How did Sartre avoid becoming a salaud himself? His answer would be that, unlike Lucien, he did not have a father …

Notwithstanding what has been said about the anti-bourgeois satire of these two early works, the truly political dimension is notable for its absence. In comparison, say, to the socialist realist novels written in the 1930s by Sartre’s Communist friend Nizan, Sartre’s novel and short stories are marked by predominantly literary and philosophical concerns. Readers of the preceding pages could have been left with the impression that the years between Sartre’s graduation from ENS (1929) and the publication of La Nausée (1938) were tranquil and uneventful. In reality, they were amongst the most turbulent of the twentieth century. Mussolini’s Fascists had been in power in Italy since the 1920s; Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 – the year that Sartre spent in Berlin reading phenomenology. The effects of the Wall Street crash began to impact on a Europe that had initially thought itself immune. Against a background of economic depression, mass unemployment and spiralling inflation and financial scandals, the Front populaire government had been formed in an attempt to head off what looked like the very real possibility of a Fascist coup in France – led by anti-democratic ligues, such as the Croix de Feu. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began with the invasion by Franco’s falangistas. As the British and French stood by and did nothing while Mussolini and Hitler openly supplied Franco’s Fascists, workers, writers and intellectuals from all over Europe headed to Spain to fight to protect democracy. Throughout all of this, Sartre kept on writing. There were echoes of these events in the two early works (there is a brief mention of Communists and Nazis fighting in the streets of Berlin in La Nausée; Lucien Fleurier becomes a camelot du roi and ends up espousing the anti-Semitism of his class), but echoes is all they were. The fact is that Sartre, by his own admission, remained detached. He and Beauvoir may have been ‘sympathetic’ to the Front Populaire and to the Spanish republicans; they may have ‘detested’ the Fascists, but they did nothing, not even vote! Sartre felt that the philosopher should philosophize, the writer should write, and the writer-philosopher should remain steadfastly aloof from the vain agitations of the world. But that was about to change in the most dramatic of fashions.

International tension had been building steadily throughout the late 1930s and it came to a head in September 1938 with the so-called Munich crisis. German troops annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and, since the boundaries of that country had been formally guaranteed by Britain and France, it looked as though Europe was on the brink of war. In the event, war was postponed for a year when Hitler was appeased yet again as Chamberlain and Daladier ‘sold out’ the Czechs. The events of this last week of September 1938 are recounted in Sartre’s 1945 novel, Le Sursis. As the title of the novel implies, all that was achieved in Munich was a temporary truce. Towards the end of August 1939 Sartre wrote to one of his girlfriends: ‘Hitler can’t possibly be really thinking about starting a war … it’s a bluff.’ But then two days later, to the same correspondent: ‘So, stupidity has triumphed. I leave tonight at five o’clock.’⁵³ History can make fools of all of us.

We have no direct record of Sartre’s reaction when he learnt that he was called up, but one could imagine a reaction similar to that of Mathieu Delarue, the hero of Le Sursis: ‘“Category 2, but that’s me!” Suddenly, it was as if the poster was targeting him; it was as if someone had written his name on the wall in chalk, with insults and threats.’⁵⁴ For the first time in life, Sartre found himself interpellated by history.

On 2 September 1939, he reported for duty with the 70th Division in Nancy. And thus began nineteen months that were to change his life for ever.