In 1960 Sartre was at the very height of his fame, and this fame was truly global. At the start of that year he and Beauvoir were invited to Cuba to witness a revolution in action. His only previous visit had been in 1949, when the island was a gigantic gambling and prostitution racket run by Batista and the American Mafia. Ten years on, the transformation could not have been more radical. In France, Sartre had been mired in the increasingly depressing endgame of the Algerian war and he needed to believe that, somewhere, hope was still alive. Cuba fulfilled that need in every respect: this was still the ‘honeymoon’ of the revolution. What he found particularly alluring about the Cuban revolutionaries was their youth (long a privileged theme in Sartre): the average age of the ministers in the revolutionary government was less than 29; that and the fact that the revolution appeared to be largely ‘improvised’: here, for once, was a revolution where ideology seemed to grow organically out of revolutionary praxis. He would find these two elements again ten years later during his involvement with the French Maoists. Moreover, Cuba was an underdog: here was another third-world David slaying the imperialist Goliath.
He and Beauvoir spent a month on the island in February-March, often in the company of Che Guevara and Fidel himself. It is unlikely that Castro and ‘El Che’ felt they had anything to learn from the European intellectuals: Sartre was there to give his official sanction to the revolution; this was an exercise in what we would now call ‘mediatization’. And sanction it he did, in a series of sixteen articles published in the popular French daily France-Soir in June-July of that year. The collective title of these reports is ‘Ouragan sur le sucre’ (‘Hurricane over the sugar-cane’), but they were not exactly written by Sartre himself: he had begun a massive study of the Cuban revolution while there – the extant manuscript runs to 1,100 pages – and the reportages were extracted from those notes and ‘tidied up’ by Claude Lanzmann, then a journalist on France-Dimanche. The articles painted a wholly enthusiastic and romanticized picture of the revolution, which is not to say that Sartre subscribed entirely to that vision: not for the first time, he allowed the imperative of support for a cause to override the desire for objectivity. Honeymoons do not last, and only nine months later, when passing back through Cuba, he noted the hardening of the regime in the face of external hostility. Sartre never authorized the republication in France of those articles, but they were published in Spanish in a volume entitled Sartre visitá a Cuba that was widely read in Latin America and the Caribbean. Even today, copies can be found for a few pesos in the second-hand bookshops of Havana’s Plaza de la Catedral, alongside dusty volumes of Marx and Lenin.
Sartre had only been back in Paris for a few months before he responded to a second invitation from the Americas; this time it was the Brazilian writer and militant Jorge Amado who invited him for a prolonged stay in that country. The visit lasted from mid-August to the end of September and was regarded by Sartre as the prolongation of his trip to Cuba. Apart from touring the country extensively, he gave numerous public lectures and interviews. This trip was publicized and politicized even more than the visit to Cuba. One needs to appreciate that Sartre had become a truly international figure – the ‘symbolic intellectual’, as Cohen-Solal put it: photographs of Sartre with Castro and Che were published not only in Cuba but almost daily back in France, and worldwide; speeches made in Havana or Saõ Paolo were not only for local consumption, but were reproduced the world over: Sartre was talking to a global audience. No intellectual, before or since, has ever reached such a wide public. His fame had made him, effectively, untouchable, and he exploited his status to the full. The previous year, Malraux (now de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture) had made an official trip to Brazil and had promoted the government line on Algérie française; Sartre was determined to undo the work of his predecessor. Obsessively and repeatedly, he drew together Cuba, Brazil and Algeria, informing his audiences about the war in Algeria, drawing parallels with their own situation. The message was clear: colonization – or economic ‘post-colonialism’ – was an evil and must be combated wherever it existed, be it in Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia or Latin America. The Algerians and the Cubans had shown the way: the fight was there to be won.
So well reported were Sartre’s activities in Brazil that his friends feared for his safety were he to return directly to Paris. On their advice he flew back to Barcelona and regained Paris uneventfully, by car. But it was not only Sartre’s inflammatory speeches that had sparked fears for his safety. In at least one way, the trip to Brazil had been badly timed: in 1957 Francis Jeanson had organized a support network for FLN militants in France; the network had been detected and broken up, its organisers arrested, and on 5 September 1960 the trial of Jeanson and his comrades opened before a military tribunal in Paris. To coincide with the start of the trial, a petition supporting the right to insoumission (insubordination or the refusal to take orders) in Algeria was published. The text of the manifesto – signed by 121 leading writers, intellectuals, academics, reporters and journalists, including Sartre of course – ended with words that echo Sartre’s long-held view that the struggles of the oppressed were waged for the benefit of all: ‘the cause of the Algerian people, which is making a decisive contribution to the destruction of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men’. Sartre had not organized the petition, but his presence amongst the signatories, like his presence in Cuba and Brazil, was a further instance of his totemic status.
The trial was a fiasco for the French army: if they had actively sought to incite debate about the use of torture, about the massacre of civilians, about the legality or otherwise of the French presence in Algeria, they could not have done better. Accuser turned into accused as the army and the government found themselves the subject of repeated, detailed indictments from the witnesses. But Sartre, of course, was not there: he was in Brazil. By way of testimony, he sent a letter that was a blatant provocation, defending the FLN and their supporters and attacking the government. Ironically, Sartre did not even write the letter himself: he had indicated by telephone what he wanted to say and it had been written by two of his collaborators from TM, and his signature expertly forged.
Sartre was, effectively, daring de Gaulle to arrest him, but the challenge was not accepted – the president famously declaring that ‘one does not arrest Voltaire!’ (Voltaire was, of course, arrested; he was also thrashed by the lackeys of the noble he had offended, although it is not clear whether or not de Gaulle had that in mind.) Others, however, were punished: state employees – including academics and civil servants – who had signed the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 121’ were sacked, as were journalists and employees of the state media. The implication of de Gaulle’s tactic of dealing differently with intellectuals and employees of the state was clear: only the former had the right to a conscience.
The Algerian war officially ended with the ratification by referendum of the Evian agreements in April 1962, but not before further bloodshed and massacres. A group of die-hard generals had attempted a putsch in Algiers in April and, in the wake of its failure, formed the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) which brought right-wing terrorism to the streets of Paris: already in October 1960 a crowd of 10,000 had marched in Paris chanting ‘Shoot Sartre!’; now, two attempts were made to blow up Sartre’s flat (in July 1961 and January 1962) and the offices of TM were damaged by a blast in May 1961. All of this confirms that Sartre’s position on Algeria was perceived to be more than mere intellectual posturing!
Sartre being interviewed by journalists during the Algerian War.
Sartre may have slept through the Popular Front, tergiversated during the Spanish Civil War and eschewed direct action in the Resistance, but he did not ‘miss’ Algeria: despite the fact that he perhaps followed more than he led, Algeria was certainly ‘Sartre’s war’.
It was not only political interventions that thrust Sartre into the limelight in 1960. In April of that year, between his visits to Cuba and Brazil, he had finally published the great philosophical work of his mature years – or what he took to be so. Like L’Etre et le néant before it, Critique de la raison dialectique had been ten years in the making. Sartre’s practical rapprochement with the Communists in the early 1950s had been accompanied by the start of an attempt on his part to arrive at a theoretical synthesis between Existentialism and Marxism. A century earlier, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard had affirmed, against the totalizing system of Hegel, the irreducibility and the specificity of lived experience; now, Sartre was attempting to achieve a rational synthesis of this subjectivity, which is the starting point of any Existentialism, and the objectivity of the method of dialectical Materialism. He saw himself as rescuing what was most valuable in Marx’s thought from the ‘laziness’ of what passed for Marxist theory within the PCF. The ‘lazy Marxist’ will see men as mere objects in a world of objects; he will, for example, negate the subjectivity of a poet like Paul Valéry with a dismissive observation such as ‘Valéry was a petit-bourgeois intellectual.’ That is, everything Valéry wrote, did or felt could be deduced from this ‘objective’ observation. But, as Sartre points out, ‘Valéry is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, of that there is no doubt. But not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Paul Valéry.’1 The task that he set himself was immense: he was trying to save contemporary Marxism from itself by giving it the ontological foundation it lacked.
L’Etre et le néant had deployed a quarter of a million words in its demonstration of man’s fundamental ontological freedom, and the Critique takes as third as many words again in its attempt to understand why, in that case, the social world is characterized by alienation and opacity. The culprit is man himself – always ‘making himself’ but under ‘conditions that are not of his own making’: ‘History is more complex than a certain simplistic Marxism would have it, and man does not only have to struggle against Nature, against the social milieu that engendered him, against other men, but also against his own action in so far as it becomes other.’2
The work contains a number of memorable descriptions: the ‘bus queue’, used to illustrate the notion of seriality; the storming of the Bastille as an instance of the ‘group-in-fusion’; the birth of ‘fraternity-terror’ in the Tennis Court oath … but these never entered even the periphery of popular consciousness in the way that the café waiter or ‘my friend Pierre’ from L’Etre et le néant had done. The Critique is a very long and very difficult book. It was read, and even quite well reviewed – by philosophers at least – but by a relatively small group of specialists. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whilst having serious reservations about the book, took it seriously enough to ask Sartre’s collaborator on TM, Jean Pouillon, to conduct a semester-long seminar on it at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1961. Michel Foucault famously described it as ‘the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth.’3
By Sartre’s own admission, the writing of the Critique was ‘not pretty’.4 By this, he was referring to the style, and he excused it on methodological grounds: if the text contained so many prolix periods with multiple sub-clauses held together by a string of ‘inasmuch as’ and ‘insofar as’, it was because the dialectical method required it. But the writing in the physical sense was not pretty either. He had written all 390,000 words in 1958–59, fuelled by the usual cocktail of alcohol, tobacco and amphetamines; not surprisingly, the manuscript is somewhat difficult to decipher. Just as L’Etre et le néant had ended with the promise of an Ethics to follow, so the Critique ended with the announcement of a second volume on the ‘intelligibility of history’. Neither was ever completed, though the notes and drafts for both were published after Sartre’s death.
Ever since the death of his stepfather in 1945, Sartre had shared a flat with his mother at 42, rue Bonaparte on the Left Bank, but after the second OAS attack in January 1962 he moved into a tenth-floor studio flat at 222, boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, bringing the Saint-Germain-des-Prés era to an end. His mother moved into a small hotel nearby. Life returned to what passed for normality: holidays in Italy, three trips to the Soviet Union, two meetings with Khrushchev … but Sartre was no longer a starry-eyed sovietophile: his sympathies lay henceforth with the liberals and the dissidents of that country. In 1963 his public image was that of the globetrotting activist and scourge of the political establishment – after all, he had produced nothing in the way of literature in the previous ten years save two plays, and the last of those had been back in 1959. So the publication in TM in October-November 1963, and then in volume form in 1964, of a highly literary autobiography, of all things, was greeted with amazement and not a little delight – for once right across the political spectrum.
It is now known that Sartre had started work on his own autobiography in 1952 in the wake of the publication of Saint Genet. It has been remarked that Sartre’s bursts of autobiographical activity coincided with moments of crisis or transformation; this was the case with the self-portrait written during the Phoney War, and it appears to be the case in 1952–56 when Sartre had momentarily turned himself into a ‘critical fellow-traveller’ of the PCF. But it is only half the story: another explanation for the autobiographical activity of the early 1950s is to be found in the nature of the work he had carried out on Genet. Childhood was an important focus of the Genet book, and it certainly appears that Sartre was now prepared to give more weight to the alienating effect of childhood than had previously been the case. Readers of L’Etre et le néant could have been forgiven for supposing that men were ‘born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it’.5 Having long criticized the Freudian emphasis on childhood in the formation of the personality, Sartre seems now to have drawn inspiration from the ‘French Freud’: in the Cahiers pour une morale, he discusses Jacques Lacan’s article in the Encyclopédie Française on ‘Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu’, and notes: ‘There is another kind of alienation (and it is capital) found in all societies: it is that of the child.’6 We know from surviving manuscripts and notes that Sartre had at first planned to write an intellectual history of his generation, but that the focus had gradually narrowed to his own childhood. The problem was: when did childhood end? In the event, he chose a significant cut-off point: the remarriage of his mother in 1917.
A page from the final manuscript of Sartre’s Les Mots, 1963.
It is extremely difficult to say anything about Les Mots that does not need immediately to be hedged round with provisos and qualifications, and this for two main reasons. Towards the end of the book Sartre produces a phrase that summarizes its whole movement: ‘I was fleeing, external forces modelled my flight and made me.’7 That is to say, the vision he develops is a dialectical one. Sartre imagined the dialectic as a spiral: an argument that goes round in circles but which is constantly shifting up to the next level of analysis; every time a synthesis is achieved, it becomes, in turn, the thesis that inaugurates the next round. This means that, at any given moment, any assertion the author might make (about himself) is only provisionally true: true subjectively, but false objectively, and vice versa. This is the meaning of the unexpected remark that occurs 50 pages into the narration: ‘Everything I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false, like everything one writes about madmen, about men.’8 A second difficulty lies in the style of the writing. As the manuscripts prove, this was the most intensively ‘worked on’ of all of Sartre’s texts. The philosophical and theoretical texts were normally written in a continuous outpouring with very few crossings-out or amendments. The literary texts were visibly subject to considerable stylistic honing and polishing. But Les Mots stands out even amongst the latter: many manuscript pages contain just a single sentence, crossed through and rewritten on the next page with alterations and, often, greatly expanded, but sometimes also contracted. This means that every single word of the text was scrutinized and carefully weighed for its effect. The result is dazzling: pastiche, parody, irony, humour, puns – a veritable compendium of rhetorical figures. But what was the purpose of all of this stylistic labour? Sartre’s own explanation is not entirely convincing: ‘I wanted [this book] to be more literary than the others, because I considered it to be, as it were, a farewell to literature … I wanted to be literary in order to demonstrate the error of being literary.’9 But if this were the case, he could have chosen any language (technical, popular etc.) for the purposes of the demonstration – or simply kept quiet (like Rimbaud). In any case, the end of the book makes it clear that he is not yet done with writing.10 A more convincing answer is suggested by Sartre’s views on the nature of style itself. In a 1970s interview he remarked: ‘language that does not say what it is talking about is style. Style is not just a way of saying what one has to say, but a way of not saying what one does not have to say.’11 For the most part, when critics declared the style of Les Mots to be ‘dazzling’ and ‘brilliant’, they were unaware of the literal truth of what they were saying. The ‘I’ that speaks itself in the text is ultimately little more than a rhetorical effect: one long oxymoron. One could further suggest that it was this very realization that prompted the writing of the work in the first place. Sartre starts from an admission of failure: he knows that he can never reply to the question ‘Who am I?’ with anything more than words that will never coincide with the unknowable truth. At best, the relation between language and truth might be ‘asymptotic’. Most readers affected to take Les Mots at face value and chose to see it as the distillation of those qualities that seemed synonymous with French literature: wit, charm and profundity.
As if they had been laying in wait for him, the Swedish Academy pounced and promptly awarded Sartre the Nobel Prize for literature in October 1964. And he refused it. The sequence of events was actually not quite that simple. Shortly before the announcement, Sartre had learnt that he was in the running and wrote to the Academy in order, as it were, to refuse it in advance. But the Swedes ignored the letter. Two days after the announcement, he published an explanation of his refusal in Le Monde. He cited ‘personal’ and ‘objective’ reasons. The personal reasons came down to a horror of institutionalization. He explained that he had always systematically declined any ‘official’ honours (such as the Légion d’honneur after the war) in order to remain fully independent: ‘The writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.’ The ‘objective’ reasons were also connected to independence. He tactfully suggested that his acceptance of the honour would doubtless have been used in ways which neither he nor the Swedish Academy would condone, in the context of the continuing confrontation between East and West. He further pointed out that he would have accepted the prize had it been awarded to him at the height of his involvement alongside the FLN, but the fact that the Academy had waited until he was politically ‘safe’ again, suggested to him that Nobel Prizes for literature are not always awarded on literary merit alone. Inevitably, his decision was denounced by politically hostile commentators as capricious and incoherent, but – psychologically as well as politically – it was entirely coherent. Sartre strove very hard to resist any kind of ‘recuperation’ by bourgeois society – he was the black sheep who would never return to the fold; psychologically, the narcissist could never lower himself to being elevated in this way: like Groucho Marx, he refused to join any club that would have him as a member … His only regret, it seems, was the large sum of money that went with it: it could have been donated to a good political cause, such as the anti-Apartheid movement, with which he had recently become involved.
To say, as I have, that Sartre had reached his peak in 1960 implies, thereafter, a decline. This decline was more tangible within France – always prone to intellectual fashions – than in the wider world, where he continued to enjoy enormous prestige. Even in the Critique, Sartre was still, in essence, working with the ontological models he had elaborated in the 1930s and 1940s. His intellectual power-base had been philosophy, and the privileged position of that discipline in French academe. But by 1960 the prestige of philosophy was waning. Reorganizations of the University system had given formal recognition to what became known as the sciences humaines: primarily, anthropology, sociology, psychology and linguistics. The vast intellectual field covered by Sartre’s totalizing adventure was fragmenting into micro-disciplines practised by specialists with specialist skills. The new generation – those born after the war – had new intellectual maîtres à penser: Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953); Mythologies (1957); Eléments de sémiologie (1964); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958); La Pensée sauvage (1962); Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961); Les Mots et les Choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966); Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (1965); Lire le Capital (1965); Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1966). Not to mention the young writers and theorists based around the review Tel Quel (founded in 1960). There were new kids on the block, but most were hardly ‘kids’: Lévi-Strauss was only three years younger than Sartre; Lacan was four years older. The exceptions here were Barthes and Foucault. This battle between old and new was promoted by the French media as the confrontation between Sartre and the Structuralists. In literature too, the Sartrean model of commitment was under attack. The nouveaux romanciers of the 1950s had explicitly theorized their own practice in opposition to that of Sartre, despite, in the case of Robbe-Grillet, acknowledging La Nausée as in some respects a forerunner of the nouveau roman.
There are many ironies in this, not least that TM had done more than any other publication to bring many of these writers and theorists to the attention of a wider public. Within TM’s editorial board, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (himself an analyst) championed new psychoanalytic writing, whilst Jean Pouillon had long sought to reconcile the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and the ‘synthetic anthropology’ towards which Sartre had been striving. Nathalie Sarraute – a writer associated with the nouveaux romanciers – had virtually been launched by Sartre in the 1940s: her Portrait d’un inconnu found a publisher largely thanks to Sartre’s personal efforts.
It is probably true that these ‘new’ writers and thinkers engaged – albeit critically – more with Sartre’s work than he did with theirs. Herein lies one of Sartre’s paradoxes: for a man who had always inhabited the world of ideas, he was strangely incurious about ideas that he sensed did not fit into his system. He had immersed himself in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger but had assimilated it to his vision of the world, rather than being changed by it. He had discovered phenomenology thanks to the Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl of his strict contemporary Emmanuel Levinas (seen today as a much more fashionable thinker than Sartre) but never engaged with him thereafter. The same could be said of his attitude to the work of his friend Merleau-Ponty (who is also, coincidentally, enjoying more serious critical attention than Sartre these days). Numerous interviewers attempted to provoke Sartre into a substantial debate with the new thinkers, but to little effect. When he was drawn into discussion, it often appeared that he had, at best, only a vague notion of what they had actually written. He had a standard, blanket dismissal of Structuralism in all its forms: ‘structures’ were simply part of what he called in the Critique the ‘practico-inert’, and were, as such, unintelligible unless taken up by human praxis; the Structuralists denied the very possibility of human agency; he regarded the human subject as cause, while they relegated it to the status of a mere discursive effect, etc. Sartre’s evasiveness created the impression that he was ‘past it’, that he was locked in the past and no longer able to engage with what was most novel and vibrant in the realm of thought and letters. The era of the Universal Intellectual was over; the age of the specialist and the ‘technician’ had dawned.
Nevertheless, the writing of the Critique and the debate around the role of the intellectual that had been occasioned by the ‘Structuralist controversy’ led Sartre to reflect further on his own status as intellectual: what right had the intellectual to speak in the name of abstract, universal principles? In three lectures delivered in Japan in 1966 – but not published until 1972 – Sartre addressed precisely this question. He argues that the classic intellectual arose with the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony in the nineteenth century. The intellectual is recruited from that class and serves its interests, first as a ‘technician of practical knowledge’. He becomes an intellectual when he starts to become involved in matters that do not concern him; and to do this, he must first become conscious of his own contradictions: he works in the name of values such as Truth, Objectivity and Universality, but the fruits of his labours are put to a particular use by the class that he serves – namely, the continuing hegemony of that class to the detriment of the under-classes who labour to realize those ends. Once awareness has dawned, he becomes – and the term will by now be familiar – a monster, or a ‘man of contradictions’. The only way to avoid being paralysed by the contradiction between universality and particularity is for the intellectual to live that contradiction dialectically. This involves a process of continuous radicalization: the intellectual must intervene punctually, on specific issues of injustice, and must always place himself in the service of the masses. But he should be under no illusions: he will always be an outsider, the object of mistrust to the masses he tries to serve, and a traitor to the class that spawned him.
The problem itself is hardly new – it is the underlying subject of most of Sartre’s major plays, especially Les Mains sales – but now he appears to recognize that it has no solution: the monster must live his monstrosity to the bitter end. He is thus a torn and solitary figure. One further task is incumbent upon him: he must subject himself to a continual process of self-examination, or auto-critique: this involves a reflexive extirpation of any assumptions, any habits of thought, any acquired certainties that may have taken root. The critic is essentially one who separates – the wheat from the chaff, for example – but he is also, in Sartre’s notion of auto-critique, the one who separates himself from himself. The idea is not dissimilar to Lévi-Strauss’s description of the acquisition of objective knowledge, which requires the subject endlessly to split himself into subject and object, in a process of cumulative self-alienation. There is deep continuity at work here: Sartre had always intuited his own ‘character’ as being defined by ‘de-solidarization’: he had always betrayed, and dissociated himself from the self of yesterday in the name of the self he would become tomorrow. In the 25 years that separated the Carnets de la drôle de guerre from Les Mots, nothing had changed in this respect: ‘I became a traitor and I have remained one. I can throw myself completely into an undertaking, give myself up unreservedly to a piece of work, to anger, to friendship, but in the very next instance I will disavow myself, I know it, I want it, and I betray myself already, in the very midst of my passion, by the joyful presentiment of my future betrayal.’12 Sartre constitutes himself as a living paradox: the man whose only constancy lies in inconstancy; existence is a flight from the consistency of the self: the only time one is what one is, and everything one will ever be, is when one ceases to exist. In this sense, Sartre was a man who lived with death snapping at his heels.
As we will see, the last fifteen years of Sartre’s life would provide ample opportunities for the ‘punctual intervention’ of the intellectual. But never had he led a more double life. There was an inside and an outside. The inside was the flat in Montparnasse: the ‘family’ and above all the female friends – Arlette, Beauvoir, Wanda, Michelle – Sunday lunch with his mother (until her death in 1969), his music, his piano … But above all his desk and the pool of light around the blank page slowly disappearing under the advancing tide of unruly black characters. Every day, the clock stood still and he had a rendezvous with another age, inhabited by a quite different kind of literary hermit: Gustave Flaubert. But there was also an outside, and here the clock never stopped.
Despite his numerous trips to the Soviet Union, Sartre maintained his highly critical stance on that regime, speaking out increasingly in favour of dissidents and denouncing the suppression of the ‘Prague spring’ as a ‘war crime’. But this was not the only war crime that he denounced. In 1966, he had been invited to join the International Tribunal against War Crimes in Vietnam, organized by the venerable doyen of British philosophers, Bertrand Russell. He was elected its executive president in November of that year. The following spring, the Tribunal met in Stockholm, and again in Denmark in the autumn. At the end of World War II, once the last charged Nazi had been judged and dispatched, the Allies had made haste to dissolve the Nuremberg Tribunal lest their own actions fall foul of its justice. The legitimacy of the Russell Tribunal (as it became known), wrote Sartre, lay in its resurrection of a process begun at Nuremberg and now so conveniently forgotten. Today, in 2006, after Bosnia, after Rwanda, after Sudan and in the midst of Iraq, the concluding words of Sartre’s write-up of the judgement of the Tribunal seem as urgent as ever:
this crime … carried out every day before our very eyes, makes all those who do not denounce it the accomplices of those who perpetrate it, and, all the better to enslave us, it begins by degrading us. In this sense, imperialist genocide can only become more radical: for the group that it targets, through the Vietnamese nation, is the human group in its entirety.13
Today an International War Crimes Tribunal sits in The Hague; the USA does not recognize its legitimacy.
Sartre’s other great public intervention of the late 1960s was the Arab–Israeli conflict, but in this conflict he found it impossible to take sides. He had been sensitized to the persecution of the Jews during World War II; he had been sympathetic to the Jewish terrorists in their struggle to oust the British and found the state of Israel, but he had also supported Nasser at the time of the Suez crisis, and the Algerian war had brought him many friends in the Arab world. Thus he maintained a stance of studied neutrality – which did not mean that he was blind to the rights and wrongs on both sides. With a view to fostering dialogue between Arabs and Israelis, he and Beauvoir undertook an ‘official’ trip to Egypt and Israel in 1967. It was not the moment for dialogue: only a few days after their return to France, the Six-Day War broke out. Sartre’s loyalties are well expressed in an interview he had given to the Israeli newspaper Al Hamishmar in 1966: ‘as the Arab world and Israel confront each other today, it is as if we are divided in our very selves, and we live this opposition as though it were our own personal tragedy.’14 For the rest of his life, Sartre would maintain this neutrality, affirming both the right of the state of Israel to exist in security, and condemning its ‘colonialist’ attitude towards the Palestinians. It is significant that, on his death, Sartre was hailed as a friend both by the Israeli and by the Palestinian press.
The Vietnam War was an important element in the backdrop to the discontent that led to the student unrest across the world in 1967–68. In France, it began in a curiously Gallic manner: students in the Faculty of Nanterre protested at the absurd rule that barred male students from female halls of residence ‘after hours’, leading to violent confrontation with the University authorities and the police. But this was the random spark that ignited the power-keg: French students were thoroughly disillusioned with an outdated system in which ‘knowledge’ was handed down from on high by arrogant, out-of-touch professors in crumbling, over-crowded lecture theatres; they felt oppressed by an authoritarian and mediocre government held together by what amounted to a cult of personality around de Gaulle and supported by a quiescent mass media; and they felt angry about Vietnam. The unrest at Nanterre spread quickly to the Sorbonne, and barricades appeared in the Latin Quarter for the first time since the Commune of 1871. Violent confrontation with the notorious CRS (paramilitary riot police) followed. These students had no intellectual gurus – by and large, they regarded intellectuals as part of the problem – but they nevertheless invited Sartre to speak to them in the Grand Amphithéâtre of the Sorbonne, which they had occupied. His presence alone was sufficient to fill the room to overflowing, but few listened to what he said: once again, his presence was symbolic. For his part, Sartre saw in their revolt a cause that he must necessarily espouse: they were young, their adversaries were old, and they were fighting against the full force of an oppressive state. But it is not clear how well he understood them.
After the expulsion of the students from the Sorbonne, increasingly violently street-fighting over the barricades of the Left Bank continued, eventually swaying public support in favour of the students, and provoking a spontaneous general strike. At this point, the government was close to falling, and perhaps even the state itself … But, with the help of the PCF – which revealed itself to be every bit as conservative as Sartre had long suspected – de Gaulle finally restored a semblance of order. Promises of reforms were made to the students; the trades unions – if not the workers themselves – were bought off.
Sartre addressing an audience in 1968.
Unrest continued well into 1969. In February of that year Sartre spoke at a meeting held at the Mutualité (on the same platform as Michel Foucault) in support of 34 students expelled for their part in the unrest. As he prepared to speak, a young militant passed him a slip of paper which bore the words, using the familiar tu form of address: ‘Sartre, keep it brief, keep it clear: we need to discuss what we’re going to do!’
The street-fighting may have ceased, but this was not the end of ’68. In its aftermath, numerous small, revolutionary groups – or groupuscules – were formed by young people who saw ’68 as only the beginning, not the end, and who distrusted the Communists as much as they detested de Gaulle. One of these was the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP; it had actually been formed shortly before May ’68), a revolutionary Maoist group dedicated to the continuation and radicalization of the struggle. Their newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, supported all forms of working-class revolutionary struggle – from workers protesting against sackings and lock-outs in France, to the Black Panthers in the USA. They very quickly came to the attention of the French authorities: in 1970 the newspaper’s first two directors were arrested and imprisoned for their ‘subversive activities’. Their colleagues had the idea of asking Sartre to take on the directorship of the newspaper, judging that the government would not dare imprison him. He was initially mystified: ‘I hadn’t quite understood what these young people wanted, nor had I understood what role an old buffer (vieux con) like me could play in that affair.’15 But the ‘old buffer’ accepted, and subsequently took on the nominal directorship of up to a dozen far-left publications. But in the case of La Cause du Peuple, what was initially a mere cover became something more: Sartre started to debate with his young interlocutors and even genuinely edited two issues of the newspaper himself. When the authorities focused their efforts on the street-sellers of La Cause du Peuple – arresting them and often beating them up – Sartre, Beauvoir and others took to the streets to sell the paper themselves in an attempt to cause the police maximum discomfiture. They did arrest him, but he was quickly released by an embarrassed commissariat. Sartre’s support for the Maoists and the causes they espoused was certainly more than symbolic – in his eyes at least. Which is not to say that he saw eye to eye with them on everything. He was careful not to give unconditional support to any action they might undertake, and was always wary of their clandestine armed faction. In the event, the GP dissolved itself in October 1973 realizing, in the wake of the successful creation of a workers’ cooperative at the Lip factory, that the workers could actually manage quite well without them.
The years 1970–73 were probably the most politically intense of his life; he wished to incarnate the ‘new intellectual’, and the activities he undertook in these years certainly demonstrate what he understood by that term. He threw himself into the support of immigrant workers, protesting at their atrocious living conditions; he became involved in issues of workers’ safety – especially in the mines; he protested against racism in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris; along with Foucault, he took up the cause for radical reform of the prison system; he launched enquiries into instances of police brutality and cover-ups – the most famous of these being the case of Pierre Overney, who had been shot dead by an armed guard at the state-owned Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt. Further afield, he took up the cause of Soviet Jews prevented from emigrating, whilst also writing a letter calling on Israel to cease persecuting conscientious objectors. In 1974, he made a visit to Andreas Baader, erstwhile leader of the Rote Armee Faktion, who was being held in solitary confinement in a German prison. Ill-health forced Sartre to reduce these kinds of ‘punctual interventions’ after 1975, but even as late as 1979 he turned out physically in support of the Vietnamese ‘boat-people’.
There was one thing in particular about which Sartre and the young Maoists disagreed, and that was the work he was engaged upon. The militants had suggested that he could best support the workers by writing a popular novel! But Sartre would do no such thing; the work he had been writing, on and off, for nearly twenty years was nearing completion, and it was just about as far removed from a ‘popular novel’ as it was possible to imagine: volumes I and II of L’Idiot de la famille – an Existential biography of Gustave Flaubert – were published together in May 1971 and weighed in at over 1,500 pages; volume III was published the following year and brought the total to well in excess of 2,100 pages. Had not Sartre once remarked that he had always regarded abundance as a virtue!
The question that Sartre poses at the start of L’Idiot de la famille is deceptively straightforward: ‘What can one know about a man, today?’ The 2,000 pages he produced were only the beginnings of a reply: at the point where the text ends, Sartre has not even arrived at the publication of Flaubert’s first masterpiece, in his mid-thirties. The structure of the study is nonetheless quite straightforward: if the whole work is an amplification of the phrase ‘you make yourself on the basis of what has been made of you’, then the first volume reconstructs what was ‘made of’ Gustave as a child. The principal factors that contributed to Gustave’s ‘passivisation’ were the relation to an adequate, but cold, mother – a mother who would perhaps not have been deemed ‘good enough’ by an analyst such as Winnicott; and to a stern, overbearing and prestigious father, as well as an older brother who attempted to be no more than a replica of his father. It is curious to read a Sartre who had so denigrated psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s bemoaning the lack of information available on precisely how Caroline Flaubert had breast-fed and handled her baby son! The first volume, then, reconstructs the ‘constitution’: ‘Such is Gustave. Such was he constituted. And, no doubt, there is no determination imprinted within a human being that he does not “go past” by and through his manner of living it.’16 The second volume (La Personnalisation) is the history of this dépassement – or how Flaubert started to make himself on the basis of how he had been constituted by others. The third volume starts to explore Flaubert’s choice of the imaginary as an expression, and a way out of the double-bind in which he had been placed. It contains an astonishingly long dialectical working-out of the multiple significances of a supposed epileptic fit suffered by Flaubert in the company of his brother at Pont L’Evêque: Sartre regards this ‘falling fit’ as the means ‘invented’ by Flaubert to transform a reality that was becoming unliveable (notably, it was a means of circumventing the familial expectation that he should ‘adopt a profession’).
L’Idiot is the most thorough application of the dialectical ‘regressive–progressive’ method. This involves a constant coming and going between past and future, between inside and outside: on the one hand, the subject is situated in his society, his milieu, his epoch, and, on the other, the project of the subject is grasped as he interiorizes and re-exteriorizes (in his actions, his creations etc.) the set of given conditions. This was Sartre’s attempt – following on from Critique de la raison dialectique – to dissolve the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity in a truly dialectical movement that gives full weight to historical determination, whilst stopping short of erecting it as a final cause.
Looking back over Sartre’s long list of existential biographical projects – which include some not mentioned here, such as the artist Tintoretto – certain patterns begin to emerge. In every case (except in that of Flaubert, where the mother is deficient), there is an exclusive relationship with an idealized mother; in every case, the idyll is shattered by a crushing father-figure. All of the subjects were artists of one kind or another (normally ‘poets’) and in each case, the central conundrum was why this subject chose the imaginary as the preferred escape from an existential crisis ‘at the moment of suffocation’. If, as I suggested earlier, Sartre was seeking glimpses of his own reflection in these figures, one can ultimately only speculate on what he saw there. What is striking is the contrast between the immense ‘will to know’ that drove his biographical ventures, and the almost total ignorance that he professed with regard to his own father: ‘About that man, nobody in my family has succeeded in making me curious.’17 If the writing of the self, when pushed back far enough, always encounters a myth of origins, then it is perhaps significant that Jean-Baptiste remained largely a figure of myth for his son: ‘I know him from hearsay, like the Man in the Iron Mask or the Chevalier d’Eon.’18
Worn down by years of overwork and sundry substance abuse, Sartre’s health had long been in a parlous state. His heavy drinking and unhealthy diet (he particularly liked fatty pork dishes and charcuterie, and was virtually allergic to anything resembling a green vegetable) had left him with atherosclerosis, a condition which often leads to strokes or haemorrhages. He suffered a small stroke in May 1971, but in March 1973 he suffered a more serious one, and in June a triple haemorrhage behind his one remaining good eye left him to all intents and purposes blind. In Les Mots, in self-ironic mode, he had uncannily predicted the fate that would befall him: ‘towards the end of my life, blinder even than Beethoven was deaf, I would grope towards the completion of my final work: the manuscript would be found amongst my papers and, disappointed, people would exclaim: “But it’s illegible!”… Then, one day, out of love for me, some young scholars would attempt to decipher it: it would take them a lifetime to reconstitute what would turn out, naturally, to be my masterpiece.’19 He was right in every respect save one: there would be no more masterpieces. The fourth volume of L’Idiot de la famille would remain forever unwritten.
The most disabling consequence of Sartre’s blindness was that the activity that had defined his life – writing – was over, and so too, in a sense, was his life. Outwardly, he accepted this fact with a remarkable lack of self-pity, but in private it was a rather different story – a story chronicled in some detail by Beauvoir in La Cérémonie des adieux.
His reduced mobility and physical dependency on others (he subsequently developed diabetes) did not prevent him, however, from continuing to act to the best of his ability. But writing – his very raison d’être – was no longer possible: he could have learned to touch-type, but he could not have reread himself: rereading was a crucial stage of literary production for Sartre. In any case, typing would have been an unacceptable substitute: the physical process of writing by hand was somehow essential to his creativity. So there remained the voice. Indeed, everything Sartre ‘wrote’ after 1973 was in fact dictated or transcribed from tape-recordings. The year 1974 saw the publication of On a raison de se révolter, co-signed with Pierre Victor and Philippe Gavi, and which was an edited version of a series of entretiens (both ‘interview’ and ‘conversation’) between Sartre and the two young Maoists between 1972 and 1974. The motives behind that publication were pecuniary as much as intellectual: the money it brought in was used to launch, and keep afloat, the new left-wing daily Libération. Also in 1974, Sartre worked on the sequel to his autobiography in the form of extended interviews with Simone de Beauvoir, in the summer and autumn of that year; interviews that covered his literature, his philosophy and his personal life.
When considering the spoken work of Sartre’s last years, it is perhaps as well to recall precisely what distinguished speaking from writing in his view. Notwithstanding his theorization of writing as communication in the 1940s (a view that many commentators erroneously assume to have been his final word), Sartre remarked on more than one occasion – especially in the 1970s – that the most important thing about writing, for him, was what he called ‘style’. Style was what allowed the writer to hide, or to not-communicate, as well as to communicate. Bereft of style, the spoken word gave the speaker no place to hide … The most sustained, and controversial, practice of the entretien took place in the privacy of Sartre’s flat, and occurred in the last five years of his life.
During the years of his involvement with the GP, he had formed a close relationship with one young Maoist in particular. Pierre Victor – whose real name was Benny Lévy – was a Jew who had been brought up in a Francophone family in Cairo. The family had left Egypt at the time of the Suez affair. Lévy (whom I shall henceforth call by his given name) had eventually landed at the ENS. After the dissolution of the GP in 1973, he and Sartre began to meet regularly to discuss the question that most concerned them both: the conditions of possibility of the establishment of a non-authoritarian socialism. Lévy would come to Sartre’s flat every morning, and every morning the dialogue would recommence. Lévy also read aloud the books that Sartre himself could no longer read. Lévy was, at the time, officially stateless – which explains, at least in part, the pseudonym he adopted – but was later naturalized a French citizen thanks to Sartre’s direct intervention with Giscard d’Estaing. Their relationship was also formalized in 1975, when Sartre made him his ‘special secretary’. It is tempting to see their relationship as a belated attempt by Sartre to acquire a son to go with the (adopted) daughter he already had, but there are problems with this interpretation, not least that Sartre loathed the father–son relationship. To see the pair as master and disciple is also problematic: Sartre detested being cast as the master – even when he had been an actual master in his lycée teaching before the war, he had taught not by authority but by provocation and inspiration – and Lévy was no starry-eyed disciple: he had an astonishingly detailed knowledge of Sartre’s work and was not afraid to critique and debate. He was, moreover, thoroughly conversant with theoretical Marxism – especially the work of Althusser. Sartre himself presented their relationship as one between equals: they addressed each other as ‘tu’ (something that scandalized Sartre’s entourage). But this too is problematic: after all, Lévy was a nobody who had published virtually nothing and Sartre was the most celebrated intellectual in the world. Furthermore, Sartre was his employer.
Sartre’s biographers have found it very hard to interpret this relationship, for at least two reasons. First, it was a private and isolated relationship, putting one strangely in mind of the way Sartre described another experience of being read to: ‘All the while [my mother] was talking to me, we were alone and clandestine, far from men, from the gods and the priests, two does in the forest, with those other does, the Fairies.’20 This kind of exclusivity was something that Sartre had always maintained. His personal life was compartmentalized to an extraordinary degree and always had been. Cohen-Solal claims that Michelle Vian and Arlette, for example, never really met until after Sartre died – despite their both having been his intimate companion for at least 25 years; similarly, Lévy and Arlette did not become friendly with each other until just three years before Sartre’s death. His friends would come and go to the flat in Montparnasse, but effectively did little more than pass each other in the street outside. Second, the acrimony surrounding the last years of Sartre’s life produced accounts of the period that bare the traces of that bitterness. Beauvoir’s memoirs are still the most abundant source of biographical material on Sartre, but nobody would claim that they are objective; and La Cérémonie des adieux – covering the last ten years of Sartre’s life – was the most ‘partial’ of all. It is a disturbing text, describing in painful, tedious detail the physical and mental decline of Sartre, but also insisting on the immense will to live that kept driving him to fight against the inevitable. On closing the book, one is unsure to what extent this was a widow’s paean to the love of her life, and to what extent the bitter revenge of a woman against the man who, she felt, had ultimately betrayed her. In the end, it is perhaps both: a work shot through with the ambivalence that characterizes the ‘work of mourning’. Her representation of Lévy is highly negative: she imputes self-serving motives to him, but is notably at a loss when it comes to understanding what Sartre himself got out of the relationship. Lévy, for his part, has said that Beauvoir had simply failed to grasp the nature of the roles that Sartre had come to ascribe to each of them: she was an unchanging past, but he was an open future.
Be that as it may, if Sartre’s last years were marred by acrimony, suspicion and paranoia, the blame must lie ultimately with Sartre himself: to the end, in his personal life, he was the dramaturge who controlled the exits and entrances of his characters.
The simmering hostilities, fuelled by mutual incomprehension, came to a head in 1978. By this time, Lévy’s own intellectual preoccupations had taken a surprising turn: the atheist Jewish militant had discovered the Kabbala and the Talmud and, in the company of Arlette with whom he had become close since 1977, had set about their serious study. It was against this background that he organized a short trip to Israel in February 1978 for himself, Sartre and Arlette. The purpose of the visit was for Sartre to be able to discuss the Israel–Palestine conflict with a small group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals. The discussions were, by all accounts, superficial; but the storm really broke upon their return to Paris. Lévy had prepared a text arising out of the visit and sent it to Jean Daniel at the Nouvel Observateur. It was signed ‘Sartre–Victor’. Crucially, Sartre had not even mentioned the text to the woman he called his ‘little judge’. Beauvoir, of course, found out about it, read it, and begged Sartre not to allow its publication: it was, she said, poorly written, feebly argued and under-researched. It would not have been the first time that Sartre published a piece suffering from all of the above defects, so the real problem lay elsewhere: for Beauvoir and the colleagues at TM, the piece did not truly represent what they took to be Sartre’s thought. But Sartre had already given the go-ahead to Lévy and, for whatever reasons – cowardice, or defiance of the old guard perhaps – refused to go back on the decision. To compound matters, he also failed to inform Lévy of Beauvoir’s opinion; Lévy found out from her directly, at a bad-tempered meeting of the editorial board of TM – the last he ever attended.
Conflicts and hostilities that had been muted now became open. And there was much worse to follow. The daily entretiens between Sartre and Lévy continued, and drifted more and more towards Lévy’s preoccupation with Judaism. The intention was to collaborate on a joint publication of a radically new kind. Sartre spoke enthusiastically about the project – provisionally entitled Pouvoir et liberté – and claimed to see it as the culmination of a long reflection on politics and ethics. In the same spirit, he proposed to Jean Daniel that the Nouvel Observateur should publish a long Sartre–Lévy interview in which he would summarize the work they had already done on the book and explain his new positions. In February 1980 Sartre had let his ‘little judge’ read the text, but was bewildered by the violence of her response (tearful and furious, she reportedly flung the manuscript across the room and told him that he could not publish it). Her view, and that of the old-guard at TM, was that an old man no longer in complete possession of his critical faculties had been bamboozled by a forceful young man with an agenda of his own.
Jean-Paul Sartre, André Glucksmann and Raymond Aron at the Elysée Palace, Paris, 26 June 1979.
But Sartre was no longer listening to the woman who had been his lifelong literary and philosophical sounding-post, or censor. Lévy delivered the manuscript himself to the offices of the Nouvel Observateur. Besieged by phone calls from Beauvoir, Bost, Pouillon and Lanzmann, Daniel hesitated. At which point Sartre himself called him and – most unusually for him – used his authority to present an ultimatum: Daniel must publish the text, in its entirety, or he, Sartre, would simply take it elsewhere. The contentious text was published under the title ‘L’Espoir maintenant’ in three instalments: 10, 17 and 24 March. Today, the value and significance of the piece are still debated by specialists: did it really mark such a radical disavowal of Sartre’s most fundamental concepts? The interviews turn around the possibility of an ‘ethics of hope’ and in fact cover many subjects: humanism, obligation and reciprocity, the future of the Left (or its lack of a future), fraternity and democracy. The ‘dialogue’ is not particularly elevated, but neither is it particularly contentious, until it turns to Judaism. Lévy brings Sartre round to this topic via a discussion of Réflexions sur la question juive, and it was doubtless this that so outraged Beauvoir and her friends: Sartre appears to be suggesting that ethics (as the ultimate goal of revolution) could only really be thought in terms of a certain messianism. This was the Sartre who had denounced any hope of salvation as an illusion or a confidence-trick; the Sartre who had described Existentialism as nothing more than the attempt to draw all the conclusions from a coherent atheism … It is doubtless significant that Beauvoir chose to end La Cérémonie des adieux with a posthumous reaffirmation of Sartre’s atheism in an obvious attempt to dispel the whiff of messianism that hung over ‘L’Espoir maintenant’: ‘my relations with other people are direct – he tells her – they no longer take a detour via the All-Powerful, I don’t need God in order to love my neighbour.’21
Sartre only just lived to see the publication of ‘L’Espoir maintenant’. On 20 March he was admitted as an emergency to Broussais hospital with a pulmonary œdema. Initially, there was no particular cause for concern, but then his kidneys stopped functioning and surgery was out of the question: he was too frail. From that moment, he was condemned. There were brief remissions, but his condition worsened and he lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke: at around 9 p.m. on 15 April 1980, he died.