The struggle to control the meaning of Sartre’s life began within hours of his death. The struggle was waged both in and between the public and private domains.
A general public knew little or nothing of the troubled relations within the ‘family’ during the last few years of his life. Simone de Beauvoir was the first to break cover: La Cérémonie des adieux (1981) chronicled the physical and mental decline of Sartre throughout the 1970s. The inclusion of the interviews was clearly intended to imprint a ‘final image’ of ‘what Sartre stood for’ in the minds of his readers in France and throughout the world – even though the interviews had been conducted as early as 1974. Arlette El-Kaïm and Benny Lévy do not emerge with credit from the pages of Beauvoir’s book. In December 1981 Arlette published an open letter to Beauvoir in Libération, warning her ‘this time you have gone too far’.1 Each woman used the ammunition she possessed. It was Arlette, not Beauvoir, whom Sartre had made his literary executor: she used this position to publish, in 1983, the Carnets de la drôle de guerre and the Cahiers pour une morale, with notes and an introduction. Beauvoir had control over other material, and published two volumes of Sartre’s letters to her – and ‘a few others’ – in the same year. Benny Lévy broke his silence in 1984 with Le Nom de l’homme: dialogue avec Sartre.2 The struggle over the image of the Sartre–Beauvoir couple did not end with Beauvoir’s death in 1986: in 1990, her adoptive daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, published Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, as well as her war diaries. Cross-referring between Sartre’s letters and war diaries and the Beauvoir letters, one notices some curious lacunae in the latter – suggesting that the editor was keen, even after the death of the leading protagonists, to manage the image of the couple that they had cultivated in their lifetimes.
Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, Paris, 1980.
The ‘battle for Sartre’ in the public domain began as soon as his death was announced. Every national and local radio and television station carried the news as a lead item; starting the next day, and continuing for over a month, daily newspapers, weekly news magazines and supplements indulged in an unprecedented feeding frenzy. The sheer volume of material was testament in itself to the magnitude of the figure who had disappeared. Not for the first time, the Communists and the bourgeois right adopted strangely similar positions. Both attempted to negate the significance of Sartre as a political activist by abstracting him from history and praising the timeless qualities of the Artist, the Writer or the embodiment of the French Intellect. Articles and obituaries appeared on all five continents. Commentators in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa were unanimous and sincere in mourning the ‘loss of a friend’. In Brazil, the writer Jorge Amado considered Sartre to have been ‘the most important man of the post-war period, the man who has exercised the greatest influence on the world today’. A discordant note was struck by a Palestinian journalist who suggested that Sartre’s real sympathies had always been with Israel. The Washington Post opined that, even after 1956, Sartre had remained a Communist. Iszvestia devoted fully five lines to Sartre’s passing.3
Once the shock had passed, the backlash was not long in coming. Each significant anniversary over the last 25 years has seen renewed coverage in newspapers and magazines. Since 1990 – as the neo-conservatives gloated in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc – the coverage has been particularly negative, particularly in France. News magazines such as L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Point have repeatedly devoted their front covers to Sartre. Inside, readers have been called upon to ‘forget Sartre’, but the economic logic of these very publications prevents them from doing so: after all, his face and his name, even when dragged through the mud, still sell magazines.
The year 2005 − 25 years after Sartre’s death and the centenary of his birth – was always going to be the most significant anniversary. It has been marked by dozens of international academic colloquia and scores of new books (commissioned for the occasion, or republished to coincide with it) as well as many reissues of old classics – often with significant ‘revisions’.4 His plays have been revived; the Bibliothèque Nationale has devoted its longest-running ever exhibition to ‘Sartre the writer’; television and radio stations have broadcast profiles of the man and reassessments of his work.
But why? Writing in Le Monde des Livres, Michel Contat remarked in March 2005: ‘Commemorations, commemorations! Magazines put Sartre on the front cover at the same time as wondering whether he should be burnt, or while stating that he no longer arouses anything but indifference – or occasionally both at the same time.’ The testimonies, he continues, oscillate between denunciation and hagiography. But one can discern a qualitative difference between the testimonies of journalists and those of academic commentators. The latter have arrived at a stage of discriminating judgementalism – separating the wheat from the chaff. This is even true in the case of establishment intellectual historians such as Jean-François Sirinelli and Michel Winock – neither of whom could be accused of being left-wing firebrands.5 Journalists, by and large, have contrived to give the public what they pretend to think they want: opinion (prejudice) and point of view (ignorance). In French publications, this is to be explained largely by the political coloration of the newspapers and magazines for which these journalists write. In Britain, the picture is interestingly different. It is only those ‘serious’ newspapers that fondly consider themselves to be centrist or ‘left of centre’ that have troubled to devote significant space to Sartre – presumably to cater for the presumed intellectuality of their readership. But in Britain the assessments of Sartre’s life have been coloured less by the political positioning of the publication in question than by a characteristically British anti-intellectualism and gallophobia: in this centenary, also, of the Entente cordiale, national stereotyping and overt racism are apparently acceptable when directed at ‘old friends’. A prime example, amongst many from the print and broadcast media, was to be found in the review section of The Independent of 17 June 2005. The two-page article purports to ‘explore [Sartre’s] legacy’. With an almost audible sigh of relief, the author concludes: ‘despite the Sartre revival in the radical US,6 it will probably be Sartre the artist-writer, rather than Sartre the political thinker, who survives’. An opinion one should certainly respect, especially when it is proffered by a scholar whose extensive knowledge of Sartre’s work leads him to assert that L’Idiot de la famille was ‘published only after Sartre’s death’. The article ends engagingly: ‘It is impossible to divide his work from the lingering, carefully crafted persona of the man: “the engaged [sic] intellectual” with rotting teeth, chain-smoking Gauloises in the Café de Flore’. Doubtless an image guaranteed to reassure all non-smoking British ‘intellectuals’ endowed with perfect dentition.
Of course it is possible to divide the work from the persona; it is also possible to seek to relate the work to the persona, but to do either it is first necessary to read the work. And this raises the question of who still reads Sartre. Le Monde conducted a series of interviews with thirty-something researchers in literature and philosophy departments in French universities. As arbitrary as the sample may have been, the results are borne out to a large extent by actual statistics relating to masters and doctoral theses completed in France. In French philosophy departments, Sartre is today – as he always has been – a marginal figure. Students of phenomenology read Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but rarely Sartre. He has never been set as a subject for the agrégation. His literary theory no longer serves – if it ever did – as a theoretical model for students of lettres modernes. In postcolonial studies, the reference points are Foucault and Edward Saïd; Sartre’s infamous preface to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre is even perceived to have ‘sunk’ Fanon himself in the eyes of French readers (although he is currently undergoing something of a revival in the English-speaking world). In all of the domains Sartre occupied during his lifetime, he has been eclipsed as a theoretical reference point by more ‘specialist’ thinkers. As we saw in the last chapter, this trend had begun as early as the 1960s. All of this is due in part, no doubt, to the rigorous divisions in the French university system between philosophy and literature departments: Sartre, after all, melded those two activities to greater effect than any other twentieth-century writer – even Camus. But it is probably also due to the sheer singularity of his thought, and it is with the question of Sartre’s singularity that we shall conclude.
The question of Sartre’s continuing relevance or irrelevance – as indeed of the significance of his life – has for some years now been debated under the heading of his supposed ‘mistakes’: ‘les erreurs de Sartre’. In France, as elsewhere, these ‘errors’ have been used to disqualify the whole of the Sartrean enterprise: a man who sympathized with the Stalinists, who worked with the Maoists, who justified ‘terrorist murders’ of ‘civilians’ in Algeria or Munich must have been wrong about everything. The illogicality of the argument requires no comment; but even those who concede that Sartre may have been ‘wrong’ about some things and ‘right’ about others are missing an important point. To understand this point, we have to return to what Sartre himself said about the vicissitudes of life after death.
The characters in Huis Clos are dead on earth – that is, they no longer ‘realize a physical presence in the world’. This dramatic conceit was explicated at length in L’Etre et le néant. As long as I am alive, the meaning of my life is never fixed: it can always be modified by my choices and actions in the future, as well as by the actions and judgements of other people. A ‘dead life’ is one that can never again be modified from the inside (by the person who had lived it), but one whose meaning is henceforth constantly modified from the outside (by the living). The lives of the dead are taken up by the living: ‘the characteristic of a dead life is that it is a life of which the Other makes himself a guardian.’7 The living may adopt various attitudes towards the dead lives with which they are entrusted: they may choose preservation, oblivion or indifference. But even the billions of dead who have been forgotten individually do not cease to exist; they exist collectively: ‘To be forgotten is, in fact, to be apprehended resolutely and forever as an element merged into a mass … it is to lose one’s personal existence in order then to be constituted with others in a collective existence.’8 The guardianship referred to here is a guardianship of meaning: the living henceforth decide on the meaning of the lives of the millions of dead – both the ‘preserved’ and the ‘forgotten’ – who silently haunt them; but not by deciding whether the actions of this dead individual or that disappeared group were right or wrong – the process is far more subtle and open-ended: ‘It is I and the men of my generation who decide on the meaning of the efforts and undertakings of the previous generation, either by taking up and continuing their social and political enterprises, or by making a decisive break and casting the dead back into inefficacy.’9 As long as there are living men and women making the world and redefining humanity, the meaning of the lives of the dead will always be ‘in suspense’. From this point of view, the question ‘was Sartre wrong?’ can only be answered at the End of History (and then there will be nobody there to ask it or to answer it). It should be rephrased: ‘will Sartre have been wrong?’ The answer to that question lies not in Sartre’s actions, but in our own. If, for example, we create a world in which social injustice is never questioned, in which misery is accepted as an accident of birth or in which torture is considered normal, then he will have been wrong – for as long as that world exists. And perhaps that is why the question is never asked in this way: from beyond the grave, Sartre reminds us of the responsibility of being human. This is why he remains an importunate corpse.10
A scene from a production of Sartre’s Huis Clos at the Théâtre de Potinière, Paris, 1946.