JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, like Bertrand Russell, was a professional philosopher who also sought to preach to a mass audience. But there was an important difference in their approach. Russell saw philosophy as a hieratic science in which the populace could not participate. The most a worldly philosopher like himself could do was to distill small quantities of wisdom and distribute it, in a greatly diluted form, through newspaper articles, popular books and broadcasts. Sartre, by contrast, working in a country where philosophy is taught in the high schools and bandied about in the cafés, believed that by plays and novels he could bring about mass participation in his system. For a time at least it looked as though he had succeeded. Certainly no philosopher this century has had so direct an impact on the minds and attitudes of so many human beings, especially young people, all over the world. Existentialism was the popular philosophy of the late 1940s and 1950s. His plays were hits. His books sold in enormous quantities, some of them over two million copies in France alone.1 He offered a way of life. He presided over a secular church, if a nebulous one. Yet in the end, what did it all amount to?
Like most leading intellectuals, Sartre was a supreme egoist. Nor is this surprising, given the circumstances of his childhood. He was the classic case of a spoiled only child. His family was of the provincial upper middle class, his father a naval officer, his mother a well-to-do Schweitzer from Alsace. The father was, by all accounts, an insignificant fellow, much bullied by his father; a clever man, though, a Polytechnicien, who grew ferocious moustaches to compensate for his small height (5 feet 2 inches). At all events he died when Sartre was only fifteen months old and became ‘only a photo in my mother’s bedroom’. The mother, Anne-Marie, married again to an industrialist, Joseph Mancy, boss of the Delaunay-Belleville plant in La Rochelle. Sartre, born 21 June 1905, inherited his father’s height (5 feet 2½ inches), brains and books, but in his autobiography, Les Mots, went out of his way to dismiss him from his life. ‘If he had lived,’ he wrote, ‘my father would have laid down on me and crushed me. Fortunately he died young.’ ‘No one in my family,’ he added, ‘has been able to arouse my curiosity about him.’ As for the books, ‘Like all his contemporaries he read rubbish…I sold [them]: the dead man meant so little to me.’2
The grandfather, who crushed his own sons, doted on Jean-Paul and gave him the run of his large library. The mother was a doormat, the little boy her most precious possession. She kept him in frocks and long hair even longer than the little Hemingway, until he was nearly eight, when the grandfather decreed a massacre of the curls. Sartre called his childhood ‘paradise’; his mother was ‘This virgin, who lived with us, watched and dominated by everyone, was there to wait on me…My mother was mine and no one challenged my quiet possession. I knew nothing of violence or hatred and was spared the harsh apprenticeship of jealousy.’ There was no question of ‘rebelling’ since ‘no one else’s whim ever claimed to be my law.’ He put salt into the jam once, aged four; otherwise, no crimes, no punishments. His mother called him Poulou. He was told he was beautiful ‘and I believed it’. He said ‘precocious things’ and they were ‘remembered and repeated to me’. So ‘I learned to make up others.’ He knew, he said, ‘effortlessly, how to say things in advance of my age’.3 There are times, indeed, when Sartre’s account recalls Rousseau: ‘Good was born in the depths of my heart and truth in the youthful darkness of my understanding.’ ‘I had no rights because I was overwhelmed with love; I had no duties because I did everything through love.’ His grandfather ‘believed in progress-and so did I: progress, that long and arduous road which led to myself’. He described himself as ‘a cultural possession…I was impregnated with culture and I returned it to the family like a radiance.’ He recalls an exchange when he asked permission to read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (then still considered shocking). Mother: ‘But if my little darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ Sartre: ‘I shall live them!’ This witty riposte was repeated with delight in the family circle and beyond.4
As Sartre had little respect for the truth it is difficult to say how much credence should be placed on his description of his childhood and youth. His mother, when she read Les Mots, was upset: ‘Poulou n’a rien compris à son enfance’ (‘Poulou understood nothing about his childhood’) was her comment.5 What shocked her were his heartless comments about members of the family. There is no doubt that he was spoiled. But when he was four a catastrophe occurred: following a bout of influenza, a stye developed in his right eye, and he was never able to use it again. His eyes were always to cause him trouble. He invariably wore thick glasses, and in his sixties he went progressively blind. When Sartre finally got to school he found his mother had lied to him about his looks and that he was ugly. Though short, he was well-built: broad, barrel-chested, powerful. But his face was excessively plain and the faulty eye almost made him grotesque. Being ugly, he was beaten up. He retaliated with wit, scorn, jokes and became that bitter-sweet character, the school jester. Later he was to pursue women, as he put it, ‘to get rid of the burden of my ugliness’.6
Sartre had one of the best educations available to a man of his generation: a good lycée in La Rochelle, two years as a boarder in the Lycée Henri Quatre in Paris, at the time probably the best high school in France; then the École Normale Superieure, where France’s leading academics took their degrees. He had some very able contemporaries: Paul Nizan, Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir. He boxed and wrestled. He played the piano, by no means badly, sang well in a powerful voice and contributed satirical sketches to the École’s theatre reviews. He wrote poems, novels, plays, songs, short stories and philosophical essays. He was again the jester, but with a much wider range of tricks. He formed, and for many years maintained, the habit of reading about three hundred books a year.7 The range was very wide; American novels were his passion. He also acquired his first mistress, Simone Jollivet; like his father, he preferred taller women if available, and Simone was a lanky blonde, a good head taller. Sartre failed his first degree exam, then passed it brilliantly the next year, coming top; de Beauvoir, three years his junior, was second. It was now June 1929, and like most clever young men at that time, Sartre became a schoolmaster.
The 1930s were rather a lost decade for Sartre. The literary fame which he expected and passionately desired did not come to him. He spent most of it as a teacher in Le Havre, the epitome of provincial dowdiness. There were trips to Berlin where, at Aron’s suggestion, he studied Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, then the most original philosophy in Central Europe. But mostly it was teaching drudgery. He hated the bourgeoisie. Indeed he was very class-conscious. But he was not a Marxist. In fact he never read Marx, except perhaps in extracts. He was certainly a rebel, but a rebel without a cause. He joined no party. He took no interest in the rise of Hitler. Spain left him unmoved. Whatever he later claimed, the record suggests he held no strong political views before the war. A photograph shows him decked out for an academic speech day in a black gown with ruffles and a yellow cloak with rows of ermine, both garments much too big. Normally he wore a sports jacket with an open-necked shirt, refusing to put on a tie; it was only in late middle age that he adopted an intellectual’s uniform-white polo-neck pullover, weird half-leather jacket. He drank a lot. On his second speech day he was the central actor in a grotesque scene, adumbrating Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, when, drunk and incoherent, he was unable to make his contribution and had to be marched off the stage.8 He identified then and throughout his life with youth, especially student youth. He let his pupils do more or less what they wanted. His message was: the individual is entirely self-responsible; he has a right to criticize everything and everybody. The boys could take off their jackets and smoke in class. They need not take notes or present essays. He never marked the roster or inflicted punishment or gave them marks. He wrote a lot but his early fiction could not find a publisher. He had the chagrin of seeing his friends, Nizan and Aron, getting published, acquiring a measure of fame. In 1936 he at last brought out a book, on his German studies, Récherches philosophiques. It attracted little attention. But he was beginning to see what he wanted to do.
The essence of Sartre’s work was the projection of philosophical activism through fiction and drama. This had become firm in his mind by the late 1930s. He argued that all the existing novelists-he was thinking of Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Gide and Thomas Mann-were reflecting ancient ideas mostly derived, directly or indirectly, from Descartes and Hume. It would be much more interesting, he wrote to Jean Paulhan, ‘to make a novel of Heidegger’s time, which is what I want to do’. His problem was that in the 1930s he was working quite separately on fiction and on philosophy: he began to excite people only when he brought them firmly together and forced them on the public’s attention through the stage. But a philosophical novel of a kind was slowly emerging. He wanted to call it Mélancholie. His publishers changed it to La Nausée, a much more arresting title, and finally brought it out in 1938. Again, there was little response at first.
What made Sartre was the war. For France it was a disaster. For friends like Nizan it was death. For others it brought danger and disgrace. But Sartre had a good war. He was conscripted into the meteorological section at Army Group Artillery headquarters, where he tossed balloons of hot air into the atmosphere to test which way the wind was blowing. His comrades laughed at him. His corporal, a maths professor, remarked: ‘From the start we knew he would be no use to us in a military sense.’ It was the nadir of French military morale. Sartre was notorious for never taking a bath and being disgustingly dirty. What he did was write. Every day he produced five pages of a novel, eventually to become Les Chemins de la Liberté, four pages of his War Diary, and innumerable letters, all to women. When the Germans invaded the front collapsed and Sartre was taken prisoner, still scribbling (21 June 1940). In the PoW camp near Trèves he was in effect politicized by the German guards who despised their French prisoners, especially when they were dirty, and kicked Sartre repeatedly on his broad bottom. As at school, he survived by jesting and writing camp entertainments. He also continued to work hard at his own novels and plays, until his release, classified ‘partially blind’, in March 1941.
Sartre made a beeline for Paris. He got a job teaching philosophy at the famous Lycée Condorcet, where most of the staff were in exile, underground or in the camps. Despite his methods, perhaps because of them, the school inspectors reported his teaching ‘excellent’. He found wartime Paris exhilarating. He later wrote: ‘Will people understand me if I say that the horror was intolerable but it suited us well…We have never been as free as we were under the German occupation.’9 But that depended on who you were. Sartre was lucky. Having taken no part in pre-war politics, not even the 1936 Popular Front, he did not figure on any Nazi records or lists. So far as they were concerned he was ‘clean’. Indeed among the cognoscenti he was looked on with favour. Paris was crowded with Francophile German intellectuals, in uniform, such as Gerhardt Heller, Karl Epting, Karl-Heinz Bremer. They influenced not only the censorship but such newspapers and magazines as were allowed, and not least their theatre and book reviews.10 To them, Sartre’s novels and plays, with their philosophical background from Central Europe and especially their stress on Heidegger, who was approved of by Nazi academic intellectuals, were highly acceptable. Sartre never actively collaborated with the regime. The nearest he came to it was to write for a collaborationist weekly, Comoedia, agreeing at one stage to contribute a regular column. But he had no difficulty in getting his work published and his plays presented. As André Malraux put it, ‘I was facing the Gestapo while Sartre in Paris had his plays produced with the authorization of the German censors.’11
In a vague way Sartre yearned to contribute to the Resistance. Fortunately for him his efforts came to nothing. There is a curious irony here, the kind of irony one gets accustomed to, writing about intellectuals. Sartre’s personal philosophy, what was soon to be called existentialism, was already shaping in his mind. In essence it was a philosophy of action, arguing that man’s character and significance are determined by his actions, not his views, by his deeds, not words. The Nazi occupation aroused all Sartre’s anti-authoritarian instincts. He wanted to fight it. If he had followed his philosophical maxims, ne would have done so by blowing up troop trains or shooting members of the SS. But that is not in fact what he did. He talked. He wrote. He was Resistance-minded in theory, mind and spirit, but not in fact. He helped to form a clandestine group, Socialism and Freedom, which held meetings and debated. He seems to have believed that, if only all the intellectuals could get together and blow trumpets, the walls of the Nazi Jericho would tumble. But Gide and Malraux, whom he approached, turned him down. Some members of the group, such as his philosopher-colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty, were beginning to put their faith in Marxism. Sartre, in so far as he was anything, followed Proudhon: it was in this spirit that he wrote his first political manifesto of one hundred pages, dealing with post-war France.12 So there were plenty of words but no deeds. One member, Jean Pouillon, put it thus: ‘We were not an organized Resistance group, just a bunch of friends who had decided to be anti-Nazis together and to communicate our convictions to others.’ Others, non-members, were more critical. George Chazelas, who opted for the Communist Party, said: ‘They struck me from the very beginning as fairly childish: they were never aware, for instance, of the extent that their prattle jeopardized the work of others.’ Raoul Lévy, another active Resistance man, called their work ‘mere chitchat around a cup of tea’ and Sartre himself ‘a political illiterate’.13 In the end the group died of inanition.
Sartre, then, did nothing of consequence for the Resistance. He did not lift a finger, or write a word, to save the Jews. He concentrated relentlessly on promoting his own career. He wrote furiously, plays, philosophy and novels, mainly in cafés. His association with St-Germain-des-Prés, soon to become world-famous, was in origin quite fortuitous. His major philosophy text, L’Être et le Nént (Being and Nothingness), which sets out the principles of Sartrean activism most comprehensively, was composed mainly in the winter of 1942-43, which was very cold. Monsieur Boubal, proprietor of the Café Flore on the Boulevard St Germain, was unusually resourceful at obtaining coal for heating and tobacco for smoking. So Sartre wrote there, every day, sitting in an ugly, ill-fitting but warm artificial fur coat, coloured bright orange, which he had somehow obtained. He would drink down a glass of milky tea, set out his inkpot and pen, then scribble relentlessly for four hours, scarcely lifting his eyes from the paper, ‘a little ball of fur and ink’.14 Simone de Beauvoir, who described him thus, noted that he was enlivening the tract, which was eventually 722 pages, with ‘spicy passages’. One ‘concerns holes in general and the other focuses on the anus and love-making Italian style’.15 It was published in June 1943. Its success was slow in coming (some of the most important reviews were not published till 1945) but sure and cumulative.16 It was through the theatre, however, that Sartre established himself as a major figure. His play Les Mouches opened the same month L’Être came out and at first sold comparatively few tickets. But it attracted attention and consolidated Sartre’s rising reputation. He was soon in demand for screenplays for Pathé, writing three of them (including the brilliant Les Jeux sont faits) and making, for the first time, a good deal of money. He was involved in the creation of a new and influential review, Les Lettres françaises (1943) and the following spring was coopted onto the jury of the Prix de la Pléiade, along with André Malraux and Paul Élouard, a sure sign that he had arrived as a literary power-broker. It was at this point, on 27 May 1944, that his play Huis clos (No Exit) opened at the Vieux Colombier. This brilliant work, in which three people meet in a drawing room which turns out to be an ante-chamber to hell, operated at two levels. At one level it was a comment on character, with the message ‘Hell is other people.’ At another it was a popular presention of L’Être et le Néant, a radicalized version of Heidegger, given a flashy Gallic gloss and a contemporary relevance and presenting a message of activism and concealed defiance. It was the kind of thing at which the French have always been outstandingly gifted-taking a German idea and making it fashionable with superb timing. The play was a huge success both with the critics and the public, and has been well described as ‘the cultural event which inaugurated the golden age of St-Germain-des-Près’.17
Huis clos made Sartre famous, and it is another instance of the unrivalled power of the theatre to project ideas. But, oddly enough, it was through the old-fashioned forum of the public lecture that Sartre became world-famous, indeed notorious, a monstre sacré. Within a year of the play’s opening France was at peace. Everyone, especially youth, was catching up greedily on the lost cultural years and searching for the post-war elixir of truth. The Communists and the new-born Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) were fighting a fierce battle for paramountcy on the campus. Sartre used his new philosophy to offer an alternative: not a church or a party but a challenging doctrine of individualism in which each human being is seen as absolute master of his soul if he chooses to follow the path of action and courage. It was a message of liberty after the totalitarian nightmare. Sartre had already established his gifts and drawing power as a lecturer by a successful series on ‘The Social Techniques of the Novel’ which he had given in the rue St Jacques in Autumn 1944. Then he had merely hinted at some of his notions. A year later, with France free and agog for intellectual stimulation, he announced a public lecture in the Salle des Centraux, 8 rue Jean Goujon, for 29 October 1945. The word ‘existentialism’ was not his. It seems to have been invented by the press. The previous August, when asked to define the term, Sartre had replied: ‘Existentialism? I don’t know what it is. My philosophy is a philosophy of existence.’ Now he decided to embrace what the media had coined, and entitled his lecture: ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’.
Nothing is so powerful, Victor Hugo had laid down, as an idea whose time has come. Sartre’s time had come in two distinct ways. He was preaching freedom to people who were hungry and waiting for it. But it was not an easy freedom. ‘Existentialism,’ said Sartre, ‘defines man by his actions…It tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action.’ So, ‘Man commits himself to his life, and thereby draws his image, beyond which there is nothing.’ The new European of 1945, Sartre said, was the new, existentialist individual-‘alone, without excuses. This is what I mean when I say we are condemned to be free.’18 So Sartre’s new, existentialist freedom was immensely attractive to a disillusioned generation: lonely, austere, noble, slightly aggressive, not to say violent, and anti-elitist, popular-no one was excluded. Anyone, but especially the young, could be an existentialist.
Secondly, Sartre was presiding over one of those great, periodic revolutions in intellectual fashion. Between the wars, sickened by the doctrinaire excesses of the long battle over Dreyfus and the Flanders carnage, the French intelligentsia had cultured the virtues of detachment. The tone had been set by Julien Benda, whose immensely successful book La Trahison des clercs (1927) had exhorted intellectuals to avoid ‘commitment’ to creed and party and cause, to concentrate on abstract principles and keep out of the political arena. One of the many who had heeded Benda had been precisely Sartre himself. Up to 1941 nobody could have been less committed. But now, just as he had tested the atmosphere with his hot-air balloons, he sniffed a different breeze. He and his friends had put together a new review, Les Temps modernes, with Sartre as editor-in-chief. The first issue, containing his editorial manifesto, had appeared in September. It was an imperious demand that writers become committed again:
The writer has a place in his age. Each word has an echo. So does each silence. I hold Flaubert and [Edmond] Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they did not write a single line to prevent it. You may say: it was none of their business. But then, was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was the condemnation of Dreyfus Zola’s business?19
This was the background to the lecture. There was an extraordinary cultural tension in Paris that autumn. Three days before Sartre spoke, there had been a scene at the opening of two new ballets, Les Forains and Le Rendez-vous, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées when Picasso’s drop-curtain had been hissed by the packed society audience. Sartre’s lecture had not been widely advertised: a few insertions in the small-ads of Libération, Le Figaro, Le Monde and Combat. But the word-of-mouth build-up was evidently tremendous. When Sartre arrived near the hall at 8.30 the mob in the street outside was so big he feared it was an organized CP demonstration. It was in fact people frantically trying to get in, and as the hall was already packed, only celebrities were allowed to pass through. His friends had to force an entrance for Sartre himself. Inside, women fainted, chairs were smashed. The proceedings began an hour late. What Sartre had to say was in all essentials a technical academic philosophy lecture. But in the circumstances it became the first great post-war media event. By a remarkable coincidence, Julien Benda also gave a public lecture that evening, to a virtually empty hall.
Sartre’s press coverage was astounding.20 Many newspapers produced thousands of words of Sartre’s text, despite the paper shortage. Both what he had to say, and the way he said it, were passionately denounced. The Catholic daily La Croix called existentialism ‘a graver danger than eighteenth-century rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism’, and joined hands with the communist L’Humanité in calling Sartre an enemy of society. In due course Sartre’s entire works were placed upon the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books, and Stalin’s cultural commissar, Alexander Fadayev, called him ‘a jackal with a typewriter, a hyena with a fountain-pen’. Sartre likewise became the object of fierce professional jealousy. The Frankfurt School, which hated Brecht, hated Sartre still more. Max Horkheimer called him ‘a crook and a racketeer of the philosophic world’. All these attacks merely accelerated Sartre’s juggernaut. He was by now, like so many leading intellectuals before him, an expert in the art of self-promotion. What he would not do himself his followers did for him. Samedi Soir commented sourly: ‘We have not seen such a promotional triumph since the days of Barnum.’21 But the more the Sartre phenomenon was moralized over, the more it flourished. The November issue of Les Temps modernes pointed out that France was a beaten and demoralized country. All it had left was its literature and the fashion industry, and existentialism was designed to give the French a bit of dignity and to preserve their individuality in an age of degradation. To follow Sartre became, in a weird way, a patriotic act. A hastily expanded book version of his lecture sold half a million copies in a month.
Moreover, existentialism was not just a philosophy to be read, it was a craze to be enjoyed. An Existentialist Catechism insisted: ‘Existentialism, like faith, cannot be explained: it can only be lived,’ and told readers where to live it.22 For St-Germain-des-Près to become the centre of intellectual fashion was not new. Sartre was in fact treading in the footsteps of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, who had patronized the old Café Procope, further down the boulevard. It had again been lively under the Second Empire, in the age of Gautier, George Sand, Balzac and Zola; that was when the Café Flore had first opened, with Huysmans and Apollinaire among its patrons.23 But in pre-war Paris the intellectual focus had been Montparnasse, whose tone had been politically uncommitted, slightly homosexual, cosmopolitan, its cafés adorned by slim, bisexual girls. The shift to St Germain, which was social and sexual as well as intellectual, was therefore dramatic, for Sartre’s St Germain was leftish, committed, strongly heterosexual, ultra-French.
Sartre was a convivial soul, loving whisky, jazz, girls and cabaret. When not seen at the Flore or at the Deux Magots, a block away, or eating at the Brasserie Lipp across the road, he was in the new cellar nightclubs or caves which now abruptly opened in the bowels of the Quartier Latin. At the Rose Rouge there was the singer Juliette Greco, for whom Sartre wrote a delightful song; the writer and composer Boris Vian played the trombone there and contributed to Les Temps modernes. There was the Tabou in the rue Dauphine and Bar Verte on the rue Jacob. Not far away, at 42 rue Bonaparte, lived Sartre himself, in a flat which overlooked the church of St Germain itself and the Deux Magots. (His mother lived there too and continued to look after his laundry.) The movement even had its daily house organ, the newspaper Combat, edited by Albert Camus, whose best-selling novels were widely hailed as existentialist. Simone de Beauvoir later recalled: ‘Combat reported favourably everything that came from our pens or our mouths.’ Sartre worked all day, scribbling hard: he wrote millions of words at this time, lectures, plays, novels, essays, introductions, articles, broadcasts, scripts, reports, philosophical diatribes.24 He was described, by Jacques Audiberti, as ‘a truck parking everywhere with great commotion, in the library, in the theatre, in the movies’. But at night he played, and by the end of the evening he was usually drunk and often aggressive. Once he gave Camus a black eye.25 People came to goggle at him. He was king of the quartier, of the enrageés (the angry ones), of those who were branché (in the know), of the rats des caves (the cellar rats); in the words of his chief publicist, Jean Paulhan, he was ‘the spiritual leader of thousands of young people’.
But if Sartre was king, who was queen? And if he was the young people’s spiritual leader, where was he leading them? These are two separate, though linked, questions, which need to be examined in turn. By the winter of 1945-46, when he became a European celebrity, he had been associated with Simone de Beauvoir for nearly two decades. De Beauvoir was a Montparnasse girl actually born in an apartment over the famous Café de la Rotonde. She had a difficult childhood, coming from a family ruined by a disgraceful bankruptcy in which her grandfather was jailed; her mother’s dowry was never paid and her father was a worthless boulevardier who could not get a proper job.26 She wrote bitterly of her parents: ‘My father was as convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus as my mother was of the existence of God.’27 She took refuge in schoolwork, becoming a bluestocking, though a remarkably elegant one. At Paris University she was an outstanding philosophy student and was taken up by Sartre and his circle: ‘From now on,’ he told her, ‘I’m going to take you under my wing.’ That remained in a sense true, though for her their relationship was a mixed blessing. She was an inch taller than Sartre, three years younger and, in a strictly academic sense, abler. One of her contemporaries, Maurice de Gandillac, described her work as ‘rigorous, demanding, precise, very technical’; despite her youth she almost beat Sartre for first place in the philosophy degree, and the examiners, Georges Davy and Jean Wahl, thought her the better philosopher.28 She, like Sartre, was also a compulsive writer and in many respects a finer one. She could not write plays but her autobiographical works, though equally unreliable as to facts, are more interesting than his, and her major novel, Les Mandarins, which describes the French post-war literary world and won her the Prix Goncourt, is far better than any of Sartre’s. In addition, she had none of Sartre’s personal weaknesses, except lying.
Yet this brilliant and strong-minded woman became Sartre’s slave from almost their first meeting and remained such for all her adult life until he died. She served him as mistress, surrogate wife, cook and manager, female bodyguard and nurse, without at any time acquiring legal or financial status in his life. In all essentials, Sartre treated her no better than Rousseau did his Thérèse; worse, because he was notoriously unfaithful. In the annals of literature, there are few worse cases of a man exploiting a woman. This was all the more extraordinary because de Beauvoir was a lifelong feminist. In 1949 she produced the first modern manifesto of feminism, La Deuxième sexe, which sold widely all over the world.29 Its opening words, ‘On ne nait pas femme, on la devient’ (‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one’) are a conscious echo of the opening of Rousseau’s Social Contract. De Beauvoir, in fact, was the progenitor of the feminist movement and ought, by rights, to be its patron saint. But in her own life she betrayed everything it stood for.
Quite how Sartre established and maintained such a dominance over de Beauvoir is not clear. She could not make herself write honestly about their relationship. He never troubled to write anything at all about it. When they first met he was much better read than she was and able to distill his reading into conversational monologues she found irresistible. His control over her was plainly of an intellectual kind. It cannot have been sexual. She was his mistress for much of the 1930s but at some stage ceased to be so; from the 1940s their sexual relations seem to have been largely non-existent: she was there for him when no one better was available.
Sartre was the archetype of what in the 1960s became known as a male chauvinist. His aim was to recreate for himself in adult life the ‘paradise’ of his early childhood in which he was the centre of a perfumed bower of adoring womanhood. He thought about women in terms of victory and occupation. ‘Every single one of my theories,’ he says in La Nausée, ‘was an act of conquest and possession. I thought that one day, with the help of them all, I’d conquer the world.’ He wanted total freedom for himself, he wrote, and ‘I dreamed above all of asserting this freedom against women.’30 Unlike many practised seducers, Sartre did not dislike women. Indeed he preferred them to men, perhaps because they were less inclined to argue with him. He noted: ‘I prefer to talk to a woman about the tiniest things, than about philosophy to Aron.’31 He loved writing letters to women, sometimes a dozen a day. But he saw women not so much as persons but as scalps to add to his centaur’s belt, and his attempts to defend and rationalize his policy of conquest in progressive terms merely add a layer of hypocrisy. Thus he said he wanted ‘to conquer a woman almost like you’d conquer a wild animal’ but ‘this was only in order to shift her from her wild state to one of equality with man.’ Or again, looking back on his early seductions, he reflected on ‘the depth of imperialism there was in all that’.32 But there is no evidence that such thoughts ever deflected him from a potential capture; they were for the record.
When Sartre first seduced de Beauvoir he outlined to her his sexual philosophy. He was frank about his desire to sleep with many women. He said his credo was ‘Travel, polygamy, transparency.’ At university, a friend had noted that her name was like the English word ‘beaver’, which in French is castor. To Sartre, she was always Castor or vous, never tu.33 There are times when one feels he saw her as a superior trained animal. Of his policy of ‘asserting’ his ‘freedom against women’, he wrote: ‘The Castor accepted this freedom and kept it.’34 He told her there were two kinds of sexuality: ‘necessary love’ and ‘contingent love’. The latter was not important. Those on whom it was bestowed were ‘peripherals’, holding his regard on no more than ‘a two-year lease’. The love he had for her was of the permanent, ‘necessary’ kind; she was a ‘central’, not a ‘peripheral’. Of course she was entirely free to pursue the same policy. She could have her peripherals so long as Sartre remained her central, necessary love. But both must display ‘transparency’. This was just another word for the favourite intellectual game of sexual ‘openness’, which we came across in the cases of Tolstoy and Russell. Each, said Sartre, was to tell the other what he or she was up to.
The policy of transparency, as might have been expected, merely led in the end to additional and more squalid layers of concealment. De Beauvoir tried to practise it but the indifference with which Sartre greeted news of her affairs, most of which seem to have been tentative or halfhearted, clearly gave her pain. He merely laughed at her description of being seduced by Arthur Koestler, which figures in Les Mandarins. Moreover, those dragged into the transparency policy did not always like it. Her own great peripheral, in some ways the love of her life, was the American novelist Nelson Algren. When he was seventy-two and their affair just a memory, he gave an interview in which he revealed his fury at her disclosures. Putting him in Les Mandarins was bad enough, he said, but at least he was there disguised under another name. But in her second volume of autobiography, The Prime of Life, she had not only named him but quoted from his letters, to which he had felt reluctantly obliged to consent: ‘Hell, love letters should be private,’ he raged. ‘I’ve been in whorehouses all over the world and the women there always close the door, whether it’s in Korea or India. But this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the press.’35 Algren apparently grew so indignant at the thought of de Beauvoir’s behaviour that he had a massive heart attack after the interviewer had left, and died that night.
Sartre also practised transparency, but only up to a point. In conversation and letters he kept her informed about his new girls. Thus: ‘this is the first time I’ve slept with a brunette…full of smells, oddly hairy, with some black fur in the small of her back and a white body…A tongue like a kazoo, endlessly uncurling, reaching all the way down to my tonsils.’36 No woman, however ‘central’, can have wished to read such things about one of her rivals. When Sartre was in Berlin in 1933, and de Beauvoir briefly joined him there, the first thing he told her was that he had acquired a new mistress, Marie Ville. With Sartre, as with Shelley, there was a childish longing for the old love to approve of the new. However, Sartre never told all. When de Beauvoir, who was teaching at Rouen for most of the 1930s, stayed with him in Berlin or anywhere else, he gave her a wedding ring to wear. But that was the nearest she got to marriage. They had their private language. They signed themselves into hotels as Monsieur et Madame Organatique or Mr and Mrs Morgan Hattick, the yankee millionaires. But there is no evidence he ever wanted to marry her or gave her the choice of a more formal union. Quite unknown to her, he did on several occasions propose marriage to a peripheral.
That the life they led went against the grain for her is clear. She was never able to bring herself to accept Sartre’s mistresses with equanimity. She resented Marie Ville. She resented still more the next one, Olga Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of two sisters (the other, Wanda, also became a mistress of Sartre) and, to envenom matters, one of de Beauvoir’s pupils. De Beauvoir disliked the affair with Olga so much that she put her into her novel, L’Invitée, and murdered her in it.37 She admitted in her autobiography, ‘I was vexed with Sartre for having created this situation and with Olga for having taken advantage of it.’ She fought back: ‘I had no intention of yielding to her the sovereign position that I had always occupied, in the very centre of the universe.’38 But any woman who feels obliged to refer to her lover as ‘the very centre of the universe’ is not in a strong position to frustrate his divagations. What de Beauvoir did was to attempt to control them by a form of participation. The three, Sartre, de Beauvoir and the girl-usually a student, either his or hers-formed a triangle, with de Beauvoir in a supervisory position. The term ‘adoption’ was frequently used. By the early 1940s, Sartre seems to have become dangerously well-known for seducing his own female students. In a hostile criticism of Huis clos, Robert Francis wrote: ‘We all know Monsieur Sartre. He is an odd philosophy teacher who has specialised in the study of his students’ underwear.’39 But as de Beauvoir taught many more suitable girls, it was her students who provided most of Sartre’s victims; indeed de Beauvoir seems to have been close, at time, to the role of a procuress. She also, in her confused desire not to be excluded from love, formed her own close relationships with the girls. One such was Nathalie Sorokine, the daughter of Russian exiles, and de Beauvoir’s best pupil at the Lycée Molière in Passy where she taught during the war. In 1943 Nathalie’s parents laid formal charges against de Beauvoir for abducting a minor, a serious criminal offence which carried a jail sentence. Mutual friends intervened and the criminal charge was eventually dropped. But de Beauvoir was barred from the university and had her licence to teach anywhere in France revoked for the rest of her life.40
During the war de Beauvoir came closest to being Sartre’s real wife: cooking, sewing, washing for him, looking after his money. But with the end of the war he suddenly found himself rich and surrounded by women, who were after his intellectual glamour as much as his money. The year 1946 was his best for sexual conquests and it marked the virtual end of his sexual relationship with de Beauvoir. ‘At a relatively early stage,’ as John Weightman has put it, ‘she tacitly accepted the role of senior, sexually-retired, pseudo-wife on the fringe of his fluctuating seraglio.’41 She grumbled about ‘all that money he spent on them’.42 She noted with concern that, as Sartre grew older, his girls became younger-seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds, whom he spoke of ‘adopting’ in a legal sense, meaning they would inherit his copyrights. She could give them advice and warnings, as Helene Weigel did to Brecht’s girls, though she did not possess the German woman’s legal status. She was constantly lied to. In 1946 and 1948, while Sartre was on trips to the Americas, she was given a detailed account of his torrid affair with a certain Dolores; but Sartre, while telling her he was tiring of the girl’s ‘exhausting passion’ for him, was actually proposing marriage to her. Then there was Michelle, the honey-blonde wife of Boris Vian, Olga’s pretty sister Wanda, Evelyne Rey, an exotic blonde actress for whom Sartre wrote a part in his last play, Les Séquestrés d’Altona, Arlette, who was only seventeen when Sartre picked her up-she was the one de Beauvoir hated most-and Hélène Lassithiotakis, a Greek youngster. At one time in the late 1950s he was running four mistresses at once, Michelle, Arlette, Evelyn and Wanda, as well as de Beauvoir, and deceiving all of them in one way or another. He dedicated his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) publicly to de Beauvoir, but got his publisher Gallimard to print privately two copies with the words ‘To Wanda’; when Les Séquestrés was produced Wanda and Evelyne were each told he had dedicated it to her.
One reason de Beauvoir disliked these young women was that she believed they encouraged Sartre to lead a life of excess-not just sexual excesses, but drink and drugs too. Between 1945 and 1955 Sartre got through a phenomenal amount of writing and other work, and to do this he steadily increased his intake of both alcohol and barbiturates. While in Moscow in 1954 he collapsed from over-drinking and had to be rushed into a Soviet clinic. But, once recovered, he continued to write thirty to forty pages a day, often taking an entire tube of Corydrane pills (a drug withdrawn as dangerous in 1971) to keep going. The book on dialectical reason, indeed, appears to have been written under the influence of both drink and drugs. His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal says that he often drank a quart of wine over two-hour lunches at Lipp, the Coupole, Balzar or other favourite haunts, and she calculates that his daily intake of stimulants at this time included two packets of cigarettes, several pipes of black tobacco, a quart of alcohol (chiefly wine, vodka, whisky and beer), 200 milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee and tea.43 In fact de Beauvoir did not do the young mistresses justice. They all tried to reform Sartre, and Arlette, the youngest, tried hardest, even extracting a written promise from him that he would never again touch Corydrane, tobacco or alcohol-a promise he promptly broke.44
Thus surrounded by adoring, though often fractious, women, Sartre had little time for men in his life. He had a succession of male secretaries, some like Jean Cau of great ability. He was always surrounded by a crowd of young male intellectuals. But all these were dependent on him for wages, charity or patronage. What he could never stomach for long were male intellectual equals, of his own age and seniority, who were liable at any moment to deflate his own often loose and windy arguments. Nizan was killed before a break could come, but he quarrelled with all the rest: Raymond Aron (1947), Arthur Koestler (1948), Merleau-Ponty (1951), Camus (1952), to mention only the more prominent.
The quarrel with Camus was as bitter as Rousseau’s rows with Diderot, Voltaire and Hume, or Tolstoy’s with Turgenev-and, unlike the last case, there was no reconciliation. Sartre seems to have been jealous of Camus’ good looks, which made him immensely attractive to women, and his sheer power and originality as a novelist: La Peste, published in June 1947, had a mesmeric effect on the young and rapidly sold 350,000 copies. This was made the object of some ideological criticism in Les Temps modernes but the friendship continued in an uneasy fashion. As Sartre moved towards the left, however, Camus became more of an independent. In a sense he occupied the same position as George Orwell in Britain: he set himself against all authoritarian systems and came to see Stalin as an evil man on the same plane as Hitler, Like Orwell and unlike Sartre he consistently held that people were more important than ideas. De Beauvoir reports that in 1946 he confided in her: ‘What we have in common, you and I, is that individuals count most of all for us. We prefer the concrete to the abstract, people to doctrines. We place friendship above politics.’45
In her heart of hearts de Beauvoir may have agreed with him, but when the final break came, over Camus’ book L’Homme révolté in 1951-52, she of course sided with Sartre’s camp, He and his acolytes at Les Temps modernes saw the book as an assault on Stalinism and decided to go for it in two stages. For the first, Sartre put up the young Francis Jeanson, then only twenty-nine, remarking at the editorial meeting which decided it, ‘He will be the harshest but at least he’ll be polite.’ Then, when Camus replied, Sartre himself wrote a long and extraordinarily unpleasant attack addressed to Camus personally: ‘A violent and ceremonial dictatorship has taken possession of you, supported by an abstract bureaucracy, and pretends to rule according to moral law’; he was suffering from ‘wounded vanity’ and indulging in a ‘petty author’s quarrel’; ‘Your combination of dreary conceit and vulnerability always discouraged people from telling you unvarnished truths.’46 By now Sartre had all the organized far left behind him and his attack did Camus damage; it may also have hurt-Camus was a vulnerable man-and at times he was depressed by his break with Sartre. At other times he just laughed and saw Sartre as a figure of fun, ‘a man whose mother has to pay his income tax’.
Sartre’s inability to maintain a friendship with any man of his own intellectual stature helps to explain the inconsistency, incoherence and at times sheer frivolity of his political views. The truth is he was not by nature a political animal. He really held no views of consequence before he was forty. Once he had parted with men like Koestler and Aron, both of whom had matured by the late 1940s into political heavyweights, he was capable of supporting anyone or anything. In 1946-47, very conscious of his immense prestige among the young, he dithered about which, if any, party to back. It seems to have been a belief of his that an intellectual had a kind of moral duty to back ‘the workers’. The trouble with Sartre is that he did not know, and made no effort to meet, any workers, apart from his brilliant secretary Jean Cau who, being of proletarian origin and retaining a strong Aude accent, counted as one. Must one not, then, back the party most workers support? In France in the 1940s that meant the Communists. But Sartre was not a Marxist; indeed Marxism was almost the exact opposite of the strongly individualistic philosophy he preached. All the same, even in the late 1940s he could not bring himself to condemn the Communist Party or Stalinism-one reason why he quarrelled with Aron and Koestler. His former pupil Jean Kanapa, now a leading communist intellectual, wrote disgustedly; ‘He is a dangerous animal who likes flirting with Marxism-because he has not read Marx, though he knows more or less what Marxism is.’47
Sartre’s only positive move was to help organize an anti-Cold War movement of the non-communist left, called the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionaire, in February 1948. It aimed to recruit world intellectuals-he called it ‘The International of the Mind’-and its theme was Continental unity. ‘European youth, unite!’ proclaimed Sartre in a speech in June 1948. ‘Shape your own destiny!…By creating Europe, this new generation will create democracy.’48 In fact if Sartre had really wanted to play the European card and make history, he might have given support to Jean Monnet, who was then laying the foundations of the movement which would create the European Community ten years later. But that would have meant a great deal of attention to economic and administrative detail, something Sartre found impossible. As it was, his fellow organizer of the RDR, David Rousset, found him quite useless: ‘despite his lucidity, he lived in a world which was totally isolated from reality.’ He was, said Rousset, ‘very much involved in the play and movement of ideas’ but took little interest in actual events: ‘Sartre lived in a bubble.’ When the party’s first national Congress took place, in June 1949, Sartre was nowhere to be found: he was in Mexico with Dolores, trying to persuade her to marry him. The RDR simply dissolved, and Sartre transferred his fluctuating attention to Gary Davis’s absurd World Citizens’ Movement. François Mauriac, the great novelist and sardonic Catholic independent, gave Sartre some sensible public advice about this time, echoing the sneering words of Rousseau’s dissatisfied girlfriend: ‘Our philosopher must listen to reason-give up politics, Zanetto, e studia la mathematica!’49
Instead, Sartre took up the case of the homosexual thief, Jean Genet, a cunning fraud who appealed strongly to the credulous side of Sartre’s nature-the side which wanted some substitute for religious faith. He wrote an enormous and absurd book about Genet, nearly 700 pages long, which was really a celebration of antinomianism, anarchy and sexual incoherence. This was the point, in the opinion of his more sensible friends, when Sartre ceased to be a serious, systematic thinker, and became an intellectual sensationalist.50 It is curious that de Beauvoir, a more rational creature, who in some ways looked and dressed and thought like an old-fashioned schoolmarm, was able to do so little to save him from such follies. But she was anxious to retain his love and her position in his court-as John Weightman put it, Madame de Maintenon to his Louis XIV-and worried too about his drinking and pill-taking. To retain his confidence she felt she had to go along with him. Thus she served as his echo rather than his mentor, and that became the pattern of their relationship: she reinforced his misjudgments and endorsed his silliness. She was no more of a political animal than he was and in time she came to talk equal nonsense about world events.
In 1952 Sartre resolved his dilemma about the Communist Party and decided to back it. This was an emotional not a rational judgment, reached via involvement in two Communist Party agitprop campaigns: ‘L’Affaire Henri Martin’ (Martin was a naval rating who went to prison for refusing to participate in the Indo-China War), and the brutal suppression of riots organized by the Communist Party against the American NATO commander, General Matthew Ridgeway.51 As many foresaw at the time, the Communist Party campaign to get Martin released actually led the authorities to keep him in jail longer than they had originally intended; the Communist Party did not mind this-his incarceration was serving their purpose-but Sartre should have had more sense. The level of his political perception is revealed by his accusing the Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, an old-fashioned parliamentary conservative, of setting up a dictatorship.52 Sartre never showed any real knowledge of or interest in-let alone enthusiasm for-parliamentary democracy. Having the vote in a multi-party society was not at all what he meant by freedom. What did he mean then? That was more difficult to answer.
Sartre’s aligning himself with the Communists in 1952 made no logical sense at all. That was just the time when other left-wing intellectuals were leaving the Communist Party in droves, as Stalin’s dreadful crimes were documented and acknowledged throughout the West. So Sartre now found himself standing on his head. He observed an uneasy silence about Stalin’s camps, and his defence of his silence was a total contradiction of his manifesto on commitment in Les Temps modernes. ‘As we were not members of the Party or avowed sympathizers,’ he argued feebly, ‘it was not our duty to write about Soviet labour camps; we were free to remain aloof from quarrels over the nature of this system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.’53 He likewise forced himself to keep silent about the appalling trials in Prague of Slansky and other Czech Jewish communists. Worse, he allowed himself to be made a performing bear at the absurd conference which the Communist World Peace Movement held in Vienna in December 1952. This meant truckling to Fadayev, who had called him a hyena and a jackal, telling the delegates that the three most important events in his life were the Popular Front of 1936, the Liberation and ‘this congress’-a blatant lie-and, not least, cancelling the performance in Vienna of his old, anti-communist play, Les Mains sales, at the behest of the Communist Party bosses.54
Some of the things Sartre did and said during the four years when he consistently backed the Communist Party line almost defy belief. He, like Bertrand Russell, reminds one of the disagreeable truth of Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.’ In July 1954, after a visit to Russia, he gave a two-hour interview to a reporter from the fellow-travelling Libération. It ranks as the most grovelling account of the Soviet state by a major Western intellectual since the notorious expedition by George Bernard Shaw in the early 1930s.55 He said that Soviet citizens did not travel, not because they were prevented but because they had no desire to leave their marvellous country. ‘The Soviet citizens,’ he insisted, ‘criticize their government much more and more effectively than we do.’ Indeed, he maintained, ‘There is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.’ Many years later he admitted his mendacity:
After my first visit to the USSR in 1954, I lied. Actually, lie might be too strong a word: I wrote an article…where I said a number of friendly things about the USSR which I did not believe. I did it partly because I considered that it is not polite to denigrate your hosts as soon as you return home, and partly because I didn’t really know where I stood in relation to both the USSR and my own ideas.56
This was a curious admission from ‘the spiritual leader of thousands of young people’; moreover it was just as deceptive as his original falsehoods, since Sartre was consciously and deliberately aligning himself with Communist Party aims at that time. In fact it is more charitable to draw a veil over some of the things he said and did in 1952-56.
By the latter date Sartre’s public reputation, both in France and in the wider world, was very low, and he could not avoid perceiving it. He fell upon the Soviet Hungarian invasion with relief as a reason, or at any rate an excuse, for breaking with Moscow and the Communist Party. Equally, he took up the burgeoning Algerian war-especially after de Gaulle’s return to power supplied a convenient hate-figure from 1958-as a reputable good cause to win back his prestige among the independent left and especially the young. To some extent this manoeuvre was genuine. To a limited degree it succeeded. Sartre had a ‘good’ Algerian War, as he had had a ‘good’ Second World War. Unlike Russell he did not actually succeed in getting himself arrested, though he tried hard. In September 1960 he persuaded some 121 intellectuals to sign a statement asserting ‘the right to disobedience [of public servants, army, etc.] in the Algerian War’. A Fourth Republic government would almost certainly have jailed him but the fifth was a more sophisticated affair, dominated by two men of outstanding intellect and culture, de Gaulle himself and André Malraux. Malraux said: ‘Better to let Sartre shout “Long live the [terrorists]” in the Place de la Concorde, than arrest him and embarrass ourselves.’ De Gaulle told the Cabinet, citing the cases of François Villon, Voltaire and Romain Rolland, that it was better to leave intellectuals untouched: ‘These people caused a lot of trouble in their day but it is essential that we continue to respect freedom of thought and expression in so far as this is compatible with the laws of the state and national unity.’57
Much of Sartre’s time in the 1960s was spent travelling in China and the Third World, a term invented by the geographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 but which Sartre popularized. He and de Beauvoir became familiar figures, photographed chatting with various Afro-Asian dictators-he in his First World suits and shirts, she in her schoolmarm cardigans enlivened by ‘ethnic’ skirts and scarves. What Sartre said about the regimes which invited him made not much more sense than his accolades for Stalin’s Russia, but it was more acceptable. Of Castro: ‘The country which has emerged out of the Cuban revolution is a direct democracy.’ Of Tito’s Yugoslavia: ‘It is the realization of my philosophy.’ Of Nasser’s Egypt: ‘Until now I have refused to speak of socialism in connection with the Egyptian regime. Now I know I have been wrong.’ He was particularly warm in praise of Mao’s China. He noisily condemned American ‘war crimes’ in Vietnam and compared America to the Nazis (but then he had compared de Gaulle to the Nazis, forgetting the General was fighting them when he himself was having his plays staged in occupied Paris). Both he and de Beauvoir were always anti-American: in 1947, following a visit, de Beauvoir had written an absurd piece in Les Temps modernes, full of hilarious misspellings (‘Greeniwich Village’, ‘Max Tawin’ [Mark Twain], ‘James Algee’) and dotty assertions, e.g. that only the rich are allowed inside the shops on Fifth Avenue; virtually every statement in it is false, and it became the butt of a brilliant polemic by Mary McCarthy.58 Now in the 1960s Sartre played a leading part in Bertrand Russell’s discredited ‘War Crimes Tribunal’ in Stockholm. None of these somewhat vacuous activities had much effect on the world and merely blunted the impact of anything serious which Sartre had to say.
Nevertheless, there was a more sinister side to the advice Sartre proffered to his admirers in the Third World. Though not a man of action himself-it was one of Camus’s more hurtful gibes that Sartre ‘tried to make history from his armchair’-he was always encouraging action in others, and action usually meant violence. He became a patron of Frantz Fanon, the African ideologue who might be called the founder of modern black African racism, and wrote a preface to his Bible of violence, Les Damnés de la terre (1961), which is even more bloodthirsty than the text itself. For a black man, Sartre wrote, ‘to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.’ This was an updating of existentialism: self-liberation through murder. It was Sartre who invented the verbal technique (culled from German philosophy) of identifying the existing order as ‘violent’ (e.g. ‘institutionalized violence’), thus justifying killing to overthrow it. He asserted: ‘For me the essential problem is to reject the theory according to which the left ought not to answer violence with violence.’59 Note: not ‘a’ problem but ‘the essential’ problem. Since Sartre’s writings were very widely disseminated, especially among the young, he thus became the academic godfather to many terrorist movements which began to oppress society from the late 1960s onwards. What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders which have engulfed most of that continent from the mid-1960s onwards to this day. His influence on South-East Asia, where the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, was even more baneful. The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu (‘the Higher Organization’). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and ‘necessary violence’. These mass murderers were his ideological children.
Sartre’s own actions, in the last fifteen years of his life, did not add up to much. Rather like Russell, he strove desperately to keep in the vanguard. In 1968 he took the side of the students, as he had done from his first days as a teacher. Very few people emerged with any credit from the events of May 1968-Raymond Aron was an outstanding exception in France60-so Sartre’s undignified performance does not perhaps deserve particular censure. In an interview on Radio Luxembourg he saluted the student barricades: ‘Violence is the only thing remaining to the students who have not yet entered into their fathers’ system…For the moment the only anti-Establishment force in our flabby Western countries is represented by the students…it is up to the students to decide what form their fight should assume. We can’t even presume to advise them on this matter.’61 This was an odd statement from a man who had spent thirty years advising young people what to do. There were more fatuities: ‘What is interesting about your action,’ he told the students, ‘is that it puts the imagination in power.’ Simone de Beauvoir was equally elated. Of all the ‘audacious’ slogans the students had painted on the Sorbonne walls, she enthused, the one that ‘touched’ her most was ‘It is forbidden to forbid.’ Sartre humbled himself to interview the ephemeral student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, writing it up in two articles in Nouvel-Observateur. The students were ‘100 per cent right’, he felt, since the regime they were destroying was ‘the politics of cowardice…a call to murder’. Much of one article was devoted to attacking his former friend Aron, who almost alone in that time of folly was keeping his head.62
But Sartre’s heart was not in these antics. It was his young courtiers who pushed him into taking an active role. When he appeared on 20 May in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne to address the students, he seemed an old man, confused by the bright lights and smoke and being called ‘Jean-Paul’, something his acolytes had never dared to do. His remarks did not make much sense, ending: ‘I’m going to leave you now. I’m tired. If I don’t go now I’ll end by saying a lot of idiotic things.’ At his last appearance before the students, 10 February 1969, he was disconcerted to be handed, just before he began to orate, a rude note from the student leadership which read: ‘Sartre, be clear, be brief. We have a lot of regulations we need to discuss and adopt.’ That was not advice he had ever been accustomed to receive, or was capable of following.63
By this time however he had acquired a fresh interest. Like Tolstoy and Russell, Sartre’s attention-span was short. His interest in student revolution lasted less than a year. It was succeeded by an equally brief, but more bizarre, attempt to identify himself with ‘the workers’, those mysterious but idealized beings about whom he wrote so much but who had eluded him throughout his life. In spring 1970 a belated attempt was made by the far left in France to Europeanize Mao’s violent Cultural Revolution. The movement was called Proletarian Left and Sartre agreed to join it; in theory he became editor-in-chief of its journal, La Cause du peuple, largely to prevent the police from confiscating it. Its aims were violent enough even for Sartre’s taste-it called for factory managers to be imprisoned and parliamentary deputies to be lynched-but it was crudely romantic, childish and strongly anti-intellectual. Sartre really had no place in it and he seems to have felt this himself, muttering: ‘if I went on mingling with activists I’d have to be pushed around in a wheelchair and I’d be in everyone’s way.’ But he was hustled along by some of his younger followers and in the end he could not resist the temptations of political show-biz. So Paris was treated to the spectacle of the sixty-seven-year-old Sartre, whom even de Gaulle (to Sartre’s annoyance) addressed as ‘Cher Maître’, selling crudely written newspapers in the street and pressing leaflets on bored bypassers. A photographer caught him thus occupied in the Champs-Elysées, on 26 June 1970, dressed in his new proletarian rig of white sweater, anorak and baggy trousers. He even contrived to get himself arrested, but was released in less than an hour. In October he was at it again, standing on an oil barrel outside the Renault factory in Billaincourt, haranguing the car workers. A report in L’Aurore sneered: ‘The workers were not having it. Sartre’s congregation consisted entirely of the few Maoists he had brought with him.’64 Eighteen months later he was back at another Renault factory, this time being smuggled inside to give verbal support to a hunger strike; but the security guards found him and threw him out. Sartre’s efforts do not appear to have aroused even a flicker of interest among the actual car workers; all his associates were middle-class intellectuals, as they always had been.
But for the man who failed in action, who had indeed never been an activist in any real sense, there were always ‘the words’. It was appropriate that he called his slice of autobiography by this title. He gave as his motto Nulla dies sine linea, ‘Not a day without writing’. That was one pledge he kept. He wrote even more easily than Russell and could produce up to 10,000 words a day. A lot of it was of poor quality; or, rather, pretentious, high-sounding but lacking in muscular content, inflated. I discovered this myself in Paris in the early 1950s, when I occasionally translated his polemics: they often seemed to read well in French but collapsed once expressed in concrete Anglo-Saxon terms. Sartre did not set much store by quality. Writing to de Beauvoir in 1940 and reflecting on the vast amount of words he put down on paper, he admitted: ‘I have always considered quantity a virtue.’65 It is odd that in his last decades he became increasingly obsessed by Flaubert, a writer of exceptional fastidiousness, especially where words were concerned, who revised his works with maniacal persistence. The book he eventually produced on Flaubert ran to three volumes and 2802 pages, many of them almost unreadable. Sartre produced many books, some of them enormous, and many more which were not finished-though often material was recycled in other works. There was a giant projected tome on the French Revolution, a second on Tintoretto. Another huge enterprise was his autobiography, rivalling Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe in length, of which Les Mots is in effect an extract.
Sartre confessed that words were his whole life: ‘I have invested everything in literature…I realize that literature is a substitute for religion.’ He admitted that words were to him more than their letters, their meanings: they were living things, rather as the Jewish students of the Zohar or the Kabbala felt the letters of the Torah had religious power: ‘I felt the mysticism of words…little by little, atheism has devoured everything. I have disinvested and secularized writing…as an unbeliever I returned to words, needing to know what speech meant…I apply myself, but before me I sense the death of a dream, a joyous brutality, the perpetual temptation of terror.’66 This was written in 1954, when Sartre still had millions of words to go. What does it mean? Very little, probably. Sartre always preferred to write nonsense rather than write nothing. He is a writer who actually confirms Dr Johnson’s harsh observation: ‘A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not.’67 As he put it himself: ‘[Writing] is my habit and also my profession.’ He took a pessimistic view of the effectiveness of what he wrote. ‘For many years I treated my pen as my sword: now I realize how helpless we are. No matter: I am writing, I shall continue to write books.’
He also talked. At times he talked interminably. He sometimes talked when no one was listening. There is a brilliant vignette of Sartre in the autobiography of the film director John Huston. In 1958-59 they were working together on a screenplay about Freud. Sartre had come to stay at Huston’s house in Ireland. He described Sartre as ‘a little barrel of a man and as ugly as a human being can be. His face was both bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed.’ But his chief characteristic was his endless talk: ‘There was no such thing as a conversation with him. He talked incessantly. You could not interrupt him. You’d wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn’t. The words came out in an absolute torrent.’ Huston was amazed to see that Sartre took notes of his own words while he talked. Sometimes Huston left the room, unable to bear the endless procession of words. But the distant drone of Sartre’s voice followed him around the house. When Huston returned to the room, he found Sartre still talking.68
This verbal diarrhoea eventually destroyed his magic as a lecturer. When his disastrous book on dialectic appeared, Jean Wahl nonetheless invited him to give a lecture on it at the Collège de Philosophie. Sartre started at 6 pm, reading from a manuscript taken from a huge folder, ‘in a mechanical, hurried tone of voice’. He never raised his eyes from the text. He appeared to be completely absorbed in his own writing. After an hour, the audience was restless. The hall was packed and some had to stand. After an hour and three quarters, the audience was exhausted and some were lying on the floor. Sartre appeared to have forgotten they were there. In the end Wahl had to signal to Sartre to stop. Sartre picked up his papers abruptly, and walked out without a word.69
But there was always the court to listen to him. Gradually, as Sartre got older, there were fewer courtiers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he made prodigious sums of money. But he spent it just as quickly. He had always been careless about money. As a boy, whenever he wanted any, he simply took it from his mother’s purse. As a schoolteacher he and de Beauvoir borrowed (and lent) freely: ‘We borrowed from everybody,’ she admitted.70 He said: ‘Money has a sort of perishability that I like. I love to see it slip through my fingers and vanish.’71 This carelessness had its agreeable side. Unlike many intellectuals, and especially famous ones, Sartre was genuinely generous about money. It gave him pleasure to pick up the tab in a café or restaurant, often for people he scarcely knew. He gave to causes. He provided the RDR with over 300,000 francs (over $100,000 at the 1948 exchange rate). His secretary Jean Cau called him ‘incredibly generous and trusting’.72 His liberality and his (occasional) sense of fun were the best sides of his character. But his attitude to money was also irresponsible. He pretended to be professional about royalties and agents’ fees-at his one meeting with Hemingway in 1949 the two writers discussed nothing but such topics, a conversation very much to Hemingway’s taste73-but this was for show. Cau’s successor, Claude Faux, testified: ‘[Sartre] obstinately refused to have anything to do with money. He saw it as a waste of time. And yet he was in constant need of it, to give it away, to help others.’74 As a result he ran up huge debts with his publishers and faced horrifying income-tax demands for back payments. His mother secretly paid his taxes-hence Camus’s jibe-but her resources were not limitless and by the end of the 1950s Sartre was in deep financial trouble, from which he never really extricated himself. Despite continued large earnings, he remained in debt and often short of cash. He once complained he could not afford a new pair of shoes. There were always a number of people on his payroll in one capacity or another, or receiving handouts. They constituted his outer court, the women forming the inner one. In the late 1960s the number sharply diminished as his financial position weakened, and the outer court contracted.
In the 1970s Sartre was an increasingly pathetic figure, prematurely aged, virtually blind, often drunk, worried about money, uncertain about his views. Into his life stepped a young Jew from Cairo, Benny Levy, who wrote under the name of Pierre Victor. His family had fled from Egypt at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956-57, and he was stateless. Sartre helped him to get permission to stay in France and made him his secretary. Victor had a taste for mysteries, wearing dark glasses and sometimes a false beard. His views were eccentric, often extreme, forcefully held and earnestly pressed on his master. Sartre’s name would appear over strange statements or pieces which the two men wrote together.75 De Beauvoir feared that Victor would turn into another Ralph Schoenman. She became particularly bitter when he formed an alliance with Arlette. She began to hate and fear him, as Sonya Tolstoy had hated and feared Chertkov. But by this time Sartre was incapable of much public folly. His private life remained sexually varied and his time was shared out among his harem. His holidays were spent as follows: three weeks with Arlette at the house they jointly owned in the South of France; two weeks with Wanda, usually in Italy; several weeks on a Greek island with Hélène; then a month with de Beauvoir, usually in Rome. In Paris he often moved between the various apartments of his women. His last years were brutally described by de Beauvoir in her little book, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre: his incontinence, his drunkenness, made possible by girls slipping him bottles of whisky, the struggle for power over what was left of his mind. It must have been a relief to them all when he died, in Broussais Hospital, on 15 April 1980. In 1965 he had secretly adopted Arlette as his daughter. So she inherited everything, including his literary property, and presided over the posthumous publication of his manuscripts. For de Beauvoir it was the final betrayal: the ‘centre’ eclipsed by one of the ‘peripheries’. She survived him five years, a Queen Mother of the French intellectual left. But there were no children, no heirs.
Indeed Sartre, like Russell, failed to achieve any kind of coherence and consistency in his views of public policy. No body of doctrine survived him. In the end, again like Russell, he stood for nothing more than a vague desire to belong to the left and the camp of youth. The intellectual decline of Sartre, who after all at one time did seem to be identified with a striking, if confused, philosophy of life, was particularly spectacular. But there is always a large section of the educated public which demands intellectual leaders, however unsatisfactory. Despite his enormities, Rousseau was widely honoured at and after his death. Sartre, another monstre sacré, was given a magnificent funeral by intellectual Paris. Over 50,000 people, most of them young, followed his body into Montparnasse Cemetery. To get a better view, some climbed into the trees. One of them came crashing down onto the coffin itself. To what cause had they come to do honour? What faith, what luminous truth about humanity, were they asserting by their mass presence? We may well ask.