Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  reciprocal duties; the second detailed the nature of the ‘uprootedness’ that afflicted

  France; and the third set out a series of incomplete proposals for a new ‘rooted’

  society. The tone was set by the very first sentence. ‘The notion of obligations’,

  Weil wrote, ‘takes precedence over that of rights, which is subordinate and relative

  to the former.’283 This, she affirmed, was something that the ‘men of 1789’ had not

  understood. Next came the claim that our obligations should correspond to ‘the

  needs of the soul’. The latter were listed as a set of ‘antithetical pairs’ and were said

  to include the need for order and liberty, obedience and responsibility, equality and

  hierarchy, honour and punishment, security and risk, private and collective prop-

  erty, freedom of opinion and truth. ‘The need of truth’, Weil wrote, ‘is more sacred

  than any other need.’284 Nevertheless, the most pressing need facing the French

  population, Weil believed, was the need for roots. ‘To be rooted’, Weil argued, ‘is

  perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.’

  It was also, she continued, one of the most difficult to define. Thus, she argued,

  ‘a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in

  the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures

  of the past and certain particular expectations for the future’.285 As the ‘sudden

  collapse’ of France in the summer of 1940 indicated, it was precisely this sense of

  rootedness that the French people lacked. The urban proletariat, Weil wrote, had

  been reduced to a ‘state of apathetic stupor’. The peasantry had been ‘brutally’

  uprooted from the land. More generally, Weil argued, ‘money and the State have

  come to replace all other bonds of attachment’.286 This was the crux of her

  argument.

  The focus of much of Weil’s ire was the French state. ‘The State’, she wrote, ‘is a

  cold thing which cannot be loved but it kills and eliminates everything that could

  be; thus one is forced to love it because there is nothing else.’287 In the French case,

  since Richelieu in the seventeenth century, the ambition had been ‘systematically to

  kill all spontaneous life in the country’. France was ruled like ‘a conquered

  territory’. If, in 1789, those who had been French by force became so by consent,

  282 L’Enracinement (1949).

  283 Ibid. 9.

  284 Ibid. 38.

  285 Ibid. 45.

  286 Ibid. 90.

  287 Ibid. 102.

  France, Intellectuals, and Engagement

  487

  the Revolution ‘melted all the peoples subject to the French crown into one single

  mass’. It thus succeeded in establishing ‘the most violent break with the country’s

  past’.288 Each successive regime only continued the process of destroying local and

  regional life. If it was the fashion before 1940 to speak of ‘eternal France’, Weil

  remarked, such was the level of uprootedness that ‘no Frenchman had the slightest

  qualms about robbing or cheating the State in matters relating to customs duties,

  taxes, subsidies, or anything else’.289

  The task facing the Free French, therefore, was nothing less than that of

  ‘refashioning the soul of the country’. And this could be done only if the people

  were provided with a country to which they felt that they really belonged. A

  spiritual and moral void had to be filled. Accordingly, Weil recommended a series

  of measures designed to secure ‘the abolition of the proletarian lot’. Large factories

  were to be abolished. Every worker would own a house and a piece of land.

  Through education and land reform the peasant was to be freed of his inferiority

  complex and was to be reacquainted with the ‘pure poetry’ of working the fields.

  More vaguely, Weil argued that four ‘obstacles’ had to be overcome: ‘our false

  conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice; our idolisation

  of money; and our lack of religious inspiration’.290 As David McLellan observed, ‘it

  is extremely difficult to characterize the kind of politics that Weil is advocating’.291

  What we can be sure of, however, is that it was not the kind of politics that emerged

  at the end of the war.

  With the Liberation of France from German occupation came what was known

  euphemistically as ‘l’épuration’.292 Under the aegis of the self-appointed Comité

  national des écrivains, lists were drawn up of those writers deemed to have

  collaborated with the enemy, those experiencing this misfortune being effectively

  prevented from publishing their work. Similar lists were drawn up for publishers

  and the press more generally. Those deemed to be the worst offenders were put on

  trial. In this often tawdry process the desire for vengeance was never far from the

  surface and, in some quarters at least, deep unease about the arbitrary punishments

  meted out was not slow to appear.293 The whole episode did, however, bring the

  question of the responsibility of the intellectual into sharp relief. Could one write

  without consequences? Did the responsibility of the writer extend so far as to

  include the possible loss of his or her life? Were writers any guiltier than the

  innumerable engineers, civil servants, builders, and entrepreneurs who had worked

  to build the coastal sea defences against Allied invasion? As writers faced imprison-

  ment and possible execution, these were not idle speculations.

  Liberation also brought with it a not insignificant reconfiguration of the intel-

  lectual landscape. Discredited and silenced, the right temporarily vacated the stage,

  leaving it to be filled by those who had either fought in the Resistance or who had

  288 Ibid. 98.

  289 Ibid. 107.

  290 Ibid. 187.

  291 Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Houndmills, 1989), 257.

  292 See Pierre Assouline, L’Épuration des intellectuels (Brussels, 1985). See also Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia,

  Histoire politique des intellectuels en France 1944–1954, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1991).

  293 More than one critic has seen a parallel with the Terror of the Revolution of 1789: see

  Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines, 259–60.

  488

  France, Intellectuals, and Engagement

  successfully negotiated the complexities of cultural life in Occupied France. Post-

  war euphoria was ideally suited to facilitate the emergence of a new generation of

  writers and philosophers, a generation ready to capitalize on the widespread

  yearning for renovation and change. What followed is a story too well-known to

  need recounting in any detail. The ‘existentialist offensive’ was about to begin.

  Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had almost prospered during the

  Occupation.294 Despite its physical hardships and privations, they were gainfully

  employed as teachers and continued to write, broadcast on the radio, and publish

  under the conditions of German censorship. In 1943, for example, Beauvoir pub-

  lished her first novel, L’Invitée, whilst Sartre published his monumental philosophical

  tract, L’Être et le néant. Neither, until the very end of the German occupation,

  showed the least interest in joining the Resistance. Nor was this ou
t of character.

  Unlike many of his fellows, as a student at the École Normale Supérieure Sartre

  remained resolutely apolitical and in the elections which brought the Popular Front

  to power in June 1936 he did not bother to vote. Nothing was allowed to get in the

  way of the summer holiday he was sharing with Beauvoir in Italy. ‘What I remember

  best’, Sartre was later to write of these pre-war years, ‘is the unique atmosphere

  of intellectual power and gaiety which enshrouded us.’295 To that end, in 1933 he

  went to Nazi Germany to study philosophy. How this came about was captured

  wonderfully by Simone de Beauvoir in the second volume of her memoirs.296 It is an

  oft-quoted passage but one that merits rereading, such is its candour and insouciance.

  When Raymond Aron came back from his studies at the French Institute in Berlin,

  Beauvoir reported, ‘we spent an evening together . . . in the Rue Montparnasse.

  We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; Aron said, pointing to his

  glass: “you see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about

  this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” Sartre turned pale with emotion at this.

  Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years––to describe objects

  as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process.’

  It would be to do an injustice to the richness of Sartre’s writings to suggest that

  the only outcome of his encounter with the work of Husserl and Heidegger was

  L’Être et le néant––the same themes were evident in his novels (most obviously

  La Nausée of 1939), his short stories, and his plays––but it was undoubtedly here

  that were set out most clearly the central themes of his existential phenomenology.

  For our purposes, there is no need to dwell upon Sartre’s explorations of the key

  concepts of consciousness, being, nothingness, the self, and bad faith, but in order

  better to understand his later political journey it might be of use to comment briefly

  on the general tenor of his argument. The first point would be that, from Sartre’s

  understanding of consciousness, it followed that we have no essence and therefore

  that we were free to be what we chose to be. The second is that, according to Sartre,

  our freedom induces in us a deep sense of dread and anxiety and therefore that we

  attempt to deny our freedom by resorting to bad faith. The two best-known

  294 See Gilbert Joseph, Une si douce occupation (1991).

  295 War Diaries (London, 1984), 175.

  296 The Prime of Life (Harmondsworth, 1983), 135.

  France, Intellectuals, and Engagement

  489

  examples of this provided by Sartre (both redolent of his own ‘situation’) were that

  of the café waiter who through his exaggerated movements plays at being a waiter

  and of the young girl who refuses to notice that she is being seduced by her lover.

  Such forms of bad faith were an aspect of what Sartre termed being-for-others.

  People were acting out a role given to them by others. Crucially, there was no way

  out of this, for it was in the nature of our consciousness that we wished to dominate

  others as, in the same way, they sought to dominate us. ‘Conflict’, Sartre wrote, ‘is

  the original meaning of being-for-others.’297 Could love overcome this conflict?

  According to Sartre, our concrete relations with others could only take the forms of

  indifference, sadism, or masochism.

  On the face of it, Sartre’s existentialism offered no grounds for optimism,

  presenting us with a bleak picture of individuals locked in an unending conflict

  from which there was no escape. Yet the same text also hinted at the possibility of

  a new ethical theory. The morally good life was clearly associated with freedom and

  authenticity: the immoral life was defined by conformism and bad faith. But what

  was to be the content of this morality? Apart from a few hints at the very end of

  the text, Sartre did not make this clear, promising only ‘a future work’ devoted to ‘the

  ethical plane’. Certainly, Sartre offered no solution to the anxiety and conflict arising

  from our freedom. Nor was this something that did not go unobserved. Once again

  Beauvoir’s memoirs provide enlightenment. ‘At a party in Lausanne’, she recounted,

  ‘Sartre had met a young man called Gorz, who knew all his writings like the back

  of his hand and talked very knowledgeably about them. In Geneva we saw him again.

  Taking L’Être et le néant as his starting point, he could not see how one choice could

  justifiably be given preference over another and consequently Sartre’s commitment

  troubled him. “That’s because you’re Swiss”, Sartre told him.’ As a matter of fact,

  Beauvoir added without a hint of levity, he was an Austrian Jew.298

  Sartre did his best to answer this criticism in his celebrated lecture of 1945,

  L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, where he argued, implausibly, that existentia-

  lism did not confine man ‘within his own subjectivity’ and that ‘no doctrine is

  more optimistic’. ‘What is at the very heart and centre of existentialism’, Sartre

  proclaimed, ‘is the absolute character of the free commitment by which every man

  realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity.’299 The more serious response was

  Sartre’s endeavour to redefine himself as a ‘writer who resisted’. This he did to great

  effect and with remarkable audacity. By sleight of hand Sartre positioned himself

  within the Resistance, equating the passive resistance of those who had ‘had to

  remain silent’ with the heroic deeds of those who had risked and lost their lives,

  and so much so that when in the very first edition of Les Temps modernes he

  proclaimed that ‘I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression which

  followed the Commune because they did not write one line to prevent it’ no one

  imagined that the same thing might have been said with some justification of

  Sartre’s own literary career during the Occupation. Having successfully taken this

  297 Being and Nothingness (London, 1972), 364.

  298 Force of Circumstance (Harmondsworth, 1968), 100–1.

  299 Existentialism and Humanism (London, 1975), 47.

  490

  France, Intellectuals, and Engagement

  step, Sartre’s next move was to sketch out the philosophical and political grounds of

  what he saw as an engaged literature.

  This Sartre did most thoroughly in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, published in

  1948. In both tone and content it bore a striking resemblance to the argument

  advanced in Nizan’s Les Chiens de garde. Denouncing ‘the aesthetic purity’ of

  bourgeois literature and the ‘lay morality’ taught by such ‘petit-bourgeois profes-

  sors’ as Durkheim and Brunschvicg, Sartre affirmed that ‘the author writes in order

  to address himself to the freedom of readers’ and from this, he argued, it followed

  that the question facing the writer was:’Why have you spoken of this rather than

  that, and––since you speak in order to bring about change––why do you want to

  change this rather than that?’300 At the heart of literature, in other words, there lay

  ‘a moral imperative’. This did not mean that, like Benda’s clerc, the writer was to be

  ‘the guardian of univers
al values’. Rather, Sartre affirmed, the poet, the essayist, and

  the novelist were to write for the proletariat because the proletariat alone was

  capable of transforming the possibility of freedom into an actuality. The committed

  writer, Sartre stated, knew that words were action.

  The writer, then, was enjoined to embrace his epoch and it was precisely this

  that Sartre himself attempted to do for the remainder of his life, attaining a level

  of celebrity for his demonstrations of political commitment that few have ever

  matched. The intellectual, he never tired of repeating in subsequent years, was

  obliged to take sides, ‘to commit himself to every one of the conflicts of our time’,

  to recognize that all such conflicts––be they class, national, or racial––were strug-

  gles between particular groups for the ‘statute of universality’. The ‘true’ intellec-

  tual’s most immediate enemy was the ‘false intellectual’, the defender of ‘bourgeois

  humanism’ and of ‘a false bourgeois universality’.301

  More striking still was Sartre’s conversion to Marxism and his effective aban-

  donment of existentialism.302 This was a long process, culminating in the publica-

  tion of the Critique de la raison dialectique in 1960. Marxism, he now declared, was

  ‘the untranscendable philosophy of our time’. The philosophical intricacies of this

  lengthy tome might best be summarized by suggesting that Sartre here relocated the

  existential struggle between one individual and another at the level of consciousness

  described in L’Être et le néant with a struggle determined, above all, by economic

  scarcity. ‘Nothing, not even wild beasts or microbes,’ Sartre now wrote, ‘could be

  more terrifying for man than a species which is intelligent, carnivorous, and cruel,

  and which can understand and outwit human intelligence and whose aim is

  precisely the destruction of man. This, however, is obviously our own species as

  perceived in others by each of its members in the context of scarcity.’303 In those

  circumstances––in effect, the circumstances of capitalism and of a society divided

  into classes––human beings lived in a condition of ‘alterity’, one in which our

  300 What is Literature? (London, 1970), 15.

  301 See e.g. ‘A Plea for Intellectuals’, in Sartre, Between Existentialism and Humanism (London,