1983), 228–85.
302 See Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, NJ,
1975).
303 Critique of Dialectical Reason (London, 1982), 132.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
491
relations with others were those of separation rather than reciprocity and where
society took the form of a ‘series’ or ‘collective’ characterized by a lack of commu-
nity. Sartre illustrated this beautifully with the example of a queue of people in the
place Saint-Germain waiting for a bus. Although they possessed a common goal,
the people in the queue existed in isolation.
The greater part of the Critique de la raison dialectique explored the manner in
which we might escape this condition of alterity and seriality. Sartre offered two
possibilities. The first entailed the overcoming of scarcity through the economic
reorganization of society and the abolition of capitalism. The second was more
intriguing. What Sartre described was the transition from the series to the ‘fused
group’, a situation in which there existed an absolute identity of interests between
its members and where other people would become a source for, rather than an
obstacle to, our freedom. Such a condition most typically emerged in circumstances
of external danger or actual revolution. To illustrate the point Sartre chose as his
example the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 by the people of Paris. ‘In this
behaviour’, Sartre wrote, ‘everyone sees his own future in the Other and, on that
basis, discovers his present action in that of the Other.’304
Yet written into the Critique de la raison dialectique was a vaguely tragic vision of
our fate. After the revolution, Sartre argued, it should be our aim to preserve the
group and to avoid lapsing back into the chaotic condition of seriality in which
individuals are at war with one another. But Sartre recognized that the existence of
the group was at best unstable and fleeting. Under constant threat from outside and
from disunity within, the group would turn itself into an organization, into an
‘institution’, where there would exist a division of labour and where certain people
would hold positions of authority. Mutuality and reciprocity would give way to the
re-emergence of hierarchy and inertia. This time the principal example cited by
Sartre was the descent into Terror experienced after 1789.
Did this mean that Sartre’s analysis of the dialectic was ultimately redundant? If
it did nothing else, it allowed Sartre to establish a critique of all those institutions
which embodied seriality and thus to show that his vision of the future in a post-
capitalist society was far removed from that of actual existing socialism in the Soviet
bloc. The dictatorship of the proletariat, he wrote, was ‘a bastard compromise
between the active sovereignty of the group and passive seriality’ leading to
bureaucratic terror and the cult of personality. The internal contradictions of
the socialist world, he continued, brought forth ‘the objective exigency for de-
bureaucratization, decentralization, and democratization’.305 Likewise, it was the
participatory ‘group-in-fusion’, rather than the elite Leninist political party, that
was to be the proper mode of revolutionary praxis. From this it was but a short
step to Sartre’s support of the student demonstrations of May 68 and the violent
tactics of Maoism.306
304 Ibid. 354.
305 Ibid. 661–2.
306 For three comprehensive biographies of Sartre see Annie-Cohen Solal, Sartre: A Life (London,
1985); Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre (London, 1986); and Bernard Henri-
Lévy, Le Siècle de Sartre (2000).
492
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
It is impossible to speak of Sartre without mentioning Simone de Beauvoir.307
Hers was a life as remarkable and her achievements were as significant. She, like
Sartre, led the existentialist offensive and she, like him, underwent a radical
conversion in the post-war years. She too expressed her ideas in a variety of literary
forms: novels, plays, essays, and philosophical treatises. In some respects, however,
her most substantial literary achievement was her three-volume autobiography,
published between 1958 and 1963.308 Here was an account of a life that was no less
candid and high-minded than it was humourless and self-serving. Only marginally
less memorable was her Goncourt prize-winning novel, Les Mandarins, a roman à
clef which, despite Beauvoir’s claims to the contrary, chronicled the lives of Sartre,
Camus, herself. and other inhabitants of the incestuous world of the Parisian
Left Bank. The title, Beauvoir later recalled, was chosen to reflect the fact that, as
intellectuals, they existed as ‘a race apart’, the only remaining nobility in France.
In 1943 Beauvoir began writing an essay entitled Pyrrhus et Cinéas. It was
intended to be a companion piece to Sartre’s L’Être et le néant and sought
(unsuccessfully) to define an ethics of freedom. Four years later, and encouraged
by the favourable reception her first essay had received, she again took up the
challenge of basing a morality upon Sartre’s text in her most sustained philosophical
work, Pour une morale de l’ambiguité. Her intention, she subsequently explained
in her memoirs, was to refute the charge that existentialism was a ‘nihilistic
philosophy, wilfully pessimistic, frivolous, licentious, despairing, and ignoble’.
Again, however, it was something of a failure. ‘I was in error’, she wrote in 1963,
‘when I thought that I could define a morality independent of a social context.’309
Sartre, as we know, was experiencing similar problems. Infinitely more successful,
however, was Beauvoir’s attempt to apply the lessons of existentialism to an
examination of the condition of women.
The impact of existentialism upon the argument of Le Deuxième Sexe was visible
in three primary ways. First, Beauvoir was able to argue that women possessed no
fixed nature or essence. This was the argument that informed her famous statement
that: ‘One is not born but one becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or
economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society.’310
Second, existentialist ethics stipulated that women, as much as men, were free and
autonomous beings and therefore that they were capable of transcending their
present condition and of living a life of authenticity rather than one of immanence
and stagnation. Third, and most importantly, existentialism provided an explana-
tion of the cause of the original subjection of women. This phenomenon was a
307 On Beauvoir see Deidre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (London, 1990). On Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir, see Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de
Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London, 2006) and Carole Seymour Jones, A Dangerous Liaison: Simone
de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London, 2008).
308 See Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958); La Force de l’âge (1960); and La Force des choses
(1963).
309 Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 76. See Anne Whitmarsh, S
imone de Beauvoir and the Limits of
Commitment (Cambridge, 1981) and Penelope Deutscher, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity,
Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge, 2008).
310 The Second Sex (Harmondsworth, 1984), 295.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
493
‘result of the imperialism of the human consciousness’. If, Beauvoir explained, ‘the
human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an
original aspiration to dominate the Other, the invention of the bronze tool could
not have caused the oppression of women’.311 Women, in other words, found
themselves in a world where men compelled them to adopt the status of the Other.
Less evident was the manner in which existentialism might enable women to
overcome their subordinate position. A change in women’s economic condition
alone would not be sufficient to effect this transformation. Nevertheless, Beauvoir
placed great emphasis upon the emergence of ‘the independent woman’. She
similarly stressed the need to engage in an activity of demystification and to
avoid gender stereotyping. Crucially, however, she insisted that ‘legends notwith-
standing, no physiological destiny imposes an eternal hostility upon Male and
Female as such’.312 Accordingly, Beauvoir affirmed, the present condition endured
by women could be surmounted and, as she continued her ascent, an ‘inner
metamorphosis’ would occur heralding the arrival of the ‘new women’. When
this occurred, women and men would live in a condition of reciprocity and
mutuality. Nor, she concluded movingly, would this do away with the ‘miracles’
of ‘desire, love, possession, dream, adventure’ that arose from the division of human
being into two categories. ‘On the contrary’, she wrote, ‘when we abolish the
slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it
implies, the “division” of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the
human couple will find its true form.’313
When Le Deuxième Sexe was published in 1949 it sold 20,000 copies in its first
week. It also provoked a well-nigh unprecedented outpouring of criticism and
abuse.314 It is not difficult to understand why. The second part of Le Deuxième
Sexe, exploring ‘women’s lived experience’, was devoted to a detailed examination
of such topics as menstruation, sexual initiation, lesbianism, pregnancy, marriage,
and motherhood, the like of which had probably never been published before and
certainly not as a work of philosophy. Conservative critics condemned it as a work
of pornography. Many on the left––especially within the French Communist
Party––were similarly shocked and dismissive. Nevertheless, for all its undoubted
faults, Le Deuxième Sexe must rank as one of the most significant and important
texts to be published in post-war France. Not only did it establish Simone de
Beauvoir as a figure and a thinker in her own right, but it also provided the impetus
for her own subsequent involvement in the feminist movement during the 1970s.
In the words of Simone de Beauvoir, both she and Sartre had the impression that
Frantz Fanon ‘must be one of the most remarkable personalities of our time’.315
When they first met, however, Fanon was already dying of the leukaemia that
would kill him in 1961 at the early age of 36. Fanon had been drawn early to
Sartre’s writings and especially to the argument advanced in his Réflexions sur la
question juive that it was not the Jewish character that provoked anti-Semitism but
311 Ibid. 88–9.
312 Ibid. 725.
313 Ibid. 741.
314 See Ingrid Galster (ed.), Le Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir (2004).
315 Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 597, 605–11.
494
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
rather the anti-Semite who created the Jew.316 For his part, from 1948 onwards
Sartre was increasingly preoccupied with the issue of colonialism and the emerging
anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia.317
On the face it, there was something deeply incongruous about a Republic
possessing a colonial empire.318 How could a regime founded upon rights, equality,
and the rule of law be reconciled to a system of exclusion, discrimination, and
violence? Yet the establishment of an overseas empire had been an integral, rather
than a marginal, dimension of the republican project from the early years of the
Third Republic onwards. In part, this policy was driven by the desire to replicate
the lost empire of the ancien régime and to match the British Empire, but after
the military defeat of 1870 empire-building was likewise fostered by the need to
restore national pride and honour. The French were also not without a taste
for exoticism. However, in the eyes of its proponents, the French Empire was to
be marked out from its competitors by the spirit of generosity in which it was to be
created and by its ‘civilizing mission’. Instead of oppression, there was to be liberty;
instead of exploitation there was to be emancipation. What is more, this sense of
mission was born of the two Frances. As the eldest daughter of the Church, France
was under an obligation to spread the Christian message: as the inheritor and
embodiment of the traditions of 1789, she was under a duty to save the oppressed
and to export fraternity. Armed thus, it became possible for generations of sincere
republicans and of devout Catholics to denounce the iniquities and abuses of
colonialism319 and yet remain ardent defenders of a system whose self-proclaimed
task was that of freeing the indigenous colonized peoples from savagery and
ignorance and of providing both education and health. The instruments of coloni-
zation, therefore, were not only to be the soldier, the administrator, and the settler,
but also the teacher, the priest, and the doctor. To what extent this vision of empire
bore any relation to reality is not a question that needs to be answered here. It
is sufficient for us to know that, as France sought to re-establish her empire in Indo-
China and North Africa after the Second World War, it was a vision that became
increasingly difficult to sustain.
Frantz Fanon was born in the French Caribbean island of Martinique and was a
descendant of slaves. He completed his studies in psychiatry in Paris and Lyons and
in 1952 took up a post in French Algeria as a doctor. The following year he married
a white French woman. It was in the year of his appointment to Algeria that Fanon
published Peau Noir, Masques Blancs.320 Described by Fanon as a ‘clinical study’, its
subject was the position of the black person in relation to the white colonizer. It
owed much to the phenomenological arguments of Sartrean existentialism. In brief,
Fanon analysed the numerous ways in which the black person was persuaded to feel
316 Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (1946).
317 See Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (eds.), Sartre: Colonialism and
Neocolonialism (London, 2001). This includes Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre.
318 See Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1961 (1972) and Nicolas Bancel, Pascal
Blanchar
d, and Françoise Vergès, La République coloniale: Essai sur une utopie (2003).
319 See e.g. André Gide’s Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Chad (1928).
320 Frantz Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (1952).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
495
inferior to the white colonizer and how he became ashamed of his own colour,
language, and culture. Fanon also looked at the ‘arsenal of complexes’ that intruded
their way into the sexual relationships between black and white persons, in the
process exposing the supposed anatomical superiority of the black male as a
myth. His overall conclusion was that, in the colonized world, the choice facing
the black person was that of ‘turn white or disappear’. As Fanon wrote, ‘the
Negro will become proportionately whiter––that is, he will become closer to
being a real human being––in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language’.321
The challenge facing the black person, therefore, was to choose authenticity and
freedom. This could be achieved through nothing less than the removal of the
colonial environment.
It is clear that if Fanon, at this point, was not so naïve as to believe that such a
‘restructuring of the world’ could be brought about by appeals to reason and the
dignity of man, he did imagine that it was possible to envisage ‘a healthy encounter
between black and white’.322 In this sense, there were clear parallels to the positions
then being developed by both Sartre on the proletariat and Beauvoir on the position
of women. Like them, however, Fanon too was to undergo a radical conversion in
the years which immediately followed. In his case, the decisive factor was his first-
hand familiarity with the Algerian rebellion. Begun in 1954 and ending in 1961,
this turned into a conflict of awful ferocity. Moreover, as a doctor, Fanon was to be
witness to the victims of torture.
It was this experience that led to the publication of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre
in 1961323 and also caused Fanon to appreciate fully the nature of colonialism.324
Fanon now wrote that colonialism ‘is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed
with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state and it will only yield when
confronted with great violence.’325 Accordingly, Fanon addressed two major
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