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,
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