by Peter Watson
Sartre, who had been in the army, interned in Germany and a member of the resistance, saw the postwar world as his moment, and he wanted to carve out a new role for the intellectual and the writer. His aim, as a philosopher, was still the creation of l’homme revolté, the rebel, whose aim was the overthrow of the bourgeoisie; but to this he now added an attack on analytic reason which he described as ‘the official doctrine of bourgeois democracy.’ Sartre had been struck, in wartime, by the way man’s sense of isolation had disappeared, and he now felt that existentialism should be adapted to this insight – that action, choice, was the solution to man’s predicament. Philosophy, existentialism, became for him – in a sense – a form of guerrilla war in which individuals, who are both isolated souls and yet part of a joint campaign, find their being. With Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre (as editor in chief) founded a new political, philosophical, and literary journal called Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), the motto for which was, ‘Man is total: totally committed and totally free.’17 This group in effect joined the long line of thinkers – Bergson, Spengler, Heidegger – who felt that positivism, science, analytic reason, and capitalism were creating a materialistic, rational but crass world that denuded man of a vital life force. In time this would lead Sartre to an equally crass anti-Americanism (as it had Spengler and Heidegger before him), but to begin with he declared in his Existentialism (1947) that ‘man is only a situation,’ one of his most important phrases. Man, he said, had ‘a distant purpose,’ to realise himself, to make choices in order to be. In doing so, he had to liberate himself from bourgeois rationality.18 There is no doubt that Sartre was a gifted phrase maker, the first soundbite philosopher, and his ideas appealed to many in the postwar world, especially his belief that the best way to achieve an existential existence, the best way to be ‘authentic,’ as Heidegger would have put it, was to be against things. The critic, he said, has a fuller life than the acquiescer. (He even refused, in later life, the award of the Nobel Prize.)19 It was this approach that led him in 1948 to found the Revolutionary Democratic Association, which tried to lead intellectuals and others away from the obsession that was already dominating their lives: the Cold War.20
Sartre was a Marxist – ‘It is not my fault if reality is Marxist,’ is how he put it. But in one important regard he was overtaken by the other member of the trinity that founded Les Temps modernes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had also attended Kojève’s seminar in the 1930s, and he too had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger. After the war, however, he pushed the ‘anti’ doctrine much further than Sartre. In Humanism and Terror, published in 1948, Merleau-Ponty welded Sartre and Stalin in the ultimate existential argument.21 His central point was that the Cold War was a classic ‘boundary situation,’ which required ‘fundamental decisions from men where the risk is total.’ Successful revolutions, he claimed, had not shed as much blood as the capitalist empires, and therefore the former was preferable to the latter and had ‘a humanistic future.’ On this analysis, Stalinism, for all its faults, was a more ‘honest’ form of violence than that which underlay liberal capitalism. Stalinism acknowledged its violence, Merleau-Ponty said, whereas the Western empires did not. In this respect at least, Stalinism was to be preferred.22
Existentialism, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty were, therefore, the conceptual fathers of much of the intellectual climate of the postwar years, particularly in France, but elsewhere in Europe as well. When people like Arthur Koestler – whose Darkness at Noon, exposing Stalinist atrocities, sold 250,000 copies in France alone – took them to task, they were denounced as liars.23 Then Sartre et al. fell back on such arguments as that the Soviets covered up because they were ashamed of their violence, whereas in Western capitalist democracies violence was implicit and openly condoned. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were one factor in France having the most powerful Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc (in 1952 Les Temps modernes became a party publication in all but name), and their influence did not really dissolve until after the student rebellions of 1968. Their stance also led to a philosophical hatred of America, which had never been entirely absent from European thought but now took on an unprecedented virulence. In 1954 Sartre visited Russia and returned declaring that ‘there is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.’24 He knew that wasn’t true but felt it was more important to be anti-America than critical of the Soviet Union. This attitude persisted, in Sartre as in others, and showed itself in the philosopher’s espousal of other Marxist anti-American causes: Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. Nearer home, of course, he was a natural leader for the protests against France’s battle with Algeria in the mid-1950s, where Sartre supported the FLN rebels. It was this support that led to his friendship with the man who would carry his thinking one important stage further: Frantz Fanon.25
France, more than most countries, lays great store by its intellectuals. Streets are named after philosophers and even minor writers. Nowhere is this more true than in Paris, and the period after World War II was the golden age of intellectuals. During the occupation the intellectual resistance had been led by the Comité National des Ecrivains, its mouthpiece being Les Lettres françaises. After the liberation the editorship was taken over by Louis Aragon, ‘a former surrealist now turned Stalinist.’ His first act was to publish a list of 156 writers, artists, theatre people, and academics who had collaborated and for whom the journal called for ‘just punishment.’26
Nowadays, the image of the French intellectual is invariably of someone wearing a black turtleneck sweater and smoking a harsh cigarette, a Gauloise, say, or a Gitane. This certainly owes something to Sartre, who like everyone in those days smoked a great deal, and always carried scraps of paper in his pockets.27 The various groups of intellectuals each had their favourite cafés. Sartre and de Beauvoir used the Flore at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Saint-Benôit.28 Sartre arrived for breakfast (two cognacs) and then sat at a table upstairs and wrote for three hours. De Beauvoir did the same but at a separate table. After lunch they went back upstairs for another three hours. The proprietor at first didn’t recognise them, but after Sartre became famous he received so many telephone calls at the café that a line was installed solely for his use. The Brasserie Lipp, opposite, was shunned for a while because its Alsatian dishes had been favoured by the Germans (though Gide had eaten there). Picasso and Dora Maar used Le Catalan in the rue des Grands Augustins, the Communists used the Bonaparte on the north side of the place, and musicians preferred the Royal Saint-Germain, opposite the Deux Magots, Sartre’s second choice.29 But in any event, the existential life of ‘disenchanted nonchalance’ took place only between the boulevard Saint-Michel in the east, the rue des Saint-Pères in the west, the quais along the Seine in the north, and the rue Vaugirard in the south; this was ‘la cathédrale de Sartre.’30 In those days, too, many writers, artists and musicians did not live in apartments but took rooms in cheap hotels – one reason why they made so much use of café life. The only late-night café in those days was Le Tabou in the rue Dauphine, frequented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco, the diseuse (a form of singing almost like speaking), and Albert Camus. In 1947 Bernard Lucas persuaded the owners of Le Tabou to rent him their cedar, a tubelike room in which he installed a bar, a gramophone, and a piano. Le Tabou took off immediately, and from then on, Saint-Germain and la famille Sartre were tourist attractions.31
Few tourists, however, read Les Temps modernes, the journal that had been started in 1945, funded by Gaston Gallimard and with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, and Raymond Aron on the board. Simone de Beauvoir saw Les Temps modernes as the showpiece of what she called the ‘Sartrean ideal,’ and it was certainly intended to be the flagship of an era of intellectual change. Paris at the time was resurgent intellectually, not just in regard to philosophy and existentialism. In the theatre, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Sartre’s own Huis clos had appeared i
n 1944, Camus’s Caligula a year later, the same year as Giraudoux’s Madwoman of Chaillot. Sartre’s Men without Shadows appeared in 1946. Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, influenced by Luigi Pirandello, were waiting in the wings.
Exciting as all this was, the climate of les intellos in Paris soon turned sour thanks to one issue that dominated everything else: Stalinism.32 France, as we have seen, had a strong Communist Party, but after the centralisation of Yugoslavia, in the manner of the USSR, the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and the death of its foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, many in France found it impossible to continue their membership of the PCF, or were expelled when they expressed their revulsion. A number of disastrous strikes in France also drove a wedge between French intellectuals and workers, a relationship that was in fact never as strong as the intellectuals pretended. Two things followed. In one, Sartre and his ‘famille’ joined in 1947 the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a party created to found a movement independent of the USSR and the United States.33 The Kremlin took this seriously, fearing that Sartre’s ‘philosophy of decadence,’ as they called existentialism, could become a ‘third force,’ especially among the young. Andrei Zhdanov, we now know, saw to it that Sartre was attacked on several fronts, in particular at a peace conference in Wroclaw, Poland, in August 1948, where Picasso too was vilified.34 Sartre later changed his tune on Stalinist Russia, arguing that whatever wrongs had been committed had been carried out for the greater good. This tortuous form of reasoning became ever more necessary as the 1940s wore on and more and more evidence was revealed about Stalin’s atrocities. But Sartre’s continuing hatred of American materialism kept him more in the Soviet camp than anywhere else. This position received a massive setback in 1947, however, with the publication of I Chose Freedom, by Victor Kravchenko, a Russian engineer who had defected from a Soviet trade mission to the United States in 1944. This book turned into a runaway success and was translated into a score of languages.35 Russian-authored, it was the earliest first-person description of Stalin’s labour camps, his persecution of the kulaks, and his forced collectivisations.36
In France, due to the strength of the Communist Party, no major publishing house would touch the book (echoes of Orwell’s Animal Farm in Britain). But when it did appear, it sold 400,000 copies and won the Prix Sainte-Beuve. The book was attacked by the Communist Party, and Les Lettres françaises published an article by one Sim Thomas, allegedly a former OSS officer, who claimed that the book had been authored by American intelligence agents rather than Kravchenko, who was a compulsive liar and an alcoholic.37 Kravchenko, who by then had settled in the United States, sued for libel. The trial was held in January 1949 amid massive publicity. Les Lettres françaises had obtained witnesses from Russia, with NKVD help, including Kravchenko’s former wife, Zinaïda Gorlova, with whom, he said, he had witnessed many atrocities. Since Gorlova’s father was still in a prison camp, her evidence was naturally tainted several times over. Despite this, faced by her ex-husband in the witness box, she physically deteriorated, losing weight almost overnight and becoming ‘unkempt and listless’. She was eventually taken to Orly airport, where a Soviet military aircraft was waiting to fly her back to Moscow. ‘Sim Thomas’ was never produced; he did not exist. The most impressive witness for Kravchenko was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the widow of the prewar leader of the German Communist Party, Heinz Neumann. After Hitler achieved power, the Neumanns had fled to Soviet Russia but had been sent to the labour camps because of ‘political deviationism.’38 After the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, in 1940, they had been shipped back to Germany and the camp at Ravensbrück. So Margarete Buber-Neumann had been in camps on both sides of what became the Iron Curtain: what reason had she to lie?
The verdict was announced on 4 April, the same day that the North Adantic Alliance was signed. Kravchenko had won. He received only minimal damages, but that wasn’t the point. Many intellectuals resigned from the party that year, and soon even Albert Camus would follow.39 Sartre and de Beauvoir did not resign, however. For them, all revolutions have their ‘terrible majesty.’40 For them, the hatred of American materialism outweighed everything else.
After the war, Paris seemed set to resume its position as the world capital of intellectual and creative life, the City of Light that it had always been. Breton and Duchamp were back from America, mixing again with Cocteau. This was the era of Anouilh’s Colombe, Gide’s Journals and his Nobel Prize, Malraux’s Voices of Silence, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes; it was again, after an interlude, the city of Edith Piaf, Sidney Bechet, and Maurice Chevalier, of Matisse’s Jazz series, of major works by the Annales school of historians, which are considered in a later chapter, of the new mathematics of ‘Nikolas Bourbaki,’ of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and of Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Coco Chanel was still alive, and Christian Dior had just started. In serious music it was the time of Olivier Messiaen. This composer was splendidly individualistic. Far from being an existentialist, he was a theological writer, ‘dedicated to the task of reconciling human imperfection and Divine Glory through the medium of Art.’ Messiaen detested most aspects of modern life, preferring the ancient grand civilisations of Assyria and Sumer. Much influenced by Debussy and the Russian composers, his own works sought to create timeless, contemplative moods, and although he tried serialism, his works frequently employed repetition on a large scale and, his particular innovation, the transcription of birdsong. In the decade and a half after the war, Messiaen used adventurous techniques (including new ways of dividing up the piano keyboard), birdsong, and Eastern music to forge a new religious spirit in music: Turangaîla (Hindu for ‘love song’), 1946—1948; Livre d’Orgue, 1951; Réveil des Oiseaux, 1953. Messiaen’s opposition to existentialism was underlined by his pupil Pierre Boulez, who described his music as closer to the Oriental philosophy of ‘being’ rather than the Western idea of ‘becoming.’41
And yet, despite all this, the 1950s would witness a slow decline in Paris, as the city was overtaken by New York and, to a lesser extent, by London. It would be eclipsed further in the student rebellions of the late 1960s. This was as true of painting as of philosophy and literature. Alberto Giacometti produced some of his greatest, gauntest, figures in postwar Paris, the epitome for many people of existential man; and Jean Dubuffet painted his childlike but at the same time very sophisticated pictures of intellectuals and animals (cows mainly), grotesque and gentle at the same time, revealing mixed feelings about the earnestness with which the postwar Parisian philosophical and literary scene regarded itself. Lesser School of Paris artists like Bernard Buffet, René Mathieu, Anton Tapiès, and Jean Atlan all sold embarrassingly well in France, much better than their British or North American contemporaries. But the hardships of war caused a marked shortsightedness among dealers and artists alike, leading to speculation and a collapse in prices in 1962. Contemporary painting in France has never ready recovered. In reality de Beauvoir had got it back-to-front when she said that Paris was in the year zero, being reborn. It was yet another instance of a sunset being mistaken for a dawn. The decade after the end of World War II was the last great shining moment for the City of Light. Existentialism had been invigorated and was popular in France because it was in part a child of the Resistance, and therefore represented the way the French, or at least French intellectuals, liked to think of themselves. Sartre apart, Paris’s final glory was delivered by four men, three of whom were French by adoption and not native-born, and a third who loathed most of what Paris stood for. These were Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco.
Camus, a pied-noir born in Algeria, was raised in poverty and never lost his sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Briefly a Marxist, he edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during the war. Like Sartre, he too became obsessed with man’s ‘absurd’ condition in an indifferent universe, and his own career was an attempt to show how that situation could (or should) be met. In 1942 he produced The Myth of Si
syphus, a philosophical tract that first appeared in the underground press. His argument was that man must recognise two things: that all he can rely upon is himself, and what goes on inside his head; and that the universe is indifferent, even hostile, that life is a struggle, that we are all like Sisyphus, pushing a stone uphill, and that if we stop, it will roll back down again.42 This may seem – may indeed be – futile, but it is all there is. He moved on, to publish The Plague in 1947. This novel, a much more accessible read, starts with an outbreak of bubonic plague in an Algerian city, Oran. There is no overt philosophising in the book; instead, Camus explores the way a series of characters – Dr Rieux, his mother, or Tarrou – react to the terrible news, and deal with the situation as it develops.43 Camus’s main objective is to show what community does, and does not, mean, what man can hope for and what he cannot – the book is in fact a sensitive description of isolation. And that of course is the plague that afflicts us. In this there are echoes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his ideas of community, but also of Hugo von Hofmannsthal; after all, Camus has created a work of art out of absurdity and isolation. Does that redeem him? Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 but was killed in a car crash three years later.
Jean Genet – Saint Genet in Sartre’s biography – introduced himself one day in 1944 to the philosopher and his consort as they sat at the Café Flore. He had a shaven head and a broken nose, ‘but his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood.’44 His appearance owed not a little to his upbringing in reformatories, prisons, and brothels, where he had been a male prostitute. Genet’s future reputation would lie in his brilliance with words and his provocative plots, but he was of interest to the existentialists because as an aggressive homosexual and a criminal he occupied two prisons (psychological as well as physical), and in living on the edge, in boundary situations, he at least stood the chance of being more alive, more authentic, than others. He was also of interest to de Beauvoir because, being homosexual and having been forced to play ‘female’ roles in prison (on one occasion he was a ‘bride’ in a prison ménage), Genet’s views about sex and gender were quite unlike anyone else’s. Genet certainly lived life to the full in his way, even going so far as to desecrate a church to see what God would do about it. ‘And the miracle happened. There was no miracle. God had been debunked. God was hollow.’45