Then there were the converts. Since the late nineteenth century a number of intellectuals, in the face of rapid de-Christianization, had converted to the Catholic faith. Some of these conversions were dramatic, such as that of the poet Paul Claudel in Notre Dame Cathedral on Christmas Day, 1886, or of Charles Peguy on the eve of the First World War. "What am I?" the philosopher Jacques Maritain, co-founder of E$-prit, wrote to his friend Jean Cocteau. 'A convert. A man God has turned inside out like a glove." Sartre himself was fascinated by the process of conversion—there are so many references to it in Being and Nothingness that one wonders if he was not tempted to take the step himself (Albert Schweitzer was, after all, his uncle). Many of the converts were the children of mixed family backgrounds: Catholics married to Jews, or Protestants living with Catholics (such as in Sartre's family). All these people had taken, in the face of adverse opinion, a definite choice that would influence what Sartre called their "life project." And all of them, as a result of the historical dilemma of Christianity at that moment, were men stranded alone with their conscience—a very existential situation.
All this demonstrates a complicity between Sartrean and Christian thought, and it did not stop there: the very origin of existential philosophy in France was Christian.
Gabriel Marcel was one of the converts, though his acceptance into the Church was hardly dramatic. The Catholic novelist, Francois Mauriac, wrote to him one day, pointing out what a lot they had in common. "Why aren't you one of us?" asked Mauriac, so "one of us" he became. The two dramatic events in his life were the death of his Jewish mother when he was four, which put his whole life in a "desert universe," and the First World War when, too weak to fight, he served with the Red Cross's information bureau: every day he would see relatives of men missing in action so that "every index card became a heart-rending personal appeal." Born in 1886, Gabriel Marcel was sixteen years older than Sartre. His life was marked by the empty and the absurd. This influenced the philosophy he developed, in fragments, during the years that followed the First World War.
His biographer M. M. Davy called him the "itinerant philosopher"; he travelled a lot and, although he passed his agregation in philosophy at the tender age of twenty, he never held a teaching post. He lived in a flat in that significant frontier-land between the Luxembourg Gardens and the Sorbonne, an area which, though beyond the formal limits of the Sixieme Arrondissement, was considered one of the "protectorates" of Saint-Germain-des-Pres in the heyday of the Germanopratin empire. What interested Marcel in his empty universe was the human relationship. He used his talents in music to express the unexpressible features of that relationship; and, like Sartre, he wrote for the theatre as a means of demonstrating the central role played by the "mot" and the "toi." His first major philosophical work, Etre et avoir (Being and Having), which he began at the end of the Great War and completed in 1933 (to be finally published in 1935), anticipated Sartre's ontology by a whole generation. The themes of Marcel's thought are recognizably Sartre's.
Marcel by the 1930s had, after the experience of the Great War, the rise of new brutal dictatorships, the disorientation of the Church and the weak response of Europe's democracies, become convinced that his world—the "broken world" he called it in one of his plays—had been emptied of humanity; it was like a watch which ceased to tell the time, or a body whose heart had stopped beating: things seemed to go on as before, but there was nothing inside; the world had lost its soul. During the Occupation he wrote a series of essays that were published in 1945 as Homo Viator, or "Man the Traveller"—unlike Sartre, Marcel did not manage to get his works past the Vichy censors. His message was a clear call to "engagement." "The true patriot cannot believe in the death of his country," he wrote, "he does not even consider he has the right to believe it."
But for Marcel the Liberation of 1944-45 was no cause for celebration. In Les Hommes contre I'humain (Men against Humanity) he described the world that emerged from the war as even more "dehumanized" than it had been in the 1930s. He had no sympathy for the ideology of Resistance that conducted purges on suspected collaborators, he did not join the ranks of anti-imperialists and de-colonizers, he disliked the ruling post-war penchant for "the spirit of abstraction" and warned against becoming the "vassals" of organized political allegiance. As the leading proponent of what by now was known as "Christian Existentialism," Marcel took Sartre's Being and Nothingness to task for taking—with its pour-soi and en-soi—a step backwards into dualism; Sartre, he thought, was artificially separating thought into idealistic and materialistic domains and risked falling into the trap of pure materialism. These comments were published in 1951, shortly before Sartre slid, irredeemably, into the extreme left.
THE MATERIALIST T EM PTAT I ON for Sartre—as Marcel perceived it—lay just around the corner from the café de Flore, on the Rue Saint-Benoit. Communist journalists used to meet in the Montana and neighbouring cafés; formal meetings of the Germanopratin "cell," no. 722, took place in the nearby Salle de Geographie on Boulevard Saint-Germain, after which the elite of the Party would withdraw for an encounter at No. 5, Rue Saint-Benoit (it was the district of saints), in the flat of Marguerite Duras, then a slim brunette author with a bark. It was the relations Sartre had with the Communists, along with divisions in his own "existentialist" camp, that drove him over the brink in 1952.
The Communists were themselves divided by the developing Cold War, which by 1948 was getting very hot. "If the Red Army Occupied France What Would You Do?" asked the political weekly Carrefour. In interviews, members of the French Communist Party turned the question round, "Why not the American army?" Anti-Americanism reached fever pitch amongst Communists and fellow-travellers. One Communist paper, Action, began a serious campaign against Coca-Cola, warning that it was "a drug liable to provoke violence." Communist frenzy could be turned on its own people, sometimes in quite ludicrous circumstances. Marguerite Duras and six of her friends were expelled from the Party in 1949 because of a conversation in the café Bonaparte during which Laurent Mannoni, journalist at Ce Soir, described Laurent Casanova, editor of La Nouvelle Critique and patron of Communist intellectuals, as a "Grand Mac," a pimp. Jorge Semprun, active in another journal, reported this to the Central Committee and, as a result, earned a reputation as a mouchard. The affair was still being heatedly discussed on French television fifty years later.
Expulsion from the Party was, for a Communist militant, like the break-up of a marriage or the loss of a close relative. The sociologist Edgar Morin, who had joined the Party at the end of the war, has spoken of the "great warmth of comrades, the wonderful feeling that radiates from the words 'c'est un copain,'lje suis un copain.'" Communist camaraderie was an adolescent game that married well with the jazz culture of Saint-Germain; but its somewhat murderous "anti-Fascist" rhetoric makes hard reading today. Many of the participants—two of Marguerite Duras' husbands, for example—had spent time in Nazi concentration camps. Communists tended to survive. A Communist network inside the camps placed comrades in relatively safe administrative positions— both Jorge Semprun and the Italian author Primo Levi have described the cruel logic behind this. As a result Communist resisters in France tended to survive. Well might the French Communist Party of the postwar years boast of the "75,000 fusilles": most of the 40,000 resisters executed by the Nazis were in fact not Communist—they had been denounced to the Nazis by the Communists.
The subject of concentration camps was a particularly sensitive one after 1945 and a major cause of division among comrades and fellow-travellers— not the Nazi camps, but the Soviet ones. Sartre was dragged into the debate.
The whole quarrel began when a Soviet defector to the United States, Victor Kravchenko, published in 1947 a French translation of his I Chose Freedom. The Communist-run Les Lettres Francaises accused the book of being written by anti-Soviet specialists in US intelligence. Parts of the original English version, it was true, had been subject to intrusive editing in order to make it "fit for the American reade
r," but that Kravchenko was its author could never be doubted. Kravchenko filed a double suit for criminal libel against Les Lettres Francaises and came over to Paris to push his case through. When he appeared, in January 1949, in the Salle de Geographie at the opening of the trial the world press was present. The intellectuals of Saint-Germain-des-Pres had never had such coverage before. The Soviet Union flew in a fleet of witnesses, including Kravchenko's former wife; but they did the Communist cause no good. "What I did, I did for the whole world, for all free people," said Kravchenko and, supported by devastating testimony on the barbarity of Soviet camps, he won his case.
For the Communists of Saint-Germain, worse was to follow. In November 1949 a left-wing Socialist who had himself done time in the Nazi camps, David Rousset, published in the conservative Figaro Lit-teraire an 'Appeal for the constitution of a committee of enquiry into the Soviet camps." The camps, reported Rousset, "are placed under the direction of sections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which carry the name Gulag." Rousset had not fully grasped the complexity of Soviet camp administration, but this was the first time the term "Gulag" was used in the West.
It caused an uproar within the Germanopratin community of deportees, represented by a Communist front organization called the "National Federation of Deportees, Internees, Resisters and Patriots" (FNDIRP) under Pierre Daix, a pure Stalinist who was in large measure responsible for the expulsions of Marguerite Duras and friends. Emergency meetings of Cell 722 were held, insults were exchanged; Duras' ex-husband, Robert Antelme, claimed that the alienation of workers under "capitalism" was just as inhuman as the Soviet Union's concentration camps. He deplored the anti-Communist tone of Rous-set's article. Antelme's position was endorsed by Sartre in his Temps Modernes. Rousset filed a suit for libel; Daix and his director at Les Lettres Francaises were fined as a result of graphic court testimony on the horrors in Soviet camps. The Communists of Saint-Germain were quite evidently living in "bad faith."
WITH IN TWO YEARS, Sartre was behind them. Every Sunday afternoon in the late 1940s there would be an editorial meeting, in the Gal-limard building, of Les Temps Modernes. Most of the young present were either Party members or fellow-travellers, despite a vicious Communist campaign against Sartre—"the hyena," the impenitent individualist, the "disciple of the Nazi Heidegger" and the inventor of a philosophical system that was both "nauseating and putrid." Sartre had a soft spot for the young, especially young women—and it may have been this that was the cause of his slide leftwards.
When asked how he managed to handle so many "contingent loves" at the same time, Sartre admitted that he had to resort to lying. In the more important political domain he lied, too. The ridiculous positions he took as a "public man" after 1952 naturally caused people to wonder about his responsibility as a writer and his philosophy of engagement, liberty, authenticity and freedom of choice. Was man really as radically free as Sartre had initially insisted? Or was his behaviour determined by deep, hidden forces beyond his control? If the latter were true, Sartre's whole philosophical system crumbled.
Most influential on Sartre's political position was his assistant editor at Les Temps Modernes, the Sorbonne professor of philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty lived on Rue Jacob and, though the author of the most cerebral, abstract works, had an enormous sense of fun; he was the only philosopher in Saint-Germain to dance with the girls in the jazz clubs —the others used to cogitate in a dark corner with their friends, half-hidden by a pall of cigarette smoke. In stark contrast to his behaviour, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy was sombre, ambiguous and empty of any hope of discovering the secret of the chaotic universe in which he lived—a reflection of his unhappy, if privileged, childhood. Merleau-Ponty's sentences ran on forever; one could never be sure whether priority should go to the well-camouflaged main phrase or the multiple qualifications that enveloped it. He rejected Sartre's division of being into the pour-soi and the en-soi, which he thought too close to Descartes' duality of mind and body to be comfortable, and instead he offered the reader the idea of a "body subject" that combined the spiritual and the material—in this sense he was closer to the Christian thought of Gabriel Marcel than Sartre. But there was no religious faith in Merleau-Ponty to act as guide; just the self-organization of the thinking subject, an "en-etre," which the American intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes translated as "being with it." It was a philosophy full of doubt, the forerunner of that of today's cultural relativists. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty spoke in his last major work, before he was struck down by a heart attack at the age of fifty-three in 1961, of writing a "relativism beyond relativism." By that time he had withdrawn from political activity entirely and had retreated into a study of the problem of perception.
But in the late 1940s he, and not Sartre (or Albert Camus), was the driving force in the politics of Saint-Germain's existentialists. The book that gave him political leadership was Humanisme et terreur, an apology for Soviet terrorism published in 1947. Juliette Greco described an enjoyable evening spent with him, drinking punch and dancing: "He accompanied Jujube [as Greco described herself] to her door and then returned home to his Humanisme et terreur." Sartre affirmed the importance of Merleau-Ponty's political influence in the obituary he wrote for Les Temps Modernes in 1961: "He was my guide; it was Humanisme et terreur which made me take my step. This little book, so dense, opened up both method and object: it was the snap of the fingers that pulled me out of inactivity."
The book advocated a "Marxism of expectant waiting," one that would give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt, an "understanding without adherence and of free examination without belittling"—in other words, a blank cheque, a refusal to accept the anti-Communism of the American camp while taking advantage of the margin of safety in European events that would allow one to remain neutral and thus save the peace. Typical of his relativistic stance, Merleau-Ponty compared French and British "terror" in their colonies with Stalin's crimes, which needed to be "understood." Merleau-Ponty argued that Soviet leaders were more honest than those of the West in admitting to their own terrorist practices. By the mid-1950s he deeply regretted having written this perverse little book.
On 25 June 1950 North Korean troops, with the encouragement of the governments in Moscow and Peking, invaded South Korea. Merleau-Ponty recognized that the Soviet Union was the principal aggressor, as did Sartre's other wayward collaborator Albert Camus, whose last illusions about the nature of Soviet Communism had been destroyed by the evidence of the Soviet concentration camps. Sartre, on the other hand, joined the majority of left-wing intellectuals in accusing the United States of warmongering.
Merleau-Ponty's subsequent drift into relativism and metaphysics had been anticipated in his earlier writings, which were not exactly a ringing endorsement of commitment. As for Camus, he had never been a philosopher; he is remembered today for his novels—L'Étranger (The Outsider), La Peste (The Plague), La Chute (The Fall)—not his essays. L'Homme révoké (The Rebel), published in a critical year for Sartre, 1951, which contained some marvellous portraits of Marx and Lenin, and with comments even more incisive on the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and the French Surrealists, was analytically weak: all it argued was that, faced with the savage, formless movement of history, man should endeavour to respect human life and remain moderate. Sartre, in his stinging criticism of the book the following summer, rightly pointed out that Camus was attempting to have the best of both worlds, the ethics of the violent rebel and personal happiness; this kind of ambiguity could not be endorsed by the philosopher of "engagement," existential Sartre. "Friendship can become totalitarian," wrote Sartre, and he accused Camus of pursuing "only literature"; Sartre broke with Camus for good. For a couple of years Camus withdrew from writing altogether, concentrating instead on the production of his plays. He then seemed to be moving in the direction of intensive literary creation when his career was tragically cut short by a motor accident near Sens in January i960.
From a strictly philosophical
point of view, Camus' story is marginal. As for Merleau-Ponty, he had marginalized himself by pursuing a purely relativistic strain of thought that committed him to nothing. In contrast to both Camus and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre had set himself a clear choice: the wrong choice. He plunged into it with gusto.
By the time the Korean War broke out he was living under a punishing regime of political activity, playwriting, journalism and a night-time reading of the works of Karl Marx—not to mention his complex love affairs. He was smoking two packets of unfiltered Boyards, drinking coffee and tea by the litre, and chewing up to twenty pills of corydrane—a popular 1950s mixture of aspirin and amphetamines—every day Simone de Beauvoir, his companion, recorded in her diary that he did not sleep for three nights out of the week, and when he did decide to go to bed he gulped down half a bottle of whisky and four or five sleeping pills. To arrive at this point of clear choice Sartre was, as he graphically put it himself, "breaking the bones in my head."
In Being and Nothingness Sartre described the futility of man's efforts fully to apprehend himself and his surroundings in terms of Henri Poincare's sphere, in which the temperature decreased as one moved from the centre towards the surface. Try as they might, individual beings could never reach the surface because the lowering of temperature produced in them a continually increasing contraction: "they tend," wrote Sartre, "to become infinitely flat proportionately to their approaching their goal, and because of this fact they are separated from the surface by an infinite distance." The surface was the etre-en-soi, the autrui, the Other— a living being always beyond reach.
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