JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

8Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsof-war camp in Triers that made Sartre realise that he was subject to politicalforces and needed to take political action. On his escape in March 1941 hehelped found the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté.It could be that the experience of the 1939–45 war left Sartre with twoenduring models or attitudes for his politics in the period 1945–80. The Nazioccupation of France provided him with a stark contrast between oppressorand oppressed. It seemed so obviously right to side with democracy,socialism and France against the violent totalitarianism of the invader (evenif, for many of Sartre’s contemporaries, collaboration or passiveacquiescence was a more prudent strategy). This clean distinction betweenthe rights of the oppressed and the wrongs of the oppressors is a moraldistinction that informs nearly all his post-war political commitments. TheFrench state and the Algerian people, the Batista regime and the Cubanrebels, the USA and the Vietnamese communists, the Franco regime inMadrid and the ETA separatists, German business and government and theBaader Meinhof gang, the Renault management and the striking car workers:in each case Sartre unquestioningly divides political antagonists intooppressor and oppressed, immoral and moral. The Nazi occupying forcesand the French resistance are the prototype for these clashes of Good andEvil.The other enduring political attitude bequeathed to Sartre by the SecondWorld War was an immense sympathy for the Soviet Union. In their caféarguments in the 1950s Sartre would allow himself to criticise Soviet policy,but if Albert Camus or Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined him he would spring tothe Soviet Union’s defence. It was not just the fact that the Soviet Union wasthe most effective antidote to Nazism in the period 1941–5, it was also that,in Sartre’s eyes, the communist French resistance seemed so much moreeffective than the Gaullist, pro-Western, French resistance in killing Germansand sabotaging the Nazi military economy. His admiration for the communistresistance fighters was immense. In himself he felt ashamed andinadequate: ashamed of his bourgeois upbringing, ashamed of hisprivileged education and lifestyle, ashamed of his political and militaryineffectiveness as an intellectual rather than a fighter.Indeed, it was mainly by writing that he resisted. In January 1943 hejoined the Comité National des Ecrivains and in 1944 started writing for theresistance paper Combat. He staged the politically didactic Bariona in theStalag and Les Mouches (The Flies) in Paris in 1943, the descent of the fliesonto Argos being a barely concealed allegory for the Nazi occupation ofFrance. In September 1944 Sartre formed the editorial committee for thesocialist literary, political and philosophical review Les Temps Modernes. In1945 he declined the Légion d’honneur.