JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world9Sartre entered the Second World War young but emerged middle aged.He was thirty-four when it began in 1939 and forty when it ended in 1945, soit was the mature Sartre who was the socialist Sartre.The Sartre that emerged from the 1945 conflict was increasingly a Marxist,an eloquent and committed revolutionary who felt a duty to speak out for thedispossessed of the world, a mass media critic of French colonialism inIndo-China and Algeria, the Batista regime in Cuba, the treatment of theBasques in Spain, and the American involvement in Vietnam. His serioustheoretical works were increasingly political works, from the June 1946essay ‘Materialism and Revolution’ (Materialisme et Révolution in Les TempsModernes) through the massive first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason(1960) and its prefatory Questions of Method (Questions de Méthode) untilhis final loss of patience with Marxism in the aftermath of ’68. In October1948 his works were placed on the prohibited list of the Catholic church. Aperennial irritant to the Gaullist government and a communist ‘fellowtraveller’, Sartre always eschewed formal membership of the PartiCommuniste Français, which he criticised as doctrinally fixed, inauthenticand too far to the right. In February 1948 Sartre joined in the attempt to forma coalition of left-wing political parties, the Rassemblement DémocratiqueRévolutionaire (RDR) but this proved a failure when the PCF left. In January1950 Sartre and Merleau-Ponty jointly condemned the Soviet Gulag system.Nevertheless, Sartre worked closely with the PCF, for example over theHenri Martin affair, until the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising of1956 which he condemned in the November of that year. In the same monthhe condemned the Anglo–French invasion of Egypt in the Suez Crisis.The post-war Sartre was willing to take risks. From January 1955 LesTemps Modernes officially condemned French rule in Algeria and Sartrespoke out at press conferences and at demonstrations. On 19th July 1961Sartre’s rented accommodation at 42 rue Bonaparte was bombed, probablyby pieds noirs appalled by his urging the French to withdraw from Algeria. On7th January of the following year it was bombed again, so he moved to anappartment on Quai Blériot. That was bombed too so he had to move to 222boulevard Raspail. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1963 Sartre pleadedwith the Soviet government not to give in to American pressure to withdrawtheir weapons from Cuban soil. Regarded by many as irresponsiblebehaviour in a world on the brink of nuclear holocaust, this for Sartre was anauthentic political act.In 1964 Sartre was offered the Nobel Prize for Literature but refused it,adding that he would also have declined the Lenin Prize had it been offeredhim. Authentic writing is not subject to an authority with the power to grant orwithhold prizes.