At the Existentialist Café (25 page)

The difficulty of being free was the theme of the play Sartre was rehearsing when Camus introduced himself:
The Flies
. It opened on 3 June 1943, Sartre’s first real play, if you do not count skits written for his fellow POWs in Stalag 12D. He later called it a drama ‘
about freedom, about my absolute freedom, my freedom as a man, and above all about the freedom of the occupied French with regard to the Germans’. Again, nothing about this seemed to faze the censors. This time it may have helped that he gave the play a classical setting — a ploy other writers also used during this time. Reviewers made little comment about its political message, although one, Jacques Berland in
Paris-Soir
, complained that Sartre seemed
too much of an essayist and not enough of a playwright.

Camus had his Sisyphus; Sartre took his parable from the story of Orestes, hero of the
Oresteia
plays of Aeschylus. Orestes returns to his home town of Argos to find that his mother Clytemnestra has conspired with her lover Aegisthus to kill her husband, Orestes’ father King Agamemnon. Aegisthus now rules as a tyrant over the oppressed citizenry. In Sartre’s version, the populace is too paralysed by humiliation to be capable of rebelling. A plague of flies swarming over the city represents their demoralisation and shame.

But now Orestes the hero enters the scene. As in the original, he kills Aegisthus and (after a passing scruple) his own mother. He has successfully avenged his father and liberated Argos — but he has also done something terrible, and must take on a burden of guilt in place of the townspeople’s burden of shame. Orestes is hounded out of town by the flies, who now represent the classical Furies. The god Zeus appears and offers to drive the Furies away, but Sartre’s Orestes refuses his help. As an existentialist hero, rebelling against tyranny and taking on the weight of personal responsibility, he prefers to act freely and alone.

The parallels with the French situation in 1943 were clear to see. Sartre’s audience would have recognised the debilitating effects of the
compromises most of them had to make, and the humiliation that came from living under tyranny. As for the guilt factor, everyone knew that joining the Resistance could bring risks to one’s friends and family, which meant that any act of rebellion brought a real moral burden. Sartre’s play may not have bothered the censors, but it did have a subversive message. It also went on to have a long and equally provocative afterlife in other countries and other times.

Beauvoir was now exploring similar themes in her work. She wrote the only play of her career, not put into production until after the war (and then to bad reviews).
Useless Mouths
is set in a medieval Flemish city under siege; the city’s rulers initially propose to sacrifice the women and
children so as to conserve food for warriors. Later they realise that it is a better tactic to bring the whole population together to fight in solidarity. It is a clunky tale, so the bad reviews are not surprising, although Sartre’s play was hardly any subtler. After the war, Beauvoir would publish her much better ‘resistance novel’
The Blood of Others
, which weighed the need for rebellious action against the guilt that comes from putting people in danger.

Beauvoir also wrote an essay called ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’ during this time, which takes the principle of bold action beyond war into more personal territory. The story comes from another classical source, Plutarch’s
Lives
. The Greek general Pyrrhus is busying himself winning a series of great victories, knowing that there will be many more battles to come. His adviser, Cineas, asks him what he intends to do when he has won them all and taken control of the whole world. Well, says Pyrrhus, then I will rest. To this, Cineas asks:
why not just rest now?

This sounds a sensible proposal, but Beauvoir’s essay tells us to think again. For her, a man who wants to stop and navel-gaze is not as good a model as the one who commits himself to keep going. Why do we imagine that wisdom lies in inactivity and detachment, she asks? If a child says, ‘I don’t care about anything,’ that is not a sign of a wise child but of a troubled and depressed one. Similarly, adults who withdraw from the world soon get bored. Even lovers, if they retreat to their private love nest for too long, lose interest in each other. We
do not thrive in satiety and rest. Human existence means ‘transcendence’, or going beyond, not ‘immanence’, or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of things to do — a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath. For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done.

A related but different message emerges from Camus’ ‘resistance novel’, again published only after the war in 1947:
The Plague
. It is set in the Algerian town of Oran during an outbreak of that disease; the bacillus suggests the Occupation and all its ills. Everyone in the town reacts differently, as quarantine is imposed and claustrophobia and fear increase. Some panic and try to flee; some exploit the situation for personal gain. Others fight the disease, with varying degrees of effectiveness. The hero, Dr. Bernard Rieux, pragmatically gets down to the work of treating patients and minimising infection by enforcing quarantine regulations, even when these seem cruel. Dr. Rieux is under no illusion that humanity can overcome deadly epidemics in the long term. The note of submission to fate is still there, as in Camus’ other novels — a note never heard in Beauvoir or Sartre. But Dr. Rieux concentrates on damage limitation and on pursuing strategies to ensure a victory, if only a local and temporary one.

Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.

By early summer of 1944, as Allied forces moved towards Paris, everyone knew that freedom was near. The growing emotion was hard to take, as Beauvoir noted; it was like the painful
tingling that comes when sensation returns after numbness. There was also much fear of what the Nazis might do as they retreated. Life continued to be hard: merely finding enough to eat became more difficult than ever. But the faint sound of bombs and artillery brought hope.

The sounds came closer and closer — and suddenly, one hot day in
mid-August, the Germans had gone. Parisians were unsure at first what was happening, especially as they still heard gunfire scattered around the city. On Wednesday 23 August, Sartre and Beauvoir walked to the office of the Resistance journal
Combat
to meet Camus, now the paper’s literary editor: he wanted to commission a piece about the Liberation from them. They had to cross the Seine to get there; halfway across the bridge they heard the crack of gunshots and ran for their lives. But tricolours were now flying from windows, and the next day broadcasts from the BBC announced that Paris was officially liberated.

Church bells pealed throughout the next night. Walking the streets, Beauvoir joined in with a group of people dancing around a bonfire. At one point, someone said they saw a German tank, so everyone scattered, then cautiously returned. It was amid such scenes of nervous excitement that peace began for France. The next day brought the official Liberation parade along the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, led by the Free French leader returned from exile, Charles de Gaulle. Beauvoir joined the crowd, while Sartre watched from a balcony. At last, wrote Beauvoir, ‘the world and the future had been handed back to us’.

(Illustrations Credit 7.2)

The first act of
the future was settling accounts with the past. Reprisals began against collaborators, with swift acts of brutal punishment at first, followed by a wave of more formal trials, some of which also ended in death sentences. Here, Beauvoir and Sartre found themselves again disagreeing with
Camus. After an initial hesitancy, Camus came out firmly against the death penalty. Cold, judicial killing by the state was always wrong, he said, however serious the offence. Before the trial in early 1945 of Robert Brasillach, the former editor of a fascist magazine, Camus signed a petition calling for mercy in case of a guilty verdict. Sartre was not involved, as he was away at the time, but Beauvoir pointedly refused to sign the petition, saying that from now on it was necessary to make
tough decisions in order to honour those who had died resisting the Nazis, as well as to ensure a fresh start for the future.

She was curious enough to attend Brasillach’s trial, which took place on a freezing 19 January 1945 as Paris was covered in deep snow. As the court briefly deliberated and then handed down the death sentence, she was impressed to see how calmly Brasillach took it. Yet this did not change her view that the sentence was right. In any case, the petition made no difference, and he was shot on 6 February 1945.

From now on, Beauvoir and Sartre would invariably line up against Camus whenever such issues were at stake. After his bolder and more effective Resistance activity at
Combat
and elsewhere, Camus now drew clearer lines: he opposed execution, torture and other state abuses, and that was that. Beauvoir and Sartre were not exactly in favour of such things, but they liked to point to complex political realities and means-ends calculations. They would ask whether there really could be cases where harm by the state could be justifiable. What if something very great is at stake, and the future of a vast number of people requires some remorseless act? Camus just kept returning to his
core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view.

If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘
The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later. He had already moved away from some of what he had said in
Being and Nothingness
, with its individualist conception of freedom. Now, he sought to develop a more Marxist-influenced view of human life as purposeful and social. This was one reason why he never managed to write the follow-up volume on existentialist
ethics: his ideas on the subject had changed too much. He did write many draft pages, published after his death as
Notebooks for an Ethics
, but he could not give them a coherent shape.

Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice. Having mastered the art of being beastly to Germans, he now far outdid Beauvoir and Sartre in writing fervent arguments for an uncompromising Soviet-style Communism. In an essay of 1945, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, he wrote that the war had ruled out any possibility of living a merely private life. ‘
We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it,’ he wrote. No one could rise above events; everyone had dirty hands. For a while, ‘dirty hands’ became a buzz term in the existentialist milieu. It went with a new imperative: get down to work, and do something!

Thus, now that the war in France was safely over, Sartre’s gang raced out like greyhounds from opened racetrack gates. Sartre wrote a series of essays arguing that writers had a duty to be active and committed; these appeared in periodical form in 1947, and then separately in 1948 as
What Is Literature?
Authors had real power in the world, he said, and they must live up to it. He called for a
littérature engagée
— a politically committed literature. Beauvoir recalled how urgent all such tasks seemed: she would read of some incident that fired her up, think at once,
‘I must answer that!’, and rush out an article for publication. She,
Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty and other friends produced so much writing so quickly that they got together to launch a new cultural journal in 1945:
Les Temps modernes
. Sartre was the journal’s figurehead, and most people assumed he wrote all its editorials, although in fact Merleau-Ponty put in more work than anyone and wrote many uncredited pieces. The name
Modern Times
was taken from Charlie Chaplin’s manic 1936 film about worker exploitation and industrialisation, a film Sartre and Beauvoir had enjoyed so much when it came out that they sat through two showings in succession. Their pace of literary production matched that lampooned in Chaplin’s film, and over the coming decades
Les Temps modernes
became one of the great engines of intellectual debate in France and beyond. It is still being published today. It was in
Les Temps modernes
that Sartre’s essay on ‘committed literature’ first appeared, and it set the tone for the years that followed.

The flow of existentialist fiction and drama continued too. Beauvoir’s
The Blood of Others
appeared in September 1945. Sartre published the first two volumes of his
Roads of Freedom
novel sequence, both written years earlier and set in 1938. They show his main character Mathieu Delarue progressing from a naive view of freedom as a mere do-as-thou-wilt selfishness towards a better definition, in which he faces up to the demands made by history. By the time the third volume appeared in 1949,
La mort dans l’âme
(variously translated as
Iron in the Soul, The Defeat
or
Troubled Sleep
), we see Mathieu bravely defending a village bell tower as France falls. He uses his freedom to better ends now, but the defeat appears to be the end of him. A projected fourth volume was meant to show him surviving after all, and finding real freedom through solidarity with comrades in the Resistance. Unfortunately, as generally happened when Sartre planned a grand conclusion for a project, the volume was never finished. Only a few fragments appeared, many years later. Just as the ethics question was left hanging in
Being and Nothingness
, the freedom question remained hanging in
Roads of Freedom
. In neither case was the problem to do with Sartre losing interest: it was because of his tendency to keep changing his mind philosophically and politically.