The decline and fall of Jean-Paul Sartre
(Credit Image: © Philippe Gras/Le Pictorium Agency via ZUMA Press)
April 15 was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. On the day of his funeral, the streets of Paris were lined with mourners. It was a huge event — not just the death of a famous writer and philosopher but the end of an era.
This era, the thirty years between the Liberation of France in 1944 and the 1970s, became known as the Trente Glorieuses, an extraordinary explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity in France. In his book on French intellectual life just after the war, Past Imperfect, Tony Judt wrote, “the decades during which they [the French] basked in the glow of national and global admiration and emulation, span the years 1945 to 1975.” Perry Anderson wrote in the LRB, “The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing.”
During these years, Paris was the centre of contemporary culture, whether in history-writing, cinema, philosophy or theatre. Above all, there was Sartre and de Beauvoir.
In an essay in the LRB in 2000, the literary critic Edward W. Said described the excitement of being invited by Sartre in 1979 to a gathering on the Left Bank to discuss the state of the Middle East. Said had just published Orientalism to widespread critical acclaim. This was a huge moment for him: “It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial.”
“For my generation,” wrote Said, Sartre “has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time.”
But by the time he was writing, twenty years after Sartre had died, Said had to admit Sartre’s moment had passed: “Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view… From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed.”
Said doesn’t offer much of an explanation for Sartre’s spectacular decline. But the reasons are obvious now and, indeed, they were obvious long before Said wrote his essay.
Tony Judt, a great admirer of Sartre’s rival, Camus, offered a devastating account in Past Imperfect. First, Communism. During the heyday of French Communism, after the war, Sartre played an ignoble role. Reading some of his interventions now, he comes across as the Owen Jones of the Left Bank. “An anti-Communist is a dog, I don’t change my views on this, I never shall.” On Soviet aggression under Stalin: “I have looked, but I just cannot find any evidence of an aggressive impulse on the part of the Russians in the last three decades.” In 1954 he argued that the Soviet citizen enjoys complete freedom to criticise the system. “He criticizes more frequently and more effectively than us.”
On post-war Stalinism, he wrote, Communist analyses “are just: the errors, ignorance, and weaknesses of the moment, do not affect that.” He was writing in Les Temps modernes weeks after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
It wasn’t just what Sartre wrote. It’s what he published in Les Temps modernes, which he founded and edited. A sentence like this from Louis Delmas: “Stalinism’s greatest crime is perhaps its stifling of collective consciousness.” Jews, Ukrainians, those who studied and suffered in the Gulags might wonder how one of “of the French maîtres penseurs” could publish this.
Then there was Mao’s China. “Nowhere have I ever witnessed such solidarity and such care,” he wrote about his first visit to China in 1955. “Lack of professors? Never mind.” Frederic Raphael has written of “The vileness of the ultra-left tricoteurs who sentimentalized nihilistic savagery in a far-off country of which they knew nothing…” This sums up Sartre’s enthusiasm for the greatest mass killer of the 20th century.
Sartre’s blindness about the Gulag and Mao, his acceptance of revolutionary violence, all of this was well known when Said excitedly flew to Paris to meet his hero and when people lined the streets of Paris. It is a devastating legacy now. Of course, he wasn’t the only one. That is why the “Trente Glorieuses” don’t look so glorious now.
