[Source: International Herald Tribune. 3/05]

Remembering Sartre as an 'ethical compass'

Alan Riding International Herald Tribune

Entr'acte

PARIS A century after his birth, 25 years after his death, Jean-Paul Sartre has not been forgotten, but he is also not remembered altogether fondly. For many American conservatives, he still typifies the Left Bank intellectual spouting obscure philosophy amid clouds of smoke. Even for many French, his embrace of Communist causes placed him on the wrong side of history.
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That said, the French National Library is using this double anniversary as the occasion for a major exhibition celebrating Sartre the philosopher, novelist, playwright and, above all, "intellectuel engagé." And in doing so, it is taking a step towards placing him alongside Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola in the pantheon of France's politico-intellectual heroes.
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But is Sartre remotely relevant today?
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As political visionaries, two of his contemporary critics, the novelist Albert Camus and the sociologist Raymond Aron, stand taller because their view of freedom was untainted by association with Stalinism or Maoism. And outside France, Sartre is certainly read less than his very own muse, Simone de Beauvoir, whose book, "The Second Sex," is a founding text of feminism.
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Yet there is no underestimating Sartre's influence over French intellectual and political life for three decades after World War II. Indeed, many of those who grew up in his shadow - as supporters or opponents - are now among the politicians, intellectuals and journalists who shape public opinion here. And in that sense, traces of Sartrism still flow through the country's veins.
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What Sartrism actually means, though, is hard to pin down because of the many Sartres, not only the fiction writer who won - and refused - the 1964 Nobel literature prize, but also the existentialist philosopher, the political activist whose positions frequently changed and the intellectual celebrity who won headlines as a Left Bank ambassador to the likes of Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito.
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This multifaceted life is now on display at the new François Mitterrand National Library through Aug. 21. And while it is notoriously difficult to build an exhibition around a writer, this show does its best through photographs, art works by friends like Giacometti and Picasso, manuscripts, letters, diaries and first editions as well as sound and film clips of key events in his life, interviews he gave and excerpts from performances of his plays.
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Still, first and foremost, Sartre was a philosopher. He taught philosophy in French lycées from 1930 to 1944. And more than his early novels, like "Nausea," and his wartime plays, "The Flies" and "No Exit," it was his monumental treatise, "Being and Nothingness," that thrust him into a position of leadership over the post-war Paris intelligentsia. Through him, "existentialism" became a synonym for the individual's responsibility to promote freedom.
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While French conservatives seemed more disturbed by the long hair and loose morals of the bohemian "zazous," as existentialist groupies were known, Sartre tried to explain his thought in simple phrases. "Existentialism defines man through his action." "The only thing that permits a man to live is the act." "A man engages in his life, defines his profile and, outside this profile, he is nothing." Put simply, every human being determines his or her destiny.
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It followed that Sartre, for one, should be politically engaged, although, until the liberation of Paris in Aug. 1944, this had not been his posture. He played no role in the turbulent politics of France's 1930s. He visited Berlin in late 1933 and did not recognize the Nazi menace. And after a few months as a prisoner of war, he cheerfully he put on plays and published books in German-occupied Paris. But after the war, a different Sartre emerged.
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Placed in the dock today, Sartre would face two charges: between 1952 and 1956, he was a fellow traveler of the French Communist Party, albeit breaking with it after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; and between 1970 and 1974, he supported French Maoists, even famously selling their newspaper on the streets of Paris. His defense counsel might respond: In both cases he was defending their right to exist more than their views. But he nonetheless won new enemies.
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On other issues, time favored him. He was among the first to criticize France's use of force to hold onto its colonies in Indochina and Algeria. He also went to Cairo before the 1967 war to defend Israel's right to exist. He endorsed the May 1968 student revolt in Paris and repeatedly denounced the Vietnam war. He even broke with Castro in 1971 over Cuban persecution of the writer Heberto Pedilla. And late in life, he called for Vietnam's "boat people" to be given refuge here.
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Meanwhile, he continued writing and publishing, notably "The Words," an acclaimed autobiography of his early life, and "The Family Idiot," the first two volumes of his biography of Flaubert.
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As editor of the journal, Les Temps Modernes, he also orchestrated intellectual debate. Only after his eyes began to fail in 1973 was he reduced to making his views known through interviews.
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Yet when he died April 15, 1980, many in the huge crowd that followed his funeral cortege seemed to sense that an era was ending. Since then, the causes he supported have been replaced by others. French lycée students can now study philosophy without understanding existentialism. Among his plays, only "No Exit" is still regularly staged. Libération, the left-leaning daily he helped found in 1973, noted this month that he was "a man of past letters."
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To admirers of Sartre, though, what remains is perhaps more important. Conceding that Sartre's image was still not fixed, Annie Cohen-Solal, author of a well-received biography of Sartre, said she preferred to view him more as "a role model, a way of doing things, than a doctrine or a body of work." And as such, she added, he remains "an ethical compass."
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Michel Winock, co-author of the "Dictionary of French Intellectuals," said Sartre's "taste for the subversive" led him to both political misjudgments and positions which to this day appear legitimate. As for what survives of Sartre, Winock told Le Nouvel Observateur: "I would say above all his moral coherence: his absolute refusal to be resigned in the face of injustice."
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Still, in an era when issues of conscience are drowned out by media cacophony, one of Sartre's greatest fears may yet come true. When he rejected the Nobel literature prize, he explained that "a writer should refuse to be transformed into an institution." Yet a quarter-century after his death, the National Library show risks turning the eternal rebel into a statue: it serves to praise him, but also to bury him.