Did Sartre believe what he said?

The French Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is the paradigm of the committed intellectual.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
03 June 2023 Saturday 16:23
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Did Sartre believe what he said?

The French Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is the paradigm of the committed intellectual. What no one had wondered is: did the guy believe what he said? In a delicious essay, A Very Different Sartre, the philosopher François Noudelmann – who has had access to the author's personal documents, from the archive of his daughter, Arlette Elkaïm (1935-2016) – draws us someone who forced himself to give his opinion on all things, trying very hard to exercise his role as an engaged thinker, in an exercise of masochism, and who realized that, in order to sound forceful and be mobilizing - to get "the cry" that he asked for, in each of his articles , the director of Libération–, had to resort to a simplistic and Manichaean style –violent, even– which, he was aware, left the complexity of reality somewhat battered.

A symbol of communism and anti-colonialism, these do not seem to be the convictions that moved him in his most private sphere, but rather he manifests himself as someone capable of defending very different opinions. Fed up with representing his character in the magazine Les Temps Modernes, one day he exclaimed: "I would like to be a troubadour again!" and, again, "politics bores me."

Some of the many women with whom he had relationships – with the tacit consent of Simone de Beauvoir, who did the same – were key in his commitment to the USSR: he drank the winds for his Russian translator, Lena Zonina (“the East and the West confront each other in our bed," he blurts out), and in order to visit her there and get her permits to go abroad, he easily exaggerated his Soviet fervor. He also boasts of having won the Swedish Academy award for the Stalinist Sholokhov after he refused the Nobel prize.

As Noudelmann demonstrates, a public man is not identical to his intimate self. We assume coherence and sincerity where, sometimes, there are social roles, intimate tolls and a devastating vital wheel that pushes us. Sartre doubted his commitment as some Pope will have ever lost faith in him, although in this case we will never know.