The Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is the paradigm of the committed intellectual. What no one had asked was: did he believe what he said? In a delicious essay, Un Sartre muy distinto el 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 to give an opinion on all things, trying very hard to exercise his role as an engaged thinker, in an exercise of masochism, and that he 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 Manichean style – violent, even– which, he was aware, left the complexity of reality a little damaged.
A symbol of communism and anti-colonialism, these do not seem to be the convictions that moved him in his most private sphere, but he manifests himself as someone capable of defending very diverse opinions. Tired of representing his character in Les Temps Modernes magazine, one day he exclaims: "I'd like to be a troubadour again!" and, once again, "politics bores me".
One of the many women with whom he had relations – with the tacit consent of Simone de Beauvoir, who did the same – was key in his commitment to the USSR: he was obsessed with his Russian translator, Lena Zonina ( "East and West meet in our bed", he lets her go), and in order to visit her and get her permission to go abroad, she exaggerated her Soviet fervor without any problem. He also boasts that, after having rejected the Nobel Prize, he won the Swedish Academy award for the Stalinist Sholokhov.
As Noudelmann demonstrates, a public man is not identical to his intimate self. We presuppose consistency and sincerity where, on occasion, what there are are social roles, intimate tolls and a crushing life wheel that pushes us. Sartre doubted his commitment as any Pope will have ever lost faith, although in this case we will never know.
