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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE THE EUROPEAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2018

HUGH MCDONNELL
HUGH MCDONNELL*
Affiliation:
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre's 1961 famous and infamous preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth has engendered the common impression of Sartre as an intellectual who was particularly hostile to Europe. In revising this perception, this article reviews Sartre's engagement with the idea of Europe over many decades. This certainly included critique, but also nuanced and positive considerations of what Europe and being European meant. This thinking about Europe is to be situated, first, in terms of Sartre's evolving philosophical project to reconcile freedom and facticity, and second, in political and intellectual contestations over Europe in the context of fascism and the Second World War, postwar international relations, and the emergence of the Third World. Sartre's contribution to these debates was an adumbration of a “knotted Europe,” the provincialization of Europe whilst retaining a commitment to universalism, and a notion of Europe as an ongoing project rather than an ossified identity.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 147 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

This article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (637709–GREYZONE–ERC-2014-STG). It has benefited from the comments and suggestions of many readers. In particular I would like to thank Ian Birchall, Emile Chabal, Nancy Jachec, Michael Wintle, the Political Theory Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, the two anonymous reviewers for the journal and the editors of Modern Intellectual History.

References

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17 Ibid., 110.

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23 Shurts, “Continental Collaboration,” 87.

24 Sartre, “Drieu La Rochelle.”

25 Shurts, “Continental Collaboration,” 92.

26 Ibid., 80, 83.

27 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Paris sous l'occupation,” in Sartre, Situations III, 15–42, at 28, 26.

28 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Fechtman (Abingdon, 2006), 218.

29 Jean-Paul Sartre, “La république du silence,” in Sartre, Situations III, 11–14, at 11.

30 Flynn, Sartre, 232.

31 Ibid.

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33 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Défense de la culture française par la culture européenne,” Politique étrangère 3 (1949), 233–48, at 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An abridged English version of Sartre's piece was published in Commentary in May 1950. However, an editor's note stipulated that the translation was in fact a condensed version of a speech given before the French League against Anti-Semitism. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “A European Declaration of Independence,” Commentary, May 1950, 407–14, at 407. This is informative, since Sartre invoked the war and occupation a great deal in relation to his idea of Europe, but not often with specific reference to Nazi persecution of Jews, even though that issue, of course, was intrinsically linked to the fascist idea of Europe that he attacked. He took great interest in Jews as a persecuted people, but this is an unusual instance of linking their persecution directly to the European idea.

34 Sartre, “Défense de la culture française,” 246.

35 Ibid., 245.

36 Roger Nimier, “Vingt ans en 1945,” La table ronde 20–21 (Aug.–Sept. 1945), cited in Girardet, Raoul, “L'héritage de l'Action française,” Revue française de science politique 7/4 (1957), 765–92, at 792CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soustelle, Jacques, “France and Europe: A Gaullist View,” Foreign Affairs 30/4 (1951–2), 545–53, at 545CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Sartre, “Défense de la culture française,” 246.

38 Ibid.

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41 See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, “Villes d'Amérique,” in Sartre, Situations III, 93–112, at 93–4, 99, 101, 107; Sartre, “New-York, ville coloniale,” in Sartre, Situations III, 113–24, passim.

42 Sartre, What Is Literature?, 51.

43 Ibid., 227, original emphasis.

44 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Il faut que nous menions cette lutte en commun,” La Gauche, 20 Dec. 1948, in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 204.

45 Cited in Birchall, Ian H., “Neither Washington nor Moscow? The rise and fall of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire,” Journal of European Studies 29 (1999), 365–404, at 397CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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47 Grémion, Pierre, “Introduction,” in Grémion, , ed., Preuves: Une revue européenne à Paris (Paris, 1989), 11 and passimGoogle Scholar.

48 Sanders, Frances Stonor, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999), 101Google Scholar. For examples of articles specifically targeting Sartre see especially Jacques Carat, “La deuxième ‘enfance d'un chef’,” Preuves, Aug.–Sept. 1952, 94–7; and François Bondy, “Jean-Paul Sartre et la révolution,” Preuves, Dec. 1967, 57–69.

49 See Duong, Kevin, “Does Democracy End in Terror? Transformations of Antitotalitarianism in Postwar France,” Modern Intellectual History 14/2 (2017), 537–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Extracts reprinted in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 228.

51 Ibid., 229.

52 Ibid., 245.

53 Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, 123.

54 Ibid.

55 On “passion” in politics see Sartre, “The Theory of the State in Modern French Thought”; Sartre, Jean-Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

56 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les animaux malades de la rage,” Libération, 22 June 1953, reprinted in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 704–8, at 705.

57 Ibid., 708.

58 Cf. Simone de Beauvoir's extended critical examination of the bourgeois idea of Europe and its relation to contemporary European integration, such as the European Defence Community, in Simone de Beauvoir, “La pensée de droite, aujourd'hui,” Les Temps modernes, June–July 1955, 1539–75.

59 On Sartre's admiration and affection for Togliatti see Gerassi, John, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven and London, 2009), 198–200Google Scholar.

60 See de Rougemont, Denis, Vingt-huit siècles d'Europe: La conscience européenne à travers les textes d'Hésiode à nos jours (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar.

61 See John Oswald, “Constructions of Europe in the Fictional and Political Works of Albert Camus” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Stirling, 2001), 139.

62 Bracke, Maud, “From the Atlantic to the Urals? Italian and French Communism and the Question of Europe, 1956–1973,” Journal of European Integration History 14/2 (2007), 33–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 38–9, 42.

63 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism,” in Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, 1973), 95–201Google Scholar.

64 Contat and Rybalka, in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 34.

65 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Le Congrès de Vienne,” Le Monde, 1 Jan. 1953, reprinted in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 256–9, at 256.

66 “Una entrevista con Jean-Paul Sartre, por Marcel Saporta,” Cuadernos Americanos, Jan.–Feb. 1954, 57–64, at 58.

67 The compatibility of Sartre's fellow traveling with a certain Europeanism was also indicated by the special issue of Les Temps modernes in 1955 devoted to an examination of the left. The (unsigned) editorial focused on the PCF's aim of reviving the Popular Front, including the SFIO, arguing that only this could help to establish a neutral zone in Europe allowing the coexistence of the two blocs. “Vers un front populaire?”, Les Temps modernes, May 1955, 2005–15, at 2015.

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70 See Jachec, Europe's Intellectuals and the Cold War, 142–3.

71 Ibid., 205.

72 See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, “Le devoir d'un intellectuel est de dénoncer l'injustice partout,” Combat, 31 Oct.–1 Nov. 1953.

73 See especially Judt, Past Imperfect.

74 Flynn, Sartre, 283–4.

75 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présence noire,” Présence Africaine 1/1 (Nov.–Dec. 1947), 28–9, at 29.

76 Ibid.

77 See Santoni, Ronald E., Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (University Park, 2003), 9Google Scholar.

78 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, Massachusetts Review 6/1 (1964–5), 13–52, at 14Google Scholar.

79 Ibid., 14–15.

80 Arthur, Paige, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London and New York, 2010), 30Google Scholar.

81 Ibid., 37.

82 “The Declaration in Support of Those Who Refuse to Fight in Algeria,” New Left Review 1/6 (1960), 41.

83 See Butler, Judith, “Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon,” in Judaken, Jonathan, ed., Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Albany, 2008), 211–31Google Scholar.

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85 De Rougemont, “Sartre contre l'Europe,” 4.

86 Ibid., original emphasis.

87 Jean-Marie Domenach, “Les damnés de la terre,” Esprit, March 1962, 454–63, at 457.

88 Ibid., 454, 458–9.

89 Ibid., 458–9.

90 Ibid., 462–3.

91 Ibid., 455.

92 Emma Kathryn Kuby, “Between Humanism and Terror: The Problem of Political Violence in Postwar France, 1944-1962” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 2011), 393–6.

93 Ibid., 388–9.

94 Cited in Butler, “Violence, Nonviolence,” 224. Note here that Butler is using the 1963 translation of the preface, which differs slightly from the most recent translation, which renders the final line as “as the infinite unity of their reciprocal relations.”

95 See Monahan, Michael J., “Sartre's ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ and the Inevitability of Violence: Human Freedom in the Milieu of Scarcity,” Sartre Studies International 14/2 (2008), 48–70, at 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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97 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Matter as Totalised Totality: A First Encounter with Necessity,” in ibid., 122–252.

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99 Ibid., 143, my translation.

100 Euripides, The Trojan Women, adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Ronald Duncan (London, 1967), 9–10. It is ironic that Sartre mistakes Europe for a wholly modern term in adaptation of Greek play, since the term was, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, first used by the Greeks. See Hobsbawm, Eric, “On the Curious History of Europe,” in Hobsbawm, , On History (London, 1997), 217–27Google Scholar.

101 Euripides, The Trojan Women, 54.

102 Ibid., 9.

103 One can trace this conviction back to at least his 1954 piece “La bombe H, une arme contre l'Histoire,” Défense de la Paix, July 1954, 18–22. Recall also his September 1958 lament that “since Hiroshima, we have been threatened, angered and worried the whole time. I imagine that in every mind there is a scar which is nothing less than terror at rest. Many people today could repeat Hobbes's words of three centuries ago: ‘The one and only passion of my life has been fear.’” See Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Frogs Who Demand a King,” in Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 109–34, at 127.

104 Santoni, Sartre on Violence, 143.

105 Note, though, philosopher Stephen Priest's claim that “During the Cuban missile crisis of 1963 [sic] Sartre pleaded with the Soviet government not to give in to American pressure to withdraw their weapons from Cuban soil.” Stephen Priest, “Sartre in the World,” in Priest, ed., Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings (London, 2000), 1–19, at 9. However, the claim is not referenced, and I have been unable to find any reference to it in the contemporary press.

106 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Palmiro Togliatti,” in Sartre, , Situations IX: Mélanges (Paris, 1972), 137–51, at 143Google Scholar.

107 Ibid., 145, 144.

108 Sassoon, Donald, The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party: From the Resistance to the Historic Compromise (London, 1981), 112Google Scholar.

109 Ibid., 109.

110 Jean-Paul Sartre, “From One China to Another,” in Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 22–35, at 23–4.

111 Ibid., 25, original emphasis.

112 “Sartre non va in U.S.A,” L'Unità, 19 March 1965, in Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 412.

113 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Il n'y a plus de dialogue possible,” in Sartre, , Situations VIII: Autour de 68 (Paris, 1971), 9–19, at 12Google Scholar.

114 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présentation,” Les Temps modernes, Oct. 1945, 1–21, at 7.

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