Baert - The Existentialist Moment The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual

Patrick Baert

polity

Copyright Patrick Baert 2015

The right of Patrick Baert to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8543-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baert, Patrick, 1961
The existentialist moment : the rise of Sartre as a public intellectual / Patrick Baert.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-8539-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-8539-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-8540-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-8540-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980. 2. Existentialism. I. Title.
B2430.S34B255 2015
194--dc23

2014043776

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I would like to thank Elliott Karstadt, India Darsley and Susan Beer at Polity Press for their help and patience with this project. I am also grateful to John Thompson, who has been encouraging throughout and provided important input at crucial points. I wish to thank Bruno Frre, Marcus Morgan and Flore Cuny for reading the whole manuscript carefully and for suggesting significant improvements. I would like to thank various people who have commented substantially on sections of the book, or on my conference presentations related to the book: in particular, Jeffrey Alexander, Ed Baring, Damian Catani, Randall Collins, Emma Murray, Gisle Sapiro, Alan Shipman and Darin Weinberg. The comments by anonymous reviewers have been extremely helpful, for which I am most grateful.

Some of the research and writing took place while I visited the Sociology Departments of Brown University and the University of Cape Town, as well as the Centre europen de sociologie et de science politique (CNRS-EHESS-Universit de Paris I Panthon Sorbonne). I am also thankful to staff at the British Library, the University Library in Cambridge and the Bibliothque nationale de France.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement no. 319974 (INTERCO-SSH). This book also benefited from a Leverhulme fellowship (RF-2012-339) and a British Academy small grant (SG102163).

Jean-Paul Sartre achieved an astonishingly high public profile during his heyday. Commentators invariably refer to the huge crowds at his funeral (50,000 according to one estimate), but the evidence for his public standing in France (and indeed abroad) goes well beyond this single event. Sartres books and plays have been a remarkable success, and once he had come to public prominence he managed to draw large audiences whenever he gave lectures. The amount of sustained media attention and his political influence in France and abroad has been unrivalled.

This book is an attempt to comprehend this extraordinary case of public celebrity. We will not be discussing at length all of Sartres forays into politics which stretched over a period of nearly four decades; there are many books that have documented this aspect of his biography extremely well. Instead, we will try to focus on the period, in France, when Sartre rose from relative obscurity to public prominence. We call it the existentialist moment because we are talking about a short time span, one in which not just Sartre, but also his philosophy, caught the publics imagination.

Popular conceptions of Sartre tend to locate his rise and that of existentialism in the context of the political turmoil of the 1960s and the student movement, but closer scrutiny shows that this was a period when Sartres philosophical status and, to some extent, his public impact was already on the wane. Sartre came to public prominence much earlier, in the mid-1940s. His popularity and that of his philosophy rose dramatically in a remarkably short space of time, between 1944 and 1947 especially in the autumn of 1945. This is not to say that there was no interest in his writings before 1944, Yet, within a mere two to three years, Sartre would turn into a major public figure and existentialism would become vogue. After 1947 Sartre and his fellow existentialists managed to maintain a high profile, though there was no longer a significant rise in their popularity and their philosophy played increasingly less of a role. Indeed, from the late 1940s onwards, the political issues of the day, rather than philosophy, underscored the public appearances and writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, as they, like most other intellectuals in France, became embroiled in the cold war over which they eventually fell out.

The central question, therefore, is twofold: one aspect deals with timing, the other with Sartres philosophy itself. Firstly, why did Sartre and his philosophical movement gain such rapid intellectual acceptance with an artistic and popular following in France at this particular time between 1944 and 1947, not before or after? Secondly, why during this period was it Sartres existentialist movement that was so successful in gaining popularity? After all, Sartres philosophical writings were rather opaque and the philosophical current of existentialism had a remarkably small following in France before 1944. Further, the philosophical origins of Sartres existentialism were distinctly German and were indebted to the work of Martin Heidegger, who had been tainted by his closeness to the Nazi regime during the 1930s.

To make sense of the rapid rise of Sartre in the mid-1940s in France, we will analyse various aspects of the socio-political climate at the time, two of which are worth flagging up here. Firstly, between 1940 and 1945, French intellectuals became involved in intense power struggles in which those seen to be associated with the Resistance were ultimately victorious. In this context, we study the activities of the Comit national des crivains, the Resistance organization of writers, as well as the purge (puration) of collaborationist intellectuals. We explore how some of the themes that were raised at the trials of collaborationist intellectuals, such as the notion of the authors responsibility, fed into Sartres existentialist concerns. Secondly, we analyse the role of Sartre in the repairing of severed social ties and the remaking of French nationhood. We argue that the notion of cultural trauma is particularly apt to describe the state of France at the time. Cultural trauma refers to a widespread sense that certain events in this case, Vichy and the occupation caused collective distress and irredeemable damage, potentially threatening the social fabric of society. Sartre expressed a sense of cultural trauma without using those words but also, crucially, provided a vocabulary to come to terms with it. We argue that it is this dual role that was a key to their success.