The mid-20th century: The German Occupation and postwar France
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the resultant division of the country were
experienced as a national humiliation, and all French citizens were confronted with an
unavoidable choice. Some writers escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the war in
the safety of exile or with the Free French Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist
convictions or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics, tried to carry on as individuals
and as writers, ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the occupying forces or the Vichy
government. Jean Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group and later were criticized
for their conduct. Giono, in fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose
reputation was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several writers joined the military, as well as the intellectual, resistance. André Malraux
served on many fronts and commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in World
War II in France, projecting the image of the writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a
minister under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and the Fifth Republic.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive for the French Communist
Party, which was to gain considerably through its organized opposition to fascism. The events of
the 1930s and ’40s strengthened the conviction that intellectuals could not remain politically
uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism, depicting humanity alone in a godless universe,
provided intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as free to determine themselves
through such choices.
Meanwhile, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive audience to writers who
upheld the honour of their defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a wide public,
notably in the works of the Communist activists Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon, whose poems
were often transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A flourishing clandestine press
included the newspaper Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was Le Silence de
la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by Vercors (Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted
in Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like Aragon’s collection of poems Le Crève-Coeur
(1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans. Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance and
was instrumental in restoring French pride and prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s
fable La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the Occupation, returned to the issues of
resistance and collaboration to present both a humane understanding of the pressures and limits
set by circumstance and a moral judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to become
part of it.
Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing some writers and lending prestige—for
the time being, at least—to those who had made the right moral and political choices. During the
Occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the questions of freedom and necessity,
and the interrelationship of individual and collective responsibility and action, in plays such as
Les Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No Exit, also published as In Camera) and
in the treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and
his ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its innocence,
its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947;
Froth on the Daydream). Sartre’s patronage of Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm
the reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy and homosexual desire added to the
radical ferment of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs [1943; Our Lady of the
Flowers] and Querelle de Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays would give new
direction to drama in the 1950s.
Camus
At this period, Sartre’s name was linked with that of Albert Camus, then editor in chief of
Combat, whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also published as The Outsider) explored
similar issues of the social attribution of identity. The two broke off relations after Sartre’s
critique of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel). Sartre moved toward the existentialist
Marxism of his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing evidence
of his isolation, his creative unease, and his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of liberation surfaced during the Cold War and
were intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The
Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner) vividly depicted the moral, political,
and personal choices confronting French intellectuals in a world defined by the battle for
hegemony between Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of women’s situation, Le
Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first appearance, was to be a
more influential achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of autobiographical works
that tracked the different phases of her own life and the exchanges within it between public and
private experience. After Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his later years in La
Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous publication in the
1990s of their letters and diaries from the war years later brought the relationship between the
couple, and their relationships with others, into more-complex and sometimes surprising
perspectives.
