Modern Mind

Husserl called these moments of ‘unmediated existence,’ when one is forced to ‘choose and act,’ when life is ‘most real.’ 6
    Sartre followed Aron to Berlin in 1933, apparently ignoring Hitler’s rise. 7 In addition to the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, Sartre also took advantage of the intellectual climate created in Paris in the 1930s by a seminar at the Sorbonne organised by a Russian emigré named Alexandre Kojève. This introduced a whole generation of French intellectuals – Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and André Breton – to Nietzsche and to Hegel’s ideas of history as progress. 8 Kojève’s argument was that Western civilisation and its associated democracy had triumphed over every alternative (ironic in view of what was happening then in Germany and Russia) and that everyone, eventually, including the presently downtrodden working classes, would be ‘bourgeoisified.’ Sartre, however, drew different conclusions – being far more pessimistic in the 1930s than his Russian teacher. In one of his most famous phrases, he described man as ‘condemned to be free.’ For Sartre, Following Heidegger much more than Kojève, man was alone in the world and gradually being overtaken by materialism, industrialisation, standardisation,
Américanisation
(Heidegger, remember, had been influenced by Oswald Spengler). Life in such a darkening world, according to Sartre, was ‘absurd’ (another famous coinage of his). This absurdity, a form of emptiness, Sartre added, produced in man a sense of ‘nausea,’ a new version of alienation and a word he used as the title for a novel he published in 1938,
La Nausée.
One of the protagonists of the novel suffers this complaint, living in a provincial bourgeois world where life drags on with ‘a sort of sweetish sickness’ –
Madame Bovary
in modern dress. 9 Most people, says Sartre, prefer to be free but are not: they live in ‘bad faith.’ This was essentially Heidegger’s idea of authenticity/inauthenticity, but Sartre, owing to the fact that he used more accessible language and wrote novels and, later, plays, became much more well known as an existentialist. 10 Although he became more optimistic after the war, both phases of his thinking are linked by a distaste – one might almost say a hatred – for the bourgeois life. He loved to raise the spectre of the surly waiter, whose surliness –
La Nausée
– existed because he hated being a waiter and ready wanted to be an artist, an actor, knowing that every moment spent waiting was spent in ‘bad faith.’ 11 Freedom could only be found by breaking away from this sort of existence.
    Intellectual life in Paris experienced a resurgence in 1944, precisely because the city had been occupied. Many books had been banned, theatres censored,magazines closed; even conversation had been guarded. As in the other occupied countries of Eastern Europe and in Holland and Belgium, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a special task force under Alfred Rosenberg, whose job it was to confiscate both private and public art collections, had descended on France. The paper shortage had ensured that books, newspapers, magazines, theatre programs, school notebooks, and artists’ materials were in short supply. Sartre apart, this was the age of André Gide, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, Lautréamont, of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel, and all the formerly banned American authors – Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Damon Runyon. 12 Nineteen-forty-four also became known as the year of ‘Ritzkrieg’: though the world was still at war, Paris had been liberated and was inundated with visitors. Hemingway visited Sylvia Beach – her famous bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. (which had published James Joyce’s
Ulysses)
had closed down, but she had survived the camps. Lee Miller, of
Vogue,
hurried to resume her acquaintance with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Eluard. Other visitors of that time included Marlene Dietrich, William Shirer, William Saroyan, Martha Gellhorn, A. J. Ayer, and George Orwell. The change in feeling was so marked, the feeling of renewal so complete, that Simone de Beauvoir talked about ‘Paris in the Year Zero. 13
    For someone like Sartre, the
épuration,
the purge of collaborators, was also, if not exactly joyful, at the least a satisfying display of justice. Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet were blacklisted, for