Modern Mind

having sung on the German-run Radio-Paris. Georges Simenon was placed under house arrest for three months for allowing some of his Maigret books to be made into films by the Germans. The painters André Derain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Kees van Dongen, and Maurice Vlaminck (who had gone into hiding at the liberation) were all ordered to paint a major work for the state as a punishment for accepting a sponsored tour of Germany during the war; and the publisher Bernard Grasset was locked up in Fresnes prison for paying too much heed to the ‘Otto List,’ the works proscribed by the Germans, named after Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris. 14 More serious was the fate of authors such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles Maurras, and Robert Brasillach, who had been close to the Vichy administration. Some were put on trial and convicted as traitors, some fled abroad, others committed suicide. The most notorious was the writer Brasillach, an ‘exultant fascist’ who had become editor of the virulently anti-Semitic
Je suis partout
(? am everywhere’, but nicknamed
Je suis parti,
‘I have left’). He was executed by firing squad in February 1945. 15 Sacha Guitry, the dramatist and actor, a sort of French Noël Coward, was arrested and asked why he had agreed to meet Goring. He replied, ‘Out of curiosity.’ Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev’s protégé and the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra, was initially banned for life from the French stage, but this was later commuted to a year’s suspension. 16
    Sartre, who had been in the army, interned in Germany and a member of the resistance, saw the postwar world as his moment, and he wanted to carve out a new role for the intellectual and the writer. His aim, as a philosopher,was still the creation of
l’homme revolté,
the rebel, whose aim was the overthrow of the bourgeoisie; but to this he now added an attack on analytic reason which he described as ‘the official doctrine of bourgeois democracy.’ Sartre had been struck, in wartime, by the way man’s sense of isolation had disappeared, and he now felt that existentialism should be adapted to this insight – that action, choice, was the solution to man’s predicament. Philosophy, existentialism, became for him – in a sense – a form of guerrilla war in which individuals, who are both isolated souls and yet part of a joint campaign, find their being. With Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre (as editor in chief) founded a new political, philosophical, and literary journal called
Les Temps modernes
(Modern Times), the motto for which was, ‘Man is total: totally committed and totally free.’ 17 This group in effect joined the long line of thinkers – Bergson, Spengler, Heidegger – who felt that positivism, science, analytic reason, and capitalism were creating a materialistic, rational but crass world that denuded man of a vital life force. In time this would lead Sartre to an equally crass anti-Americanism (as it had Spengler and Heidegger before him), but to begin with he declared in his
Existentialism
(1947) that ‘man is only a situation,’ one of his most important phrases. Man, he said, had ‘a distant purpose,’ to
realise
himself, to make choices in order to
be.
In doing so, he had to liberate himself from bourgeois rationality. 18 There is no doubt that Sartre was a gifted phrase maker, the first soundbite philosopher, and his ideas appealed to many in the postwar world, especially his belief that the best way to achieve an existential existence, the best way to be ‘authentic,’ as Heidegger would have put it, was to be
against
things. The critic, he said, has a fuller life than the acquiescer. (He even refused, in later life, the award of the Nobel Prize.) 19 It was this approach that led him in 1948 to found the Revolutionary Democratic Association, which tried to lead intellectuals and others away from the obsession that was already dominating their lives: the Cold War. 20
    Sartre was a Marxist – ‘It is not my fault if reality is Marxist,’ is how he put it. But in one important regard he was overtaken by the other member of the trinity that founded
Les Temps modernes,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had also attended Kojève’s seminar in the 1930s, and he too had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger. After the war, however, he pushed the ‘anti’ doctrine much further than Sartre. In
Humanism and Terror,
published in 1948, Merleau-Ponty