Modern Mind

welded Sartre and Stalin in the ultimate existential argument. 21 His central point was that the Cold War was a classic ‘boundary situation,’ which required ‘fundamental decisions from men where the risk is total.’ Successful revolutions, he claimed, had not shed as much blood as the capitalist empires, and therefore the former was preferable to the latter and had ‘a humanistic future.’ On this analysis, Stalinism, for all its faults, was a more ‘honest’ form of violence than that which underlay liberal capitalism. Stalinism acknowledged its violence, Merleau-Ponty said, whereas the Western empires did not. In this respect at least, Stalinism was to be preferred. 22
    Existentialism, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty were, therefore, the conceptual fathers of much of the intellectual climate of the postwar years, particularlyin France, but elsewhere in Europe as well. When people like Arthur Koestler – whose
Darkness at Noon,
exposing Stalinist atrocities, sold 250,000 copies in France alone – took them to task, they were denounced as liars. 23 Then Sartre
et al.
fell back on such arguments as that the Soviets covered up because they were ashamed of
their
violence, whereas in Western capitalist democracies violence was implicit and openly condoned. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were one factor in France having the most powerful Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc (in 1952
Les Temps modernes
became a party publication in all but name), and their influence did not really dissolve until after the student rebellions of 1968. Their stance also led to a philosophical hatred of America, which had never been entirely absent from European thought but now took on an unprecedented virulence. In 1954 Sartre visited Russia and returned declaring that ‘there is total freedom of criticism in the USSR.’ 24 He knew that wasn’t true but felt it was more important to be anti-America than critical of the Soviet Union. This attitude persisted, in Sartre as in others, and showed itself in the philosopher’s espousal of other Marxist anti-American causes: Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. Nearer home, of course, he was a natural leader for the protests against France’s battle with Algeria in the mid-1950s, where Sartre supported the FLN rebels. It was this support that led to his friendship with the man who would carry his thinking one important stage further: Frantz Fanon. 25
    France, more than most countries, lays great store by its intellectuals. Streets are named after philosophers and even minor writers. Nowhere is this more true than in Paris, and the period after World War II was the golden age of intellectuals. During the occupation the intellectual resistance had been led by the Comité National des Ecrivains, its mouthpiece being
Les Lettres françaises.
After the liberation the editorship was taken over by Louis Aragon, ‘a former surrealist now turned Stalinist.’ His first act was to publish a list of 156 writers, artists, theatre people, and academics who had collaborated and for whom the journal called for ‘just punishment.’ 26
    Nowadays, the image of the French intellectual is invariably of someone wearing a black turtleneck sweater and smoking a harsh cigarette, a Gauloise, say, or a Gitane. This certainly owes something to Sartre, who like everyone in those days smoked a great deal, and always carried scraps of paper in his pockets. 27 The various groups of intellectuals each had their favourite cafés. Sartre and de Beauvoir used the Flore at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Saint-Benôit. 28 Sartre arrived for breakfast (two cognacs) and then sat at a table upstairs and wrote for three hours. De Beauvoir did the same but at a separate table. After lunch they went back upstairs for another three hours. The proprietor at first didn’t recognise them, but after Sartre became famous he received so many telephone calls at the café that a Une was installed solely for his use. The Brasserie Lipp, opposite, was shunned for a while because its Alsatian dishes had been favoured by the Germans (though Gide had eaten there). Picasso and Dora Maar used Le Catalan in the rue desGrands Augustins, the Communists used the Bonaparte on the north side of the
place,
and musicians preferred the Royal Saint-Germain, opposite the Deux Magots, Sartre’s second choice. 29 But in any event, the existential life of ‘disenchanted nonchalance’ took