During World War II, Albert Camus and the “Combat” newspaper he edited, which spoke for the French resistance, were among the hardliners calling for a “purge,” that is, handing those who collaborated with the Nazi occupation the most severe sentences possible. On the other end of the spectrum was Francois Mauriac, a devout Catholic novelist and European conservative, who had sided with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
However, once France was liberated in 1945, what came to be known as the Robert Brasillach affair emerged. This novelist and critic went from a conservative to a fascist and anti-Semitic collaborator. He thereby took the opposite path of Mauriac, who supported the resistance after having been a nationalist in awe of General Petain. Nevertheless, it was Mauriac who launched a petition calling on General de Gaulle not to execute Brasillach, despite that the latter had defamed him personally, as well as publicly mocked and celebrated his diagnosis with laryngeal cancer.
In the meantime, Camus’ stance regarding the execution of collaborators had changed, leading him to apologize to Mauriac and sign the petition. As for Jean-Paul Sartre, his friend at the time, he refused to sign it, insisting that collaborators must be dealt the most severe punishment possible because people like Brasillach should have no place in a new and pure world.
We rarely see mention of this incident in histories of the relationship between the angry and tense Sartre and the welcoming and forgiving Camus, which was a major juncture in modern French cultural history, just like Sartre’s relationship with the philosopher and sociologist who combined liberalism and conservatism, Raymond Aron. Their divergent views with regard to the Brasillach affair provides insights into the personalities of both men, the differences of which are often marginalized in discussions of their intellectual disputes.
Nevertheless, the friendship between Sartre and Camus, which began during World War II, specifically with Sartre’s play “The Flies” (1943), became strained a few years later.
With the publication of Camus’s “The Rebel” (1951), it seemed that maintaining this friendship would be difficult. Its author expressed an extremely negative view of the acts of violence perpetrated by communism and other similar movements, and he argued that the survival of the Stalinist Soviet Union was a perpetuation of the crime that had been the Second World War. Sartre found this to be a moralistic position, as standing with the persecuted should be the priority, and this can only be achieved by being in solidarity with the Soviets and supporting the French Communist Party.
Then came their famous dispute regarding violence after the Algerian Revolution broke out in 1954. Sartre backed the revolution unequivocally, arguing that colonial injustices justified its acts of violence and that this violence was a means to a great end. Meanwhile, Camus did not believe that anything could justify violence; to him, politics was subservient to morality.
Camus’ position seemed at odds with the two popular positions of the time: that which demanded that the “terrorists” of the National Liberation Front be stamped out, and the other that called for stamping out the white settlers. Indeed, he did not want to stand with either side - neither the left “looking for traitors” nor with the right “looking for volunteers.” In the end, the two extremes succeeded in silencing him, and once Sartre took control of the cultural milieu, Camus was shunned from it.
However, when he was close friends with the Communists between 1950 and 1956, Sartre celebrated not only the violence unleashed by national liberation but also the violence that was embraced by communism and accompanied its rise. These were the only positions, in his opinion, suitable for an intellectual to adopt because the intellectual is “the priest of the era (...) a rifle in the service of political engagement.”
Taking this path, he had his big fall: amid the climate of the Cold War that had just erupted, Sartre wrote “The Communists and Peace” in 1952. The book expressed support for the Communist Party and voiced fears that it could be banned, as western governments were rapidly making authoritarian turns. While McCarthyism in the US gave credibility to such verdicts, Sartre went as far as denying that the Soviet Union had Gulags. Indeed, after a visit to Moscow in 1954, he insisted that its people enjoyed “total freedom to critique,” hurling accusations at the writers and critics who had said otherwise and slandering them.
Soon, in 1955, Aron published his famous book “The Opium of the Intellectuals,” which, in a sense, is a polemic against Sartre (and another existentialist philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), his silence, and “engagement.” Echoing Marx’s analogy on the impact religion had on common people, he argues that Sartre’s “myth of revolution” was an opiate numbing the French intelligentsia. He also asserts that “the intellectual’s primary function is not engaging in politics but seeking the truth.” Pursuing the roots of the idea he was critiquing, Aron gave the first three chapters of his book poignant titles: “The Myth of the Left,” “The Myth of the Revolution,” and “The Myth of the Proletariat.”
In 1992, British-American writer and historian Tony Judt addressed this theme in his book “Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956.” He laments the latter’s irresponsibility and moral decline, as well as how, led by Sartre, they were driven to glorify Stalin, exposing their “provincialism” and their inability to reconcile their positive view of communism with a critical view of the Soviet Union’s actions in Eastern Europe.
Sartre began distancing himself from communism and the Soviets with the invasion of Hungary in 1956. However, he then famously wrote a violent and fiery preface for Franz Fanon’s book “The Wretched of the Earth” in 1961. It was also around this time that his adoration of leaders like Castro and Che Guevara grew. After Che’s death in Bolivia in late 1967, Sartre claimed that he was “not only an intellectual but the most complete human being of our age.”
Subsequent judgments of the role that French political culture had played under Sartre were not made in isolation of such strained and haphazard positions and opinions. The dispute was trivialized along these lines; the public debate was made void of contemporary and pressing questions, giving the French extreme right the opportunity to fill, in its own way, these large, neglected gaps.
While Camus, influenced by his re-evaluations and the noble position taken by his ideological opponent Mauriac, changed his view and adopted a less violent and more humane position, Sartre’s frustration with the Soviet Union and its communism drove him to adopt a more violent position whose violence was grounded in greater radicalism.
Looking at the past from the window of the present, it might be a major oversimplification to attribute the positions of Sartre and Camus on violence to their personalities and moods. However, overlooking the impact of their personalities would likely give rise to another kind of oversimplification.
