Sartre Chides the Commissars
PARISOT, PAUL
Sartre Chides the Commissars The French existentialist may be breaking with Stalinism By Paul Parisot Paris The French Communist party has received an unexpected ultimatum from Jean-Paul Sartre....
...You couldn't care less...
...The critical reception of the book and its sales were not such as to give the Communist party a moment's anxiety...
...we must crown with flowers the books you like and stamp those you dislike into the mud...
...The alliance between Sartre and the Communists was consecrated last year, when he and his colleague, Simone de Beauvoir, were nominated to the "World Peace Council...
...You'll do it without our permission...
...Sartre protests quite bitterly against the fate of the intellectuals who dedicate themselves to the party's service...
...When he took up politics, he may have hoped at least to make his own personal mark, especially since he had at his disposal a literary review of his own...
...It was the same when he decided to go over to the Communist position...
...But what you have absolutely no right to do is to insult us...
...Sartre now runs the review as his own personal organ, with the aid of two or three young disciples who are also Communist sympathizers...
...They included Robert Antelme...
...Ostensibly, his attack is confined to the author of the offending article...
...The first time was under the German occupation, when he joined the Resistance...
...There is every reason to think that the trouble did not begin with the Humanile article, which served merely as a pretext for him to say what he had wanted to say for some time...
...Then start by hiding Kanapa in the background...
...Sartre has always succeeded brilliantly at everything he tried novels, philosophy, plays...
...whose insolence is only equaled by his servility...
...and the seizure is underlined by his altogether unusual promptness in replying to an attack which did not, after all, touch him directly...
...He saddles the party in advance with responsibility for any such split...
...In page after interminable page of Les Temps Modernesin articles always "to be continued...
...And you let him talk...
...And Kanapa talks of splitting...
...though in fact followed by long months of silence he defended the decision of the Communist party politburo to foment street demonstrations a decision which was reversed just as he was in the process of thinking up his best arguments...
...Are you crazy...
...Mascolo himself and some of his friends took part in the debate, and there was a long report of it in the next day's Combat, so that a considerable public was reached...
...But "the trouble is, though, that L'Humanite has put it on page 2...
...And if we permit ourselves to weigh a book in scales which are not identical with yours, we are immediately relegated to the ranks of police-intellectuals and St.-Germain-des-Pres philosophers...
...Sartre's personality makes this attitude of the party easy to understand...
...The second was in the ill-fated Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire in 1948...
...Let them dispute severely with us, toughly if they wish, so much the better and we will be as tough as they...
...But I ask you: Who are the splitters...
...the "sneak...
...It goes without saying that intellectuals who are Communists will not always agree with us who are not...
...The importance he would attach to this concession appears when he says: "It takes more than one swallow to make a summer, and more than one Kanapa to disgrace a party...
...The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, co-editor until recently, has withdrawn since becoming a professor at the College de France...
...Paul Parisot, who relates the lastest chapter in Sartre's career, is one of the abler young journalists of the French Left...
...they'll discover him soon enough anyway...
...And, finally, it is in the name of the "rassemblement of honest intellectuals" called for by the party, and which he believes he joined in good faith, that he protestsand how violently...
...In his retort to L'Humanite...
...Like Sartre, the author admits the Communist party's claim to be "the party of the proletariat...
...By treating Communism as a "theory of material needs" and the Communist movement as a "movement for the satisfaction of material needs," he considers that he is by no means disputing this claim but, on the contrary, confirming it...
...It was not directed against Sartre, who is not even mentioned, and the insults he takes unto himself ("cafe philosopher," "police-intellectual") are clearly aimed elsewhere: principally at Dyonis Mascolo, a young writer expelled from the Communist party about three years ago, and secondly at the monthly periodical, Preuves, published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...At this point, the wayward Sartre began to feel himself in danger...
...To all appearances, it was the debate organized by Preuves and its echoes in the daily press which produced the repercussions that culminated in the explosion from L'Humanite...
...Dyonis Mascolo himself, through his position in the Gallimard office, is a literary personality of some importance in Paris...
...the form it took was to deny to all intellectuals the right of discussing Communism...
...But his conclusion is that the intellectuals must "infiltrate" Communism and get control of it, and he was himself expelled from the party mainly because he resisted the ideological dictatorship which the Central Committee exercised over the party's intellectuals...
...If the party were to disown Kanapa, it is probable that Sartre would let the whole matter drop for the time being...
...If the article commits only its author, one can chuck it away without comment...
...It contains nothing to distinguish it from the usual Communist party literature devoted to attacking intellectual opponents while reminding fellow-travelers of their place...
...This sort of thing fills a whole page and concludes with: "But if you want to convince the intellectuals, beware of oversimplification: for what they see between the lines will not be a field of creative potentiality but the hypnotic void of imbecility...
...The particular case concerns a long, heavy volume, Marxist with a strong existentialist tinge, by Dyonis Mascolo, entitled Le Communisme, which was published last autumn by Gallimard...
...He has twice before committed himself in politics...
...This report is his first contribution to The New Leader...
...One of its founders, the sociologist Raymond Aron, writes regularly for Figaro and Preuves, and another, Jean Paulhan, edits the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Franqaise...
...He carries good will to the point of admitting that a book which may be...
...Like many intellectuals before him, Jean-Paul Sartre French novelist, playwright and existentialist philosopher elected to walk the Communist "road of the future" and found it thorny path...
...in his own eyes, "in no way anti-Communist" can be condemned "for [the party's] own reasons...
...This may be a postwar postscript to The God That Failed...
...Sartre, however, begins his reply by stating explicitly: "I seize this occasion to turn to those in charge of the Communist party's intellectual activities and to speak frankly to them...
...The tone soon sharpens to a shrill irony, and "those who direct the Communist party's intellectual activities" are required to prove that they do not intend to murder intelligence: "Do you really want to reassure [the intellectuals] that they will not become ciphers...
...Nevertheless, though hurling an ultimatum, "Disown Kanapa or you break our alliance," Sartre still obeys the rules of his political game...
...On neither of these two occasions did the philosopher and novelist of "engagement" reveal any great aptitude for political activity, but he did show himself extremely zealous to expound the reasons for his actions and to become one of the theoreticians of the movement he had joined...
...Are you blind to the inconsistencies of your position, which are so glaringly obvious to the rest of the world...
...Writes Sartre: "It is not enough to agree with you on all the main heads of your policy...
...Thus, the party felt compelled to take action...
...He makes much of the fact that Colette Audry, the Temps Modernes writer most attacked by Kanapa, has taken part in all the Communist campaigns...
...In the Humanite article which enraged Sartre, Kanapa could only quote four reactions to the booka discussion organized by Preuves, and the notices in Les Temps Modernes, La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Francaise and L'Ecole Liberatrice (the organ of the teachers' union, in which the Communists are a minority)but he gave an example of "amalgam" by adding to the list Le Populaire-Dimanche (Socialist party weekly), which never mentioned the book but which had criticized the Communist intellectuals' study circles...
...On the Communist side, the only concession was to call off the public attacks on Sartre and his magazine...
...the most authentic withered fruit of any European Communist party...
...But it was always a one-way rapprochement...
...It is called upon to retract an article which appeared in L'Humanite of February 22, failing which Sartre predicts a split between the party and those intellectuals "who are in agreement [with it] on all the main themes of [its] politics...
...author of L'Espece Humaine, one of the best novels of life in the Nazi concentration camps, and the young novelist, Marguerite Duras, whose already considerable body of work was recognized by the literary juries last year...
...He warns the party which staged the Moscow Trials against "amalgams" which are worthy of Franco's Spain, though conceding that "the demands of action sometimes hinder one from making necessary distinctions...
...Are you again going to sacrifice your alliances to the insane arrogance you maintain toward your allies...
...The article which provoked this sudden wrath was reprinted in full, along with Sartre's reply, in the March number of Les Temps Modernes...
...At the heart of the new quarrel, the real issue doubtless a realer one than Sartre believes is this: May Les Temps Modernes, however useful it might be to the Communists in other ways, retain the right to praise, even with reservations, a book written by an expelled party member...
...Have you learned nothing...
...Very well, but in that case it is you who will have destroyed the very unity we wished to make...
...a former disciple who disengaged himself from Sartre in order to devote his whole work to the party and to edit La Nourelle Critique, the most sectarian of the Communist intellectual journals...
...The diplomatic editor of Franc-Tireur, he is also a member of the editorial staff of the international monthly Preuves...
...Sartre seems to be beside himself at the mere thought of Kanapa, the "cretin...
...The wall of suspicion was never breached, and Sartre's own attempts to collaborate more closely with the party were not encouraged...
...Several of his fellow-members of the party's Sixth Paris Section were expelled along with him...
...Jean Kanapa...
...Les Temps Modernes today bears no resemblance to what it was in the years immediately after the liberation...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
