In Our Time - Sartre

Episode Date: October 7, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jean-Paul Sartre, the French novelist, playwright, and philosopher who became the king of intellectual Paris and a focus of post war politics and morals. Sartre's own life was coloured by jazz, affairs, Simone de Beauvoir and the intellectual camaraderie of Left Bank cafes. He maintained an extraordinary output of plays, novels, biographies, and philosophical treatises as well as membership of the communist party and a role in many political controversies. He produced some wonderful statements: "my heart is on the left, like everyone else's", and "a human person is what he is not, not what he is", and, most famously "we are condemned to be free". Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how Sartre's novels and plays express his ideas and what light Sartre's life brings to bear on his philosophy and his philosphy on his life. With Jonathan Rée, philosopher and historia; Benedict O'Donohoe, Principal Lecturer in French at the University of the West of England and Secretary of the UK Society for Sartrean Studies; Christina Howells, Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Jean-Paul Sartre, French novelist, playwright and philosopher, was king of post-war alternative cafe society, Paris, where the intellectuals regrouped. He was a mid-century focus and force of intellectual influence.

Sart's own life was coloured by jazz, affairs, Simone de Beauvoir, an extraordinary output of plays, novels, biographies, philosophical treaties, and the camaraderie of intellectual discussions in the cafes on the left bank of the seine. He was also politically active in many major controversies. He produced many quotable lines. For instance, a human person is what he is not, not what he is, or we are condemned to be free. How do his novels and plays carry such ideas? And what light does Sartre life bring to bear on his influential philosophy?

And how did he put his ideas into practice? With me to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre is Christina Howes, Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wardham College. Benedict O'Donoghue, principal lecturer in French at the University of the West of England, and Secretary of the UK Society for Sartre and Studies, and the philosopher and historian Jonathan Ray. Jonathan, can we look first at Sartz, as we're going to talk about Sartre's own ideas of how you talk about people, his own ideas of biography, and then perhaps come to the subject of his first novel. but he had fixed, he had very certain ideas about how you write about, how you interpret people's lives.

Yes, indeed. And the first book with which he made an impact on the public was a novel called La Nozé. It came out in 1938. And it's really, it's a novel about novels. It's a novel about what it means to tell a story. And it's constructed in a very clever way. It's presented as the diary of a young man, 30-year-old man, living in a northern French town where he's,

He spent three years trying to write a biography. And he started to write a diary because he thinks that if he writes down everything that happens to him moment by moment, then he will begin to be able to grasp what his own life means. And what he's spending his life doing is sitting in a library reading documents, trying to find out what this 18th century marquee, what his life meant. And he finds that other historians have written about this guy. And they've found it easy to attribute a personality to him, a kind of string on which all the beads of this.

which are the events of his life are supposed to be strong. He finds the more he knows about this Marquis, the less possible he finds it to find this kind of key, this connecting thread. And so we have these two things. We have a diary and a biography running alongside each other. And both of them are about the failure to grasp what a life means. And the conclusion that the diarist, he's called Antoine Rourgantin,

the conclusion that Rok-Conté, comes to is that in a way we're condemned to misunderstand ourselves. The problem is we have an unstoppable impulse to try and make sense of our lives by telling stories which have a beginning and a middle and an end. But that always falsifies things because actually the conclusion he comes to is that there's actually no such thing as a true story. But we can't stop believing that there is. and tell stories about ourselves to make sense of our lives.

Events happen in one direction, he says, but we relate them in the other. That's to say we're constantly trying to imagine what the present would look like when we write an autobiography in our old age or what the present will look like when an obituary comes to be written. We try to imagine an end which will throw light on the present. But actually that end is never given. So we're condemned to constantly misunderstand ourselves. story of a life is the story of the stories by which we misunderstand ourselves. So in a proper sense, this is a philosophical novel. This is not only a novel about the character

or can tell you, and the man he's writing about, but the stories about how you write, how you see life, how you make sense of life, whether there is any sense in life, and which is at the heart of what becomes his philosophy. And he says, sorry, can I just for one second, John, and is this expressed in his own autobiography? You mentioned in your marvelous opening statement there about, in old age we look back in our own lives. Well, he wrote, not in his old age, but he wrote Le Moe, his autobiography, much later on. And is he on the same tack there is how do you write about what we've done? Is there any sense in it? Is there any shape in it? Is there any meaning on it?

Or is this all what he called an illusion retrospective? Yeah, I believe that Le Moe, which he wrote when he was nearly 60, I think, and this account of his childhood, is very much on the same line. And people talk about the difference between the young satch and the old satchar. I think that that's greatly exaggerated the difference. He's still on about the same thing. One way you can put it is that such thought that traditional philosophy and indeed common sense likes to think that we begin by having a sense of who we are

and we build out of that to a sense of who other people are. You know, adolescence or young people or whatever, yeah. Yeah, the starting point of our sense of the world is a sense of ourselves and then we build out of that to a sense of the world and other people. Such as point all the way through is that it's the other way around. Actually, we have a sense of the world first, and we only get a sense of who we are as a reflection of the world and of how others see us. And Le Moe is a story about how he, from the age of, I don't know, three to ten or something,

begins to construct a sense of himself out of the images that get projected to him from his doting mother and his doting grandfather. And it's a cruel story. I mean, if he wasn't writing about himself, you would say this is a sadistic book because it does make a complete fool of the young satch. He's someone who's completely lost in illusions about how he's going to become a great writer. He doesn't really understand who he is.

He just begins to understand it when his beautiful locks are cut off. And he begins to see that his mother is disappointed about this because his mother realizes that he is one of the ugliest, shortest, nastiest-looking boys that there's ever been. Sartre doesn't know that to himself. He knows it because he sees it through the eyes of his mother. So always our sense of ourselves comes from other people. That's the message.

Benedict Donoghue, can you take us on from there? Jonathan's led us to the family, led us to that. What can you give us some, well, as I said it to say it in this context, sort of facts about his childhood and his upbringing? Well, his families come from more or less opposite sides of France. His mother's family are the Schweitzer, so indeed his mother, I think, is a cousin or second cousin of the Wilno Nelbert Schweitzer, and they come from Alsace, and her father, Carl, or Charles, is known as both of those because of where he comes from, the German connection, as it were, and he comes from a family of schoolteachers, and is himself an eminent schoolteacher and the author of a German grammar, as a matter of fact, and he imagines that his bright little grandson in due course will follow him into the academic profession.

Sartre's father's family come from La France Profonde, a bang-slapp in the centre of France, Tivier, in Le Perigour, excuse me, and his family are doctors and medics. His own father was a naval officer who contracted some dreadful interic disease in Indochina and died before his only son Jean-Paul was one year old. And that leaves Sartre, needless to say,

with various complexes, not least of all the complex that he doesn't have. an Oedipal complex because he doesn't have a father to have one about, about which of course in sense he's being ironic, because the super ego is even more super than most super egos, and that's his grandfather, who's grander than most fathers, as the name suggests. And he grows up in Paris,

in this bourgeois, highly cultured, highly educated household, which nevertheless brings together two families from provincial France and two very different families. Carl and his wife, known collectively as Carly, Mamie are not actually great friends. Their tastes in literature in particular are widely divergent. Mamie reads what Carl regards as trashy romantic novels, and she titters at the risque bits behind her hand

and shares the joke with her daughter and Marie Jean-Paul's mother. And meanwhile, Jean-Paul is known as Poulou, as his baby name, is fascinated by the books in his grandfather's library, the leather spines, the tooling on them and so forth, and is inducted in sense into a world of culture and literature at a very early age. So we're talking about very bourgeois background in French terms or in any terms. We're talking about some interesting psychological possibilities, as you pointed out. We're also talking, as Jonathan pointed out,

about somebody who discovers himself to be extremely ugly, short, ugly, very bad eyes, but at the same time very clever. Yes. So that's the setup, that's the young. Yes. And he comes back to Paris, as Ixc and goes to university and spectacularly fails his first major examination. And then meets Simone de Beauvoir,

which is when he's 24, she's 20, and that is a big turning point into life, isn't it? Yes, I mean, we jumped a few rather crucial phases there, but I'm happy to do that if you want us to do that. I mean, he spends a very unhappy adolescence in La Rochelle in the household of his mother and his stepfather which is the crucial period of his development and before he returns to Paris,

and it's when he returns to Paris that he feels rather more at home and goes to school as the Lyce Henri C.R.E.4, I think it is, as a border. And yes, has a relatively brilliant career at school, is true, and eventually goes to the Colormin-Nomer-Ciberia, takes what is known as the aggregation of philosophy, which there isn't really an equivalent over here, but it has the same kind of prestige, I suppose, as a doctoral degree. It fails it the first time round,

you're quite right, to everybody's amazing, despite his brilliance, the second time around when he's preparing the oral he meets Simon de Beauvoir for the first time. And they have an immense impact on one another. She records in her own memoirs that she was immediately struck by his verve, his wit, his intelligence, his good humour, his prankishness, who's great practical Joe Fassart. Was it her interest on him that had gone him to be top of the list that year? She was second. From failing to be top is quite a jump.

Was there anything to do with having an affair with Simone de Beauvoir? What sort of drew him up of this? He says that he realized that in the first time around when he was placed 50th, his mistake had been to write an original answer in his examination. What he should have done was to write a banal answer and present it more originally. So it was a matter of style rather than substance as far as he was concerned. So the second time around, he was placed first and she's second. And the rest, as they say, is history.

She became a key and key figure in the rest of his life and, in fact, nursed him to his death. Obviously, she will reappear as we go along. He was a prisoner of war under the Nazis and then he was released and came back to Paris but what he did when he was a prisoner of war and what he did when he came to Paris in the war was the right plays, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah.

And this is another absolutely crucial formative phase for Sartre when he's in Stalag, 12thier as it was, or treavelte. He writes, produces, performs in a nativity play which uses the story of the nativity with which we're all thoroughly familiar, of course, as a rather sort of thin veil to camouflage what is effect and appeal to resistance

and yearning for freedom. Christina, he comes back to Paris and we have the period of massive prolific playwright here, Des Moos, Du Klo, and so on. He is a playwright. He seems to be allowed great freedom by the occupying, German army and take advantage of it. It can be said that he isn't much affected by the German occupation

and doesn't take much part in resisting it, although the myth of course is that he is part of the intellectual resistance. What's your view of that? Yes, I think that Sauch has been criticised very strongly for this, in particular, by some people one wouldn't expect

to take the line, Levinas, who I wouldn't have expected to take that line, UNESCO, who I would. it seems to me that in fact, as a matter of fact, very recently it's been discovered that Sartch's school teaching post in Paris had belonged to a Jew, two people before, who had been expelled from his post because of being Jewish.

And this has been held very much against Sartch. My own view on this is that Sartch didn't take it directly from the Jewish teacher and that it's rather difficult to see what he would have done in Paris. He did write plays that did encourage resistance already in the camp. The Nativity play was a resistance play despite being very disguised. Rise up against the Romans. Absolutely.

And same with Le Mouche, which did encourage a great deal of rejection of the occupying forces. Of course, looking back on these, it's very easy to be – I mean, we have the – retrospective illusion ourselves. It's very easy to look back with hindsight and see how things could have been better done. Sarch himself with Le Mouche felt that he presented a very black and white situation, arrest these leaves at the end, taking the furies with him, liberating the town of Argos. He says looking back on it, that he presented in black and white what was in fact quite a gray situation. What would have happened, probably they would have returned to their oppression. There's one sentence that he says, which is who it keys into his position then, and is fascinating.

He says that the French were never so free as when they were under Nazi occupation. Now, could you comment on that for us? Yes, yes. That's obviously one of his most provocative and paradoxical remarks. What did he mean by it? Yes, well, I think he meant several things by it. I think the serious meaning rather than the provocative meaning is that the occupation made people very aware of issues of freedom. I mean, for start, freedom isn't simply practical freedom, it's much more importantly ontological freedom. And the freedom, if you like, of consciousness, the freedom of the human being to make decisions in whatever situation they find themselves.

And I think that under the occupation where practical freedom was clearly restricted, reflection on freedom was increased. And I think that, in a sense, this black and white question, also the fact that you were either for or against the Nazis at that point, there wasn't really any intermediary position, also could be seen as making choices easier in some way. There weren't such difficult, delicate, complex human choices to be made over large political issues.

But Jonathan, on Christina, if you might want to continue this between you, he also said in the being and nothingness that man is condemned to be freed. Does this fit in with what Christina was saying? Yes, I think it's very important to realise that when such talks about freedom, he's not talking about freedom of the will.

He's not talking about freedom of action, really. He's not talking about the kind of freedom that a prisoner is deprived of. He's talking about the freedom we have to think about to interpret our situation in different kind of ways. And it's part of, in a way, and from the very beginning, his central thought is about the nature of consciousness.

And consciousness, he says, we tend to think that consciousness is about reality. There's reality out there, and we absorb it into ourselves, and then we're conscious of it. But actually, that's only a very small part of the picture. I was conscious bicycling in today that it was a nice, crisp winter morning. And you might say, well, that's because it was a nice crisp, winter morning and that was making an impact on my brain on my consciousness. But actually, you know, when I say it's a nice crisp winter morning, I'm saying, well, it's not a spring morning. It's not an evening. In other words, it's not just the reality that's present to me, which is making an impact on me. I'm also aware of what's not taking place. Every time I understand something as being present to me, I'm also understanding lots of things that are absent from me. Now, those absences, which are always part of my consciousness of the world, are not imposed on me by the,

the world. They are my construction. So in other words, every time I perceive the world in a certain way, that's as much because of what I bring to the world as because of what the world brings to me. And that's the sense in which we are always free. We can always understand things in

different ways. In a sense, it's freedom of consciousness. You might as well say it's freedom of judgment. We can always understand things differently. And the great danger, what Sartre is constantly trying to encourage us to escape from, is imagining that the way we look at things, way we're accustomed to looking at things is the only possible way. But nevertheless freedom, sorry, Christina.

I was just going to say, but the idea of being condemned to be free, though, I think has a further dimension, doesn't it? This freedom is inescapable and, indeed, for such, makes most of us terrified. We don't enjoy it because it puts so much responsibility on us. And I think that's where they're condemned comes from. What he's saying is there are actually no excuses. Any kind of determinist or behavioral or the psychological explanation of, our behaviour is always necessarily in bad faith.

It's no good saying I was following orders. It's no good saying, you know, well, this was God's will for me. It's no good saying, well, this is, that was what I was brought up to behave. These kind of excuses will not do. It's in that sense that we're condemned. The Sartre loves dramatic formula like this, the highly charged metaphors that really bring home to us what it is. He's saying about our condition. And, you see, Christina is exactly right.

We are free whether we like it or not. We can always make another judgment. He moved into, in a sense of we can, carry that word forward with a different meaning, Jonathan, but maybe not, maybe the same. He moved into the political world with the founding of a magazine,

Le Tom Modern, where he, the word, the sent literature, was the opposition, and that is still going to that magazine, it was very successful, and that was the beginning of, well, let's say, for the purposes of this conversation, that was the beginning of real political action, which then took him further and further and further,

further to his life, when he told. Can you tell us what that magazine did, why he started it? I mean, tell them what was in it rather than wise. We know he started in Dundraub. Well, it was a wide-ranging magazine that contained literature, poetry, but mainly it was a political magazine. And such thought that, and this is really from the very beginning, he'd thought that writing is itself a form of resistance,

because writing is when you don't just allow the notions that you've inherited to take you over. Writing is always trying to think things out for yourself. But in that respect, writing is always a political act. Well, political in a very Sartrian sense, if you like. I mean, it's political because it's challenging the habits which society has. But writing is a form of resistance to what? To the taken for granted. To the conventional.

But can't you be writing the taken for granted? Well, there's authentic writing and inauthentic writing. True writing. It's always writing against. He's always writing against, against the bourgeoisie, against his family. against the middle class, against capitalism, against depression, and for the proletariat, and that's what the Eliton is all about.

These manifestos that he writes for them, the presentation of Eton modern, first of all, and then, what's the literature, are clarion calls to all writers, all artists indeed, but writers in particular, to use their skills in a committed political form. Christina, was it around Eton modern,

and we're talking about post-war Paris now, and we've mentioned several times, the left bank, and the cafes are still there, and the Golaas are still there, the black polo necks have disappeared, but they will return, and so on. Is it there that he gathers around him? There's a feeling that he gathers around him, this cross-section of intellectuals, writers, playwrights, jazz people, and so and so forth.

Yes, whether he gathers them, I don't know, but they certainly gather around him. I think, just in reply to your question about, couldn't one write the taken for granted, though, that would be conservative writing precisely, that he's writing against it. It would still be political in his view, if you just reproduce. That's still political. And I think that the kind of committed writing that he goes for in the 40s and this group that he gathers around him, as you say, they're not really necessarily all the expected political writers.

They include, for example, a little bit later, Jean-Gene. Can we come to him later, sorry? Oh, all right. Sorry about that. We can mention giving him a name check, but we'll come back to him. Okay. I'm very sorry. We're going to talk about somebody at this day.

I would like to bring back in Simone de Beauvoir because there we're talking about a powerful intellectual in her own right, someone who is key to many movements especially with the feminist movement. How was his involvement with her intellectual at this point? Although, and you can talk about it personally as well, they were together, but they each had affairs and so on. So did their life represent their ideas? I think that's right.

I think on the intellectual side, there was a tremendous amount of interaction. They read each other's work, they corrected each other's work, they discussed together and indeed Simon de Beauvoir produces a book on ethics which Sartre never managed to write he does write a notebook on ethics in the 40s which he won't publish

and which gets published posthumously but Simon de Beauvoir actually comes clean as it were and publishes her ethics for ambiguity so I think intellectually they were very intertwined I have a little bit of sympathy it's not very fashionable now I think

but I have some sympathy for their lifestyle with their main loves and their contingent loves, because it was intended to be very honest. I think it caused a great deal of pain and jealousy, more to see one to Beauvoir quite possibly, but I think it was part of an agreement that they had, that they would have secondary relationships. Where I think it becomes unpleasant and seedy

is the way that they seem to have recounted to each other the details of these other relationships, when one reads the letters. Sometimes it's quite shocking the degree of physical detail that the letters go into about these minor relationships. But it seems to be the other people, if you like, that are being let down rather than such and Simon de Beauvoir letting each other down.

But switching only to the political thing, are they between them working out something which becomes into Beauvoir's hands one of the roots of feminism, ideas of feminism? Or is it her alone without him? I think it is probably her at this stage. I think in retrospect, Sarch would like to have been involved in it. But I think it's a very Sartrean book, if I may say so,

that Sigmandobevo's second sex, because really it's not just about, well, it's not at all about politics in the conventional sense. It's not about women being deprived of their rights. It's much more about the idea that women are born into a set of expectations, a set of stories, if you like, ideas of what the story of a woman's life ought to be. And the purpose of Simondiobova's book

is to make you realize that those stories are not necessarily your stories. You can make up your own story of what your life is... You're born a woman, you become a woman, is the phrase, isn't it? You have to imagine yourself into being a woman, and it's femininity that is the enemy of women. Femininity is a set of stories that society has already kind of pre-prepared, off the peg, ready for girl babies to start identifying with.

And Simondiwoldovoire is trying to get people not to pick up those, old stuff. So I think, but there was another kind of politics which such was trying to move into with Le Tour Modem, which is politics in a much more conventional sense. I think you need to remember what an extraordinarily ambiguous political situation it was in Paris after the liberation. I mean, for two years, things got worse and worse and worse. The standard of living fell, the amount of food available, was much less two years after the liberation than it had ever been during the occupation. There was violence. There was a lot of people. were seriously imagining that this was a brief interlude before the German occupation would be replaced by a Soviet occupation.

Or others were worried that it was going to be replaced, well, that it was really being replaced by an American occupation. I mean, Simond de Beauvoir notoriously said, you know, we're under an occupation now by the Americans, which is identical to the occupation we were under during the war. So people really didn't know how to interpret the situation they were in. And what Tomodan did notoriously was that it decided to throw its lot in with the Soviet Union, with Soviet communism. And in a way, I mean, people have said it's extraordinary the way Sartre did this, because he was aware of what injustices and terrible things were taking place in the Soviet Union. And indeed, he published accounts of them in Torn Morden. But in a way, that enabled him to present himself all the more as a hard-bitten political.

realist, someone making difficult choices. The choice was between America and the Soviet Union and you have to side with the Soviet Union. That's what Sartre was saying in Tomodern. Yes, and that's obviously in itself the controversial. He heads into controversial territory. Before we go to that sort of territory,

can I just ask briefly, because we can't do this program without mentioning Albert Camus. Albert Camus was North Africa and was a journalist as well as a writer, a playwright and so much. And they came together and then they had a great falling out. one of the three of you is going to have to say very briefly what attracted them together and how they fell out

and then we can move on with Sartre's own course. Benedict. Well, they met at one of the rehearsals for Sartre's play and I think it was Mouche, actually. And they became colleagues then and they were friends but never quite close friends. Though they might have been close. Camus always had a bit of a chip.

He felt a bit of an outsider, the title of his great novel, because of course he was a Pierre noir from North Africa, working class, a child of an immigrant family and so forth, and Sartre was this kind of classic Parisian bourgeois intellectual, whether he liked it or not. So there were always going to be class difficulties between them, and there were also quite substantive political differences between them in the sense that Camus was always inclined to take what Sartre was. regards the sort of soft line on justice and truth and grand idealistic notions of that.

Sorry, the difference was that Jonathan was saying how Sartre and Simwan de Beauvoir identified America as the possible enemy. Come you very early on, said after 45, the big enemy, the big evil was Russia, was the USSR. So that became one of the prevailing, one of the big distinctions between them. And it was an interesting battle there, wasn't it? and also they battled over Algeria because Sartre was on the gold side much as a gold fed up with having this man on his side

yelling and shouting but Camus had had an inside of view of Algeria can you just say what that difference was because that might get us to the falling out well that might be better thought with my well see you in a bit yes when

over the question of Russia and the revolution when Camus published the rebel, I think it's translated into English as, that really was the occasion of that big quarrel because it was reviewed by Le Tomodern, it was reviewed by Francis Jonson, such friend and right-hand man,

and it was criticised so very strongly. Camus hadn't read the philosophers that he quoted according to Jansom, he'd only read the critics, he took a mealy-mouthed liberal reformist view instead of a revolutionary view. dial was pretentious. And Cammy wrote back an open letter to Sartch rather than to Jansans, defending himself.

And never forgave Sartre, I think. And, of course, he died not very long after this, and their relations were never restored. So it really was a political falling out. And then Sartre wrote a brutal repost, didn't he? That's right. Which he really sort of took the gloves off. Yes, he did.

But I think it really had been a kind of love affair in the, in the fore. I mean, they'd known each other through their writings, from the late 30s onwards. And they were sort of opposites because each of them would have loved to be the other in a sense. I mean, Camus had had this not very brilliant education as a working class lad in Algeria. And he was noticed by this great bourgeois intellectual in Paris.

That was fantastic. Sartre always wanted to be politically active. Camus had spent the 30s as a member of the Communist Party in Algeria, engaged in adjutop-threata as a political journalist, the kind of stuff that Sartre had never done. I mean, Sartre liked the idea of having dirty hands in theory,

but he never did in practice. And what's more, Camus actually did have a false identity as a member of the resistance in Paris, which Sartre never did. So Camus was a genuine political animal, which Sartre wished he was and knew that he never would be. And yet in the period after the war, it was Sartre who was taking the extreme political positions

in print and Camus was dragging his feet, mainly because he had decided that the Soviet Union was a force for evil. Then there was the problem of Algeria. Such was himself Algerian. Sorry, Camus was himself Algerian. He'd been warning since the 1930s of the danger of an Islamic politics taking... Today he would be called, he'd be accused of Islamophobia. He's constantly going on about the danger of Islam becoming a political force, even before the Second World War. And he becomes more and more anxious about this. In 1954, there's a huge revolt in Algeria.

And Camus wants the French troops to go in and try and restore some kind of secular Republican democracy there. Sartre is getting embarrassed by his commitment to the Soviet Union. It's becoming more and more untenable. And he jumps horses. Sartre becomes an advocate of anti-colonial. liberation movements rather than of Soviet-style communism. Well, that's post-Hungary. I mean, it's just not a random sort of arbitrary move, though. And Kamihu has his roots in working-class Algeria is absolutely horrified by this move.

The only problem by introducing Alba Kamiu into any conversation is, it's impossible to put him back in his box. So, he's going back in his box and we're going back to Sartre. Christina Hous, Sartre tried to bring together existentialism. and Marxism. Two words with grind on the molars of a lot of people listening. Nevertheless, their guiding forces in mid-20th century thought. How did he do it? And was it

an impossible task? Ah, how did he do it? Well, I think that... I suppose the first, second time. You need to answer the second one. No, no. Just how did it do it? Yes, I'm sure it was an impossible task. Yes. Well, it was impossible, certainly, in the view of the Marxists, who very much

resisted having existentialism brought to them. In the critique of Dialectual Reason, which is the major work in which he attempts to do this, he refers, very interestingly, I've never worked out whether it's an error or very cleverly done. He refers to existentialism as an ideology of Marxism, as if Marxism was the overarching philosophy and existentialism was a minor offshoot of it. But in another place, he does refer to Marxism as an ideology of existentialism, which clearly was not going to appeal to any Marxist group.

I think the idea is that he wishes to take over, I'm going to have to simplify it, but you have asked me to existentialism and Marxism, the very big question. He's going to take over the whole idea of conditioning, background, environment that comes from Marxism, not so much the economic structures, and wed that to the idea of freedom and making ourselves in the situation we've

find ourselves. In some respects, it is quite arguable, I think, that if you don't take a determinist Marxism, if you take a looser Marxism which believes in conditioning but still believes in human and individual action, then existentialism can re-infuse it, that was such idea, reinfuse it with energy so that human freedom was seen working through historical circumstances. Well, that's very helpful. Although you simplified it for you, it was very helpful for me. And then he goes into being a leader in the student revolt in 1968 and then Maoism and so on and so forth.

But can we just use this that Christine has given us, Jonathan, take that either on or just explore around these two areas. He's trying to fuse these two things. He's developed, as you said, at the very beginning of the programme. This existentialism, we've talked about being content to be free, he's talking about this idea. He's come in to, encountered Marxism and sort of fallen in love with the USSR. And these two things are now grinding away at him and getting him, and he is deliberately getting involved in key moments in French history. So can't we just work the ideas through? Let's take it for granted that he'd gone involved in these controversies.

And was a big, big person in them. Right. He saw it as his task to teach Marxism what it was. I mean, he thought that Marxism had. always misunderstood itself. And so, I mean, we say that he became a Marxist. He only became a Marxist on condition that he could completely redefine what Marxism means. I mean, he didn't, he thought Marxism shouldn't properly be understood in the way that Soviet Union understood it, namely as an idea of inexorable economic laws which determine what the future of humanity is going to be. And he didn't understand Marxism in the way that Marx understood it. Indeed, he scarcely read any Marx at all. What he thought was that Marxism provided a way of thinking about

human collective experience. And he really went straight back to the original ideas that he'd been talking about in the 1930s, the idea that really we become who we are through the stories that we tell ourselves. And in the critique of dialectical reason, he's talking about how we can become occasionally members of groups,

so that genuinely we are who we are only as members of groups and not as members of, and not as separate individuals. but it's only a very special thing that comes about through special situations, mainly he talks about the French Revolution, producing this kind of fusion where it's possible for one person genuinely to speak for a group. So we're still in the same world where history is about the way that people tell stories to themselves. It's just that he's talking about bigger stories when he calls himself a Marxist

than the small stories he was talking about when he called himself an existentialist. Benny, can I ask you a similar question? in a slightly different way. Up to 19504, he'd written a great number of plays, and it was probably best known as a playwright. After then, he wrote only two plays. Was this because he thought the theatre was not any longer a political forum

because of its bourgeois associations for what Jonathan and Christine have been talking about? It wasn't a way to reach it. Yes, very largely, sir. I mean, in part of least, answer the question already. I mean, his theatrical writing, obviously during the 40s, is very much sort of agit,

writing if you like. It's rabble-rousing. He has messages. He has big moral and political questions to ask. And then he goes through this rather strange phase after the immense success, but also the immense misunderstanding of Le Mansailles, dirty hands, which is welcomed with open arms by the right as a critique of the great proletarian party machine and it's banned in Moscow and he's damned by the Communist Party in France, and it plays to sell out audiences in New York and so forth, and he thinks, my God, I made a huge gaffe here. And he suddenly goes off on a rather sort of strange kind of itinerary through medieval Germany with The Devil and the Good Lord in 1951, and then he rewrites Dumas with Keene in 1954,

and then he has a great deal of fun, the expense of the right-wing press with Neckrassoff in 1955, which is hilariously funny and brilliant, quite brilliant play and brilliant critique of the right-wing press and the accession with the mania with a communist phobia and it's a dig also, of course, what's going on in the States with McCarthy and the House Committee on American activities and all of that. And then he seems to sort of run out of steam in a sense in the theatre, partly because he by then realizes that it isn't having.

the kind of effect that he wants to have, part because of the audience it produces, partly because it takes on a life of its own. Limansal gets interpreted in ways that he doesn't want to be interpreted. Necrasov gets damned and is ineffectual in a way that he doesn't want it to be. And he's kind of disillusioned with it as a forum. He also runs out of what he thinks of as theatrical heroes, I think.

And he's also conscious of changes in the theatre itself. And we've got, in particular, Beckett in 1953 with Honourton Dongodo, the theatre is changing, it's becoming. a different sort of animal and having a different kind of relationship to its audiences and such more or less bows out after that. Cephali Cicistrate D'Altona, the condemned of Altona in 1960, which is his last major play. But Christina, he would have loved to make an impact in cinema. I mean, I think he did think that the moment of cinema had come.

Tom O'Don is, after all, called after a movie. It's called after modern times. And he did write a actually rather magnificent screenplay for John Houston about Freud. about Freud. And I think that if he'd had the opportunities, if he'd had the commercial backing, he would have become a screenplay writer. I thought, John Houston, directing such screenplay on Freud.

That will have to wait another time. I promised to come back to Jean-Gernet, Christina. And here we are. Now, there we have a notorious thief, at that time, daringly homosexual thief, by many people thought, he wrote a book called Saint-June. He made him an existential hero.

And that offended quite a lot of people. What really was he playing out? Also, Jeunet became chic. He turned up in the house of Parisian ladies who said, Oh, I'd love you to burgle my house. Exactly. You can just imagine. I'm not rot.

Right. Jeunet, and I'm afraid we haven't got much time. I think that he offended Jeunet, as much as he offended his bourgeois readership, in fact. The last chapter is called prayer for the bonnusage de Jean-Gene, prayer for the good use of Jean-Geney. And he knows that he's turning Jeunay against his intentions. His intentions were, if you like, probably corrupting.

He's made by Sartre, if not into a saint, at least into someone who's going to reveal to the bourgeois their bad faith, the way they scapegoat people for being homosexual, the way in which they like to keep their own consciences clean and good. And Jernet is set up against all this as somebody who can teach us lots of moral lessons from the most unlikely of sources. Can I just add up that there's an important shift from a sort of pre-war and wartime dictum of Sartres, which is that we are what we do,

which is essentially the lesson of Wiclo, and this changes in Saint-Gernet to we are what we make of what others make of us, and there's a sort of dialectical dimension that comes into his thinking they're importantly explored in Saint-Gernet. Jonathan Rowe, what would you say is Sartre's lasting legacy? He was a philosopher in the public sphere. I think he was a genuinely creative philosopher

who managed, well, he managed to survive as a. the freelance, which is quite a wonderful thing, and he did take some of the most fundamental philosophical thoughts you could have about the nature of freedom and the nature of consciousness, and run them in a way that made it clear that they did have a bearing on how you conduct yourself

ethically and politically. Well, thank you all very much. We didn't bring in AJA, who challenged Sartre massively, and so there's plenty more to talk about, but thank you very much for talking. decanting that into 44 minutes. Next week we'll be discussing the 400-year-old Han Dynasty from 2,000 years ago in Chinese history.

Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.