them to their captors. The Communist exemplifies the Stoic discipline
that we shall find Sartre admiring in hisWar Diaries, even as he plays it
off against the virtue of authenticity that was starting to supplant it in his
eyes. Indeed, when we consider the ethical categories Sartre is formulat-
ing as he writes this work, we recognize that both Brunet and Mathieu
are caught in respective forms of bad faith.
Brunet is committed to a cause greater than himself. This affords
him a certain self-control that he believes distinguishes him and his
kind from the mass of soldiers that surround him. But he bristles at
the sight of his natural enemy – a military chaplain equally intent on
winning the allegiance of these fellows to his cause. Hearing the
priest’s sermon that belongs to the genre of “retribution” discourses
along with Father Paneloux’s homily on the plague as a chastisement
in Camus’The Plague– both echoing the Pe ́tanist reading of the
French defeat as the well-deserved price of the people’s laxity and
indulgence after the Great War – with the chaplain’s message ringing
in his ears, Brunet recommends that the small group of loyalists
gathered around him try character assassination to discredit the
priest’s status in the soldiers’ minds – hinting that he associates with
the German officers in the evenings, abandoning his flock for the
material comforts of the upper class. When one of their group sug-
gests that the priest doesn’t seem to see much of the Germans,
another shoots back that, intentions aside, he isobjectivelyaFrench
prisoner spending time with the enemy. In other words, the fateful
logic of the Stalinist show trials remains in force in the Party, as is
confirmed in the fourth volume when Brunet himself is accused of
“objective” treachery by another operative who has joined the prison-
ers in the camp. Their job, Brunet indicates, is to proceed gradually,
insisting the armistice be rejected and that the only legitimate form of
government is democratic. Obviously he has other goals in mind for
the long run, but one must gear the message to the audience and the
“objective possibilities” of the times. When the conversation turns to
the Nazi–Soviet pact of nonaggression – the event that led Nizan to
quit the Party in disgust – Brunet defends the necessity for the
Soviets in order to gain time to prepare for the inevitable Nazi attack:
“I put my trust in the Central Committee of the USSR and I’m not
going to change my attitude now...When a man joins the Party,
nothing but the Party matters,” proclaims Brunet. “This is a life
The Roads to Freedom 159