we,” with an encomium of revolution as “replacing [our present
situation] by a more just society in which human beings can have good
relations with each other...A society in which relations among human
beings are ethical.”^3
Though Sartre rather consistently opposed what he called
“Machiavellianism,” understood popularly as the notion that politics is
amoral and that the end justifies the means, he had to come to terms with
the morality of violence, especially the consequentialism of the revolu-
tionary claim that one must crack a few eggs to make an omelette. This
tension grew as he became more actively engaged with the French
Communist Party ( 1952 – 1956 ) – a period he recalled as one of “amoral
realism” (ORR 79 ); it haunted his involvement with the Algerian revo-
lution and his subsequent relations with the Maoists. It was the year
when he began fellow-traveling with the Communists that he wrote in
Saint Genet: “Any ethic which does not explicitly profess that it is
impossible todaycontributes to the bamboozling and alienation of men.
The ethical ‘problem’ arises from the fact that Ethics isfor usinevitable
and at the same time impossible” ( 186 n., emphasis his). Nearly a decade
later, Sartre would emphasize this agony even more forcefully (in impli-
cit debate with Albert Camus over the Algerian revolution) with his
preface to Frantz Fanon’sThe Wretched of the Earth.^4
As a journalist born and raised in Algeria, Albert Camus had long
defended the Arab population against oppression by the French minor-
ity. But as a pacifist, he believed it was in the interests of the Arabs to
pursue autonomy within the French Union rather than seek complete
independence by violent rebellion. Sartre, on the contrary, held this view
in utter contempt:
A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither
executioners nor victims [allusion to a line in Camus’The Plague]. Very well then;
if you are not victims when the government which you voted for, when the army in
(^3) Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Le ́vy,Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian van den
Hoven (University of Chicago Press, 1996 ), 107 ; hereafterHope. See below,Chapter 14 ,
4 pages^379 ff.
Frantz Fanon,The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Maspero, 1961 ),
trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1965 ); henceforthWE. Because of Sartre’s
pro-Israeli remarks during the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967 , Fanon’s widow forbad the
publication of his preface in the subsequent printing of the French text ofWE.
Ends and Means: existential ethics 263