colonialism, which he regarded as a sordid form of state takeover.
The young Sartre harbored a basic egalitarian spirit from his early teens
and, as he recalled, thought of the French control of Algeria whenever
the injustice of colonialism came to mind (Ce ́r 478 ). As his life-long
companion Simone de Beauvoir remarks, they showed little concern
for politics after graduation and did not even vote in the critical general
election of 1936 that ushered in the socialist program of the Front
Populaire. But even in those years his tendencies veered toward the Left.
As we review Sartre’s life from the political angle, we discern several
stages in the development of his political thought and action. It extends
from early indifference mixed with sympathy for the Republican side in
the Spanish Civil War, through resistance to Nazi domination every-
where, to a favoring of leftist movements generally and passed through a
period of “amoralist political realism” (in association with the PCF).
His relation with the PCF cooled with the repression of the Hungarian
revolution in 1956 and ended with total rejection of the Party in 1968 ,
accompanied by a sympathetic identity with the “direct action” of the
extreme Left in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s. This trajectory concluded
in a kind of muted optimism regarding the possibility of social reform
in his discussions with Benny Le ́vy in his final years.
In a number of conversations with two Maoist friends, one of whom
would become his last secretary, Sartre recalled having been a “sounding
board for politics without directly engaging in it” for most of his life.^2
If “sounding board” denotes committing his pen to leftist causes as well
as signing petitions and participating in public protests, Sartre, in the
second half of his life, was a political sounding board par excellence.
As we prepare to chart his career, we should note several features of
Sartre’s political thought that will appear rather consistently. First, he
approached the political as a moralist searching for those individuals who
were responsible in an ethically evaluative sense for seemingly imper-
sonal social movements such as racism, colonialism and capitalism. Not
that he rejected “structural” causality or its moral aspects (paceLouis
Althusser) – we shall see him insisting apropos of colonialism that “the
(^2) Philippe Gavi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Victor,ORR 274. Beauvoir considered Gavi more of
an anarchist than a “Maoist” strictly speaking. However, given the fluidity of that term in
contemporary parlance, it would be difficult to define a “Maoist,” strictly speaking.
284 Means and ends: political existentialism