Unfortunately, only six of these fifteen^3 notebooks seem to have
survived the misfortunes of war.^4 But if you supplement what they
contain with the almost daily letters that he exchanged with Beauvoir
and others, you obtain a detailed view of their thoughts and reactions to
life in the military and on the home front for the months between
Sartre’s mobilization in September of 1939 and his second leave for
home on March 28 , 1940. On his return to his post, the letters continue
through to his capture a few hours before the armistice, on June 21 ,
1940 , which was his birthday. They become less frequent during his
temporary incarceration for two months in Baccarat and his transfer in
mid August to a massive POW camp outside of Trier, in Germany, that
housed 26 , 000 prisoners, just as he recounts inThe Roads of Freedom.
Most of the letters from Germany have been lost.
War Diaries: “A proud, pagan journal”
Despite the gaps in their narrative due to the apparent loss of nine of the
diaries, the remaining ones afford us the opportunity to view Sartre’s
reflections, especially his philosophical speculations, “in process,” as it
were.^5 In a letter to Beauvoir, he confesses:
Since I have broken my inferiority complex vis-a-vis the far Left, I feel a freedom of thought I’ve never known before; vis-a-vis the phenomenologists too. I feel I’m on
the way, as biographers say around page 150 of their books, to discovering myself.
(^3) Only fourteen notebooks are listed inWD, but Arlette Elkaı ̈m-Sartre speaks of fifteen in her
introduction toCDG, which includes the additional first notebook, listed inWDas lost. For a
discussion of the status of this search for the supposedly lost notebooks, seePS 109 ,n. 1 as
well asMAEA 1393.
(^4) For a brief history of the career of the notebooks and their fate, see Arlette Elkaı ̈m-Sartre,
“Pre ́sentation,”CDG-F 9 – 10. Besides the three or four that Beauvoir recalls having given to
Bost and which were lost when he was wounded on the Northern Front, Arlette believes that
a couple may have been lost when Sartre’s apartment was “plastique ́” by the OAS (French
opponents of the Algerian revolution that Sartre was supporting) in 1961 and again in 1962 or
possibly during the resultant transfer of his residence. After the second explosion, it is
reported that Sartre himself never returned to the apartment to gather his belongings. Others
5 did that for him.
In the introduction to his translation of theWar Diaries, Quintin Hoare has summarized the
contents of the missing notebooks from the letters exchanged with Sartre during that period
as well as the subsequent recollections made by him and Beauvoir (WDxvi–xviii). “A proud,
pagan journal” within the subheading above is taken fromWD 69.
The War Diaries 163