lecture the following year, he continued: “Yet in the depths of [the
tortured men’s] solitude, it was the others, all the others they were
protecting – all their Resistance comrades [by their refusal to talk]. For
isn’t this total responsibility in total solitude the very revelation of a dark
freedom?” “Each citizen [of the Republic of silence],” he continues,
“knew what he owed to all and that he had to rely on himself alone...
Each of them, in choosing himself in freedom was choosing freedom for
all.”^5 Sartre is extending his life-changing experience of solidarity in the
stalag to the heroes of the Resistance as a model for the entire popula-
tion, a move he will elaborate in his humanism lecture. We should
remember this model of response to a mortal threat when we encounter
Sartre’s seemingly hyperbolic claims of concrete freedom and collective
responsibility in later works like theCritique, the playThe Condemned of
Altona, his many occasional pieces, or, as we are about to see, his seminal
humanism lecture.
Within a month of the liberation of Paris, Sartre gathered a group
of friends to constitute the editorial board of a monthly to be calledLes
Temps Modernes, after his favorite Chaplin film. Many of these
had participated in the short-lived Resistance group, “Socialism and
Freedom” (seeChapter 11 ), and had discussed the need for a periodical
that would articulate and disseminate these twin ideals.^6 Gallimard had
already assured the funding for its publication.^7 Its initial members
were Raymond Aron, Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, Albert
Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan, with Sartre as editor in chief. Camus, who
had been associated with the Socialism and Freedom group, was unable
to join because of the demands of editing Combat. Its initial issue
appeared for an eager public on October 15 , 1945 with an introduction
(pre ́sentation) by Sartre in the form of a quasi-manifesto, not only for the
journal but for the movement itself. Let us consider that essay in order
(^5) “Republic of Silence,” 4 – 6 ;Sitiii: 12 – 14.
(^6) Annie Cohen-Solal remarks: “The idea forLes Temps moderneshad been formulated with
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, and later Camus and Leiris, in the wake of discussions held by
7 ‘Socialism and Freedom,’ and, more urgently, after its failure” (Life^258 ).
A gesture that some interpreted as paying “conscience money” for the fact that Gallimard had
remained in business and continued to publish the formerly prestigiousNouvelle Revue
Franc ̧aise under German censorship and edited by collaborationist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
as “a showcase of the ‘new’ Franco-German solidarity” (Steven Ungar, introduction toWL,
9 ). For an insightful and critically sympathetic portrait of Drieu, seeWL 161 – 164.
232 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation