had renounced his allegiance to the Party the year before because of its
support of the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin which
cleared the way for the invasion of Poland. The Party responded by
vilifying Nizan as a traitor and government informer. In 1947 , Sartre
joined Franc ̧ois Mauriac, Raymond Aron and many others in an open
letter to the leaders of the PCF, challenging them either to furnish
evidence behind their smear campaign against Nizan’s name or to retract
these accusations publically.^6
Although he came under the influence of the charismatic pacifist
professor known as Alain at the Lyce ́e Henri-IV, Sartre’s own pacifism
seems to have been rather short-lived and superficial. By the time he
undertook military service during the “phoney war” of 1939 – 1940 ,
Sartre had all but buried those inclinations in the face of the Nazi attack.
Still, we witness him recording in hisWar Diarieson several occasions
the tension at play in his personal life between the Stoicism that had
attracted him in college and which he associated with Alain’s pacifist
arguments and the quest for authenticity.^7 But it was antimilitarism
rather than opposition to violence per se that fed Sartre’s “pacifism.”
This would surface in hisWar Diariesand thereafter, especially in his
frequent descriptions of the “counter-”violence that permeated the
actions of the exploited and the oppressed as his writing become increas-
ingly polemical in the late 1940 s and thereafter.
We noted that Sartre spent the academic year 1933 / 1934 at the
French Institute in Berlin under a fellowship to study contemporary
German philosophy, especially Husserlian phenomenology. In view of
his extreme involvement in matters political after the war, it is nearly
inconceivable that he would ignore the events that followed Hitler’s
assumption of power nine months before his arrival: the book burnings,
the manifestations, the assassinations – in effect, the National Socialist
(^6) In 1948 Sartre would write a play,Dirty Hands, that treats the dilemma of a Party loyalist
caught in the midst of the Party’s change of policies that required him to redefine the motives
of his previous actions initially undertaken at the Party’s behest. Understandably, the Party
was displeased by the opportunistic “thesis” of the play. Voicing dismay that his play was
being presented as anti-Communist propaganda at a time when his relations with the PCF
were warming, Sartre personally forbade its performance in Vienna while a congress of the
“World Peace Movement” was taking place (December, 1952 ). See above,Chapter 10 page
7281 for the ethical perspective on this work.
SeeCDG 84 – 90.
286 Means and ends: political existentialism