issue inThe Devil and the Good Lordis the relation between ethics and
politics – the Absolute and the (Peasant) Revolution. In its concluding
scene Goetz, the new commander of the peasants and a convert from the
other side, after having just coldly killed a subordinate who questioned
his authority, exclaims:
The kingdom of man is beginning. A fine start!...Never fear, I shall not flinch.
I shall make them hate me, because I know no other way of loving them...I shall
remain alone with this empty sky over my head, since I have no other way of being
among men. There is this war to fight, and I shall fight it.
(act 3 , scene 11 )
In an interview published the day this play opened, Sartre defends his
sympathy with the Communists: “To the extent that I am inspired by a
rather broad Marxism, I am an enemy for Stalinist Communists [the
PCF]....Until the new order, the Party will represent the proletariat for
me, and I do not see how this situation could possibly change for some
time...It is impossible to take an anti-Communist position without
being against the proletariat” (cited in Contat and Rybalkaii: 254 ).
These remarks were prescient. Sartre added several new members
to the team ofLTM. The result was a closer orientation with the Party.
In particular it meant that Sartre cooperated with the PCF in defending
Henri Martin, a sailor jailed for distributing tracts opposing the war in
Indo-China. Sartre’s lengthy piece,The Henri Martin Affairwas a sign
of his joining ranks with the PCF.^22 But his chief move in that direction
was a set of essays published inLTMunder the titleThe Communists and
Peacestarting in July of 1952. It was occasioned by the arrest of the
acting head of the PCF on trumped-up charges in the aftermath of a
massive demonstration against the arrival in Paris of American general
Matthew Ridgway, who had succeeded General Eisenhower as Supreme
Allied Commander in Europe. His visit was to seek support for western
participation in the Korean War that had begun in June of 1950 , and
for the cold war generally. This text, which illustrates Sartre at his
most hyperbolic, ushers in the next years that will fix him permanently,
in the eyes of many, in the Communist camp. Such expressions as
“An anticommunist is a dog” (Sit iv: 248 ) or “there is crap in the
(^22) Jean-Paul Sartre,L’Affaire Henri Martin(Paris: Gallimard, 1953 ).
300 Means and ends: political existentialism