her equally intemperate rejoinder inLTMthe same year. She accused
Merleau-Ponty of “bad faith” for having ignored the work on which
Sartre was presently engaged, which, she insisted, addressed many of the
issues fromCPthat Merleau-Ponty had criticized. In effect, Sartre
was redressing an imbalance between the individual and the social, the
ethical and the political, that would find its ontological foundation in his
next major work,Critique of Dialectical Reason( 1960 ).
Sartre confirmed his sympathy with the PCF with voyages that also
served to embarrass him after his return. The first was to attend the
congress of the World Peace Movement in Vienna on December 12 – 19 ,
1952 , during which, as we noted, he prohibited the performance of his
playDirty Hands. Though Sartre and Beauvoir insisted that only twenty
percent of those attending were Communists, Ronald Hayman reports
that “nearly all the delegates from the West were communists” (WA 283 ).
Except for Sartre, each of the fifty attendees from France was a member
of the Party. In one of his declarations he spoke of the three events of
his adult life that had meant the most to him, that had renewed his hope:
the Popular Front, the liberation, and the Vienna Congress (Life 337 ).
In May–June 1954 he made his first visit to the Soviet Union.
He returned singing its praises. Incredibly, for example, he claimed that
there was complete freedom of criticism in the USSR. Recalling these
remarks twenty years later, Sartre admitted that the series of remarks
published after his return was the work of his secretary, Jean Cau, and
that he was not enthused by what he saw there: “They showed me what
they want me to see, obviously, and I had a lot of reservations” (Ce ́r 462 ).
Between revolutions ( 1956 – 1969 )
With the discovery of the labor camps in the USSR and its violent
quelling of the Hungarian workers’ uprising in 1956 , Sartre began
to distance himself from the PCF once more. It should be noted that his
relation with the Italian Communist Party had been and remained cordial
throughout these years.^25 Sartre wrote a lengthy essay, “The Phantom
(^25) Whereas the passing of the former head of the PCF was given perfunctory notice inLTM,
Sartre wrote a laudatory obituary on the death of “my friend Togliatti” in the same journal.
As head of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti was associated with “polycentrism”
and with what came to be called “Eurocommunism” (Sitix: 139 – 151 ).
Between revolutions (1956–1969) 303