I have spent much time in the past twenty years examining the causes and effects of World War II on France. There are many reasons for this particular study: 1) my ancestors are from Alsace, France, a borderland whose nationality volleyed between France and Germany; 2) my Dad fought in World War II, and 3) it is the primary historical intersection in which I share a passion with my husband (his area of interest lies in the Normandy conquest).

We spent part of our last vacation on the southern coast of England on the cliffs of Dover and below Dover Castle, where the planning of the evacuation of the BEF, or Operation Dynamo, was organized. We hope to return next may to take the ferry over to Dunkirk, France, where the evacuation took place.

Included in this study, are many historical texts and biographies about the German Occupation of France, particularly in Paris, from May 1940 to June 1944. For this post, I will examine one French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who lived in Paris during the Occupation and became a voice of the people, forever changing French literary culture. I am referencing Literary France byPriscilla Parkhurst Clark and Ian Ousby’s Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944.

In the decades leading up to World War II, Nobel Prize winners Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus had already established themselves as significant influences in the philosophy of existentialism and Marxism. These writings continue to influence these disciplines today. Sartre’s partner and fellow existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir, would also become a prominent feminist writer of this time.

 In their writings, Sartre (Huis clos, Les Mouches) and de Beauvoir (Les Mandarins, winner of le prix Goncourt, like our Pulitzer) developed the main themes of opposition to the bourgeois world and solidarity with the working class and communism. Camus (L’Etranger, La Peste) would also examine these themes and focus on morality in modern times.

Ironically, before the war, Sartre was heavily influenced by German philosophy and developed a distinctive style for his writings that challenged French philosophy and the French language itself. (Literary, 167). This philosophy, of course, would change over the next decade.

Sartre served in the French army as a meteorologist until his capture by German troops in 1940, where he spent nine months as a prisoner of war. According to Priscilla Parkhurst Clark in Literary France: “The war confronted Sartre with a palpable enemy of a different order than the bourgeoisie…Sartre entered the ‘socialistic’ stage of his life (174).” Sartre was no longer attacking the bourgeoisie as an outsider; he now became an “insider” of French literary culture.

Upon Sartre’s return to France in 1941, during the German Occupation, he founded an underground group, “Socialism and Liberty”, along with other writers. Sartre would continue to write throughout the Occupation about the moral corruption and behavior of the Germans.

According to Ian Ousby in his book Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944, this living of a day-to-day existence, aided in the ‘New Order in Europe’ which depended upon the passivity of ordinary people to accomplish its goals. Sartre placed the writer squarely in the midst of society, having daily conversations at the Café de Flore with other intellectuals (Ousby 41).

There are hundreds of books written about this horrific time in France’s history [see post on “Is Paris Burning?]”. However, what better lens and perspective on Occupied France than from a writer and statesman who lived in this societal prison? Sartre renounced French literary culture with such passion because he was so much a part of it. He was the voice of the people in this languid existence where Parisians waited obsessively for the one weekly arrival of food trucks from the German troops. Sartre and de Beauvoir would live on a diet of rabbits sent to them from a friend in Anjou (45).

In his essay “Paris under the Occupation”, Sartre wrote that the “correct” behavior of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the Occupation, leading them to accept what was unnatural as natural.

The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and be well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression (127).

Sartre wrote two of his most significant works during the Occupation: Les Mouches (1943) and Huis clos (1944), one of the first works of French literature that I read. It is amazing that none of his works during this time were censored by the Germans and were published in literary magazines.

 When I first read Huis clos (No Exit) in 2004, I was not considering the context of WWII. This chilling story, developed into a play in May 1944, depicts the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked in a room together.

 According to Sartre, “Hell is other people,” which is the idea of the struggle to see oneself as an object from the perspective of another (Literary France 182). So intriguing. These characters at first are expecting to be physically tortured. After all, they are in Hell with damnation, fire, and eternal misery! However, to their surprise, they are locked in a pleasant room furnished in the style of French “Second Empire” with two other strangers who seem very cordial. It doesn’t take long, however, for them to realize that there is no accident that they have been placed together. On the contrary, they have been placed together to make each other miserable and will become one another’s torturers; a fitting commentary on the French world under German occupation.

After the Liberation of Paris in 1944, Sartre and several colleagues founded the journal Les Temps modernes to redefine what it meant to be a writer and to counter French literary culture and the traditions of the bourgeoisie. Les Temps contained “trinkets of sonorous inanity” while living within twin ideologies of aestheticism and scientism, according to Sartre (176). Many have criticized Sartre’s role as a writer during the Occupation instead of resisting the enemy. Camus defended his friend, stating, “Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote (Literary 151).”

 In order for Sartre to become a new writer after the war, he had to destroy the old ways of harsh criticism of French literature. Sartre now must practice a literature that long ago, before the hardships of war, declared its mission: to live in a culture that no longer compelled belief. The previous credo of Victor Hugo , “words are the Word, and the Word is God,” no longer applies.

Sartre would now wrestle with the questions: “What then is literature?”; “What is writing?”; “Why write and for whom? Great questions! Shouldn’t we, as bloggers, ask these questions before every post? [see my posts on Sartre’s What is Literature] .

In What is Literature, Sartre addresses the question “For Whom does one Write” following his experiences of living in Paris during the Occupation:

“People of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events, who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity and there are the same corpses among them. That is why it is not necessary to write so much; there are key-words.

If I were to tell an American audience about the German occupation, there would be a great deal of analysis and precaution. I would waste 20 pages in dispelling preconceptions, prejudices and legends…I would have to look for images and symbols in American history which would enable them to understand ours (What is Literature 71).”

Sartre’s freedom to answer these questions came at the cost of the blood and sacrifice of the young men in World War II, including Robert Crane, my Dad,  who faced down evil in its tracks.

Works Cited

Priscilla Parkhurst Clark. Literary France. Oxford Press. 1987.

Ian Ousby. Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944. New York: Cooper Square Press. 2000.