The Republic of Silence – Jean-Paul Sartre on The Aftermath of War and Occupation (September 1944)
Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers and writers of the 20th century. He lived through World War II first as a French prisoner of war, then as a professor of philosophy associated with the underground socialist movement. Sartre writes of the Occupation: “Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-power police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle.” Some of Sartre’s post-war writings have recently been collected in an English Language edition as The Aftermath of War and is published by Seagull Books, Kolkata.
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers and writers of the 20th century. He lived through World War II first as a French prisoner of war, then as a professor of philosophy associated with the underground socialist movement. Sartre writes of the Occupation: “Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-power police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle.” Some of Sartre’s post-war writings have recently been collected in an English Language edition as The Aftermath of War and is published by Seagull Books, Kolkata.
The Republic of
Silence (Lettres francaises, September 1944)
We were never more
free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning
with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take
it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political
prisoners, we were deported EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the
newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of
ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we
were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate
thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to
hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles.
Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a
solemn commitment.
The circumstances,
atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without
pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as
the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink
from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our
concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even
constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot
itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every
instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man
is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being
was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it
could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than…” And here
I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all
Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered
NO.
But the very cruelty
of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this condition by forcing us to ask
ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace. All those among
us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who
knew any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they
torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty
itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge
that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not his Oedipus
complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his own liberty, his
capacity for resisting torture and death.
To those who were
engaged in underground activities, the conditions of their struggle afforded a
new kind of experience. They did not fight openly like soldiers. In all
circumstances they were alone. They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in
solitude. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against
torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed,
and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an
untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every
appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of
encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they
were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance.
Total responsibility
in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty? This being
stripped of all, this solitude, this tremendous danger, were the same for all.
For the leaders and for their men, for those who conveyed messages without
knowing what their content was, as for those who directed the entire
Resistance, the punishment was the same – imprisonment, deportation, death.
There is no army in the world where there is such equality of risk for the
private and for the commander-in-chief. And this is why the Resistance was a
true democracy: for the soldier as for the commander, the same danger, the same
forsakenness, the same total responsibility, the same absolute liberty within
discipline.
Thus, in darkness and
in blood, a Republic was established, the strongest of Republics. Each of its
citizens knew that he owed himself to all and that he could count only on
himself alone. Each of them, in complete isolation, fulfilled his
responsibility and his role in history. Each of them, standing against the
oppressors, undertook to be himself, freely and irrevocably. And by choosing
for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without
institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each
instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism. No one failed
in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this
Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that
other Republic of Silence and of Night.
http://www.writingrights.org/2010/08/18/the-republic-of-silence-jean-paul-sartre-in-the-aftermath-of-war-and-occupation/see also
