Sartre: Anguish and Despair

Three days France lies dying; three hot June afternoons in 1940, Frenchmen wait, in Paris, Marseille, in New York bars, for news of impossible defeat. Waiting, some try to believe the war will not end, others that the Nazis bring peace. In dishonored France a few ponder, for the first time, what it once meant to call themselves French.

Alone in Paris, a homosexual watches blond, sun-tanned Germans fill streets emptied of law and respectability. "Anything goes!" he thinks, and lures a young deserter to his room. Roads are packed with townspeople fleeing the unknown invaders, while soldiers wait in vain for orders, seeing their officers desert. Among the soldiers is Mathieu, ex-teacher of philosophy; while his companions try to hold a cracking world together with plans for new life, Mathieu is absorbed in tracing their personal guilt in the collapse.

For the first time in his series of novels, "Paths to Freedom," Sartre appears clearly in his dual role; characters of the novelist begin to confront questions set by the philosopher. In "The Age of Reason," and "The Reprieve," a nation of individuals, typified by Mathieu, shrank from commitment, thinking to escape choice. Now, a few wake to the thought that their very failure to act--the vote they did not cast, the protest they did not speak--was itself a choice: a choice of war, and with war, defeat-Mathieu understands: "Let them clamor to the skies: 'We have nothing to do with this mess! We are guiltless' . . . What was true was the indefinable fault they had all committed, our fault."

Yet all his life, intellect has betrayed Mathieu. "Enough! I'm through! I'm sick of being the wise guy, the guy who always sees straight! . . . If only I could have pressed my finger on the trigger, somewhere some German would have fallen . . ."

After three days, Mathieu ends his life in action, holding out against the German advance in the church steeple of a small village. The fifteen-minute fight in the tower climaxes the development of the first three novels--but the series could not end with it. The rest of "Troubled Sleep" and a fourth novel still in preparation, "The Last Chance," is concerned with those who must live on, "Day after day . . . to gather in the rotten fruit of defeat."

Sartre is a great novelist; but if his work is to be more than a record of failure, the final section will have to answer some difficult problems, and today no reader can be indifferent to his answers. The fourth and concluding novel, "The Last Chance," will test Sartre's philosophy severely. In particular, so far Brunet seems to approach most nearly his model of the man acting on the basis of commitment, yet it is hard to believe that Communism can be the goal of "The Paths to Freedom."

The time is short when answers, good or bad, can be of any use. In the two years since Sartre named the final novel, its title has become grimly appropriate. In France and Germany, his fugitives from a dead war live as he writes . . . and this time they approach what may be the last chance of all of us.