Recently, a law was passed in France suppressing Coca-Cola as subversive of the French way of life. At about the same time, the distinguished Catholic novelist François Mauriac wrote an article in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro denouncing American culture as a menace in no way less threatening than the Russians. France, it would seem, is anxious and uneasy about the future of its culture. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, one of that culture’s foremost representatives in the eyes of the world, there is good reason for anxiety—though not necessarily for despair. In this essay, Mr. Sartre analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of French culture and suggests that its problems can be solved only within a supra-national, European framework. This article is a condensed version of a speech given before the French League Against Anti-Semitism and was translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman.
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We in France hear it said all about us that French culture is being threatened. In practically all foreign countries, we are told, this culture has a smaller influence than in the past, and there is a crescendo of complaints about the importing into France of foreign ideologies—by this generally is meant American culture—which, it is claimed, may shatter our traditional cultural framework.
Is French culture really threatened? Can it be saved?
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To be born into a culture—which happens to all of us—is to be born with an offer of a future, an offer which we cannot reject but which we are forced to accept and transcend, and which, in so doing, we transform into a new cultural situation. A culture is alive when the community of which it is an expression envelops and exceeds its own culture, when there is still, for each individual that is born, an ensemble of real possibilities of development corresponding to what he is seeking. Culture is thus continuous with the past and open towards the future.
By that same token, in order for a culture to remain alive, the autonomy and sovereignty of the community must be such that the thinker, artist, or man of religion will be able to go beyond, problems and towards solutions.
If the community is enslaved or powerless, the artist or writer can conceive of no solutions, because these solutions do not lie in the hands of the community; and, in the case of a people reduced to utter slavery, culture disappears because there are no longer any solutions for which the writer, philosopher, painter, and musician can consider themselves responsible.
An intellectual in a sovereign country—since present-day communities, as far as their framework is concerned, are national—may feel, as Kafka said in his journal, that he is the bearer of a mandate that no one has given him.
Nevertheless he does have a mandate, which is, after all, that of thinking about the general problems and the particular problems raised in his time; life, death, love; war, the social structure with its injustices, the political or ethical problems of individuals. And a writer in a free community has the special mandate—and therein lies the greatness of the great—of considering himself responsible for everything: he has to offer solutions for everything. If you take a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, you will see that these great men took pride in their role and that their pride lay at the source of their achievement.
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When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he considered himself responsible, insofar as he could denounce it, for war itself, and he felt that he had to give an interpretation and description of war that would seem valid to an entire community. But this had a meaning for him only insofar as he thought that the community, warned by works of this kind, would feel a greater repulsion for war and consequently be less likely to enter into one. If, on the other hand, we assume that the community has the means neither for avoiding war nor making it, the problem that war presents becomes much less urgent and will be less tempting to the writer.
If, for example, there are no very great women writers—there are great ones such as Colette, but no very great ones—if, despite the fact that women have been writing for centuries, we do not find the equivalent of a Cervantes, a Tolstoy, or a Stendhal among them, it is not because their brain cells are any different from those of men, but essentially because the woman lives in a masculine universe for which she is not responsible. She does not take sides on the questions of war, justice, heroism, or wisdom because of the fact that these are questions involving the values of men and strictly reserved for men, values upon which she cannot act. A much more limited world is reserved for her; the world of the passions, of love, of psychology, and of nature. Just as one cannot imagine a woman writing War and Peace in the 18th or 19th centuries—not because she would have been incapable of doing so, but because she was outside the realm of martial values (she would not have known from her own experience anything about the horror of a battlefield, military heroism, or the chance and absurdity of so-called military planning)—so it cannot be denied that culture thrives when the body of individuals who contribute to it are responsible for the values of the community.
If, in addition, a community has so great an importance that to other communities it seems an important factor in their future, then the culture of this community has a special significance. It reflects future possibilities that come to the others only from outside; it reflects, as it were, their destiny. If so many people in the small countries bordering on Germany were tempted by Nazi culture and ideology, it was because Germany was, at that moment, a formidable imperialist power able to devastate and conquer them overnight Thus her ideology took on a force, an urgency, and a value that were not contained in the ideas themselves, but were contained in the might capable of imposing them. In other words, at such times communities that are inferior in power examine the ideology and culture of a stronger country as if it were their destiny. A native of Luxemburg or Holland examining Nazi ideology might have said to himself, “This may be the ideology that will dominate my country for two hundred years.”
Thus cultural ideas, quite independently of their internal value, have a potential of diffusion that depends upon the economic or military importance of the country supporting them. They acquire a certain universality. In a powerful country like 18thcentury France, the writer achieved the universal through the particular. When Voltaire said that the Frenchman was the universal man in the 18th century, he meant, with a certain pride, that, generally speaking, all one needed to do was to be a Frenchman in order to be an example of the evolving cultural type that would prevail throughout the world. And the fact is that it did prevail, simply because French political hegemony implied, by the same token, a kind of diffusion of French ideas.
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If, on the other hand, a country is small, threatened, and powerless, then its culture is profoundly affected.
It is not true that by being more Portuguese or more Dutch one will become more universal. It is not true, because other nations consider a small country to be an accident of history and politics, and the human type achieved in that country to be a provincialism and not a profound reality. So that when the writer of a small country seeks to communicate with the intellectuals of other nations, he immediately places himself on the level of the universal and the formal, fleeing the particularity of his own national culture.
Let us suppose that, as a result of political events, a small European nation borrowed elements of American culture and ideology. It would borrow them as something untranscendable, in the sense that they had their origin in a certain reaction to an economic and social structure in America that the borrower would be unable to change. And if the same nation that borrowed ideas from a foreign country had had a living culture in the past, it would be unable to reanimate that culture since it would no longer be a culture that the community transcended toward a future. The result would be that the small nation would find itself having two different and opposing cultures: one, a kind of revery about a destiny—this, the culture that came from abroad; the other, a cult of the past and a revery about the past—this, its own culture, half dead, replaced, and forgotten.
It is often assumed that ideas are exported like manufactured products or natural wealth; it is evident that certain small countries export watches or wheat, although their political power is inferior to that of the countries around them. It would seem that the same might hold for ideas. But what is true for natural wealth is false for culture. In the cultural realm it is clear that there are exchanges without reciprocity. Indeed, ideas, even when weak and trivial, descend from the stronger to the weaker, without rising, even when excellent, from the weaker to the stronger.
Or, rather, they do rise, but they exhaust their energy in rising and end by making no claim on the new community, by being nothing more than a cultural fact, and not a cultural possibility.
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Today America is never smitten with a European idea. That is why we are apt to notice in Americans a kind of unfailingly indulgent superiority toward what we Europeans write or think. This is not be-cause they are proud or arrogant: whereas our Dutch neighbors are intrigued or disgusted or excited about a French work because they are in the same situation as we, Americans receive ideas from us that are half dead and have absolutely no power to excite them; and this is so not only because their continent has different problems, but mainly because Americans do not see these ideas as their future. On the contrary, they see them as something that belongs to the past in relation to themselves, as the false future of a country of which they consider themselves to be the true future.
I never saw anyone in the United States amused or excited or saddened by Anouilh’s beautiful play, Antigone. I still remember an American critic who wrote: “What gave the American producer the idea of trying to catch our interest through the primitive mores of a small Greek clan?” Taken this way, as if it were about an obsolete problem, the play is utterly devoid of interest. Similarly, I have often heard it said, in regard to the body of theories called Existentialist, which has representatives in England, Germany, Holland, and France, “Yes, poor Europeans, they’ve suffered.” This is not at all the attitude of the European who refuses to adopt Existentialist ideas. He says, “It’s idiotic, repulsive, it sickens me,” but certainly not, “Poor France, she’s suffered.” This attitude is inconceivable where there is a homogeneity of problems, and therefore of culture.
And if, nonetheless, a writer in a small country becomes a constituent element of a great culture and compels recognition, as with Kierkegaard and Kafka, the countries with a great culture solicit this writer, annex him, as it were, and later on send him back to the small country in a form undreamed of by the latter. Very often elements are stolen from Europe that ten years later we find have become, in someone else’s thinking and with a different twist, our destiny.
If we French were free to choose the countries with which to enter into mutual cultural relations, the inescapable conclusion would be that we ought to choose those with apolitical potential equal to ours, an equal history and equal problems, and ought, on the other hand, to abstain from all ideological commerce with countries of a higher potential. But we are not free to choose. The political, economic, demographic, and military hegemony of a country imposes cultural exchanges without reciprocity.
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Elements that are naturally spontaneous to America and have a meaning there, can become ruinous for French culture. An American Negro writer who loves France, Richard Wright, said to me one day, with a kind of sadness, “In the last analysis, what I like about you is the very thing that may be the death of you.” For indeed there is a French culture that, quite obviously, keeps going as the result of an international misunderstanding of France’s position. If we find in France certain forms of culture, certain conceptions of life and intellectual activity not found elsewhere, they are bound up with an inadequate industrial equipment, a deficient birth rate, and a society based upon injustice. There is no doubt that if we do have a culture that, in a certain sense, sets up human values, individual and personal values that attract people like Wright, it is the result, in large part, of our not being a great industrial nation like America, where everybody is an employe, or like Russia, where everybody is a civil servant. It is precisely because we have not attained this degree of industrialization or social organization that we still offer values which, for many foreigners, have charm. What they do not always see is that it is the charm of the past.
In 1918 this was a profitable misunderstanding. We had won a war that ruined us demographically and helped further our decline in relation to the new powers; but at the same time the prestige of this victory maintained us for a long time at the same level in international opinion, so that the ideas and culture produced in France between 1918 and 1939 could still be looked upon as a genuine future by other countries. The way Proust was welcomed in the United States around 1925 or 1930 presupposed the entire French army behind him and the myth of the Frenchman as the best soldier in the world. Otherwise, only a few intellectuals would have been attracted to Proust, and only in the way Gide’s Journal, for example, finds admirers today in America—that is, as testimony of a delightful past.
It was this misunderstanding that gave France another thirty years of strength and power in relation to other countries. But this misunderstanding vanished in the Second World War, so that we now face the following problem: In order to recreate a milieu in which our ideas can find a new potential and remain valid—not as a past, but as a future for other countries—we must reequip and re-industrialize ourselves. But in order to regain this position, in order to reequip and re-industrialize ourselves, we turn to America and, from then on, American culture and American ideology come to us inevitably along with bolts, manufactured articles, and cans of fruit juice. Since the future, for us, is becoming America, American ideas are, for us, the future.
The future perhaps—but not the past or the present. Insofar as they are presented as an actual culture for France, they too are a false culture.
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Generally speaking, the characteristic feature of European culture is a secular struggle against evil. I think that, in the last analysis, a French intellectual, writer, or philosopher merely expresses a feeling common to all members of the French community when he asserts that our society is badly made. Nothing can justify, nothing can redeem or explain, the death of a young man of twenty, in particularly horrible circumstances, when his destiny was not fulfilled; nothing can justify certain states of despair, certain injustices; even if they are rectified, the fact remains that they have caused suffering to thousands of men. Evil is inexpiable in the world, and European culture is certainly a reflection on the problem of evil and on the thought: “What can a man do, what can he achieve, if it is granted that evil is in the world?”
Now, in general, evil is not an American concept. There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization. If I compare French with American rationalism, I would call American rationalism white, and French rationalism black. Whether we consider reason in Descartes, a reason that is both all-powerful and, in a sense, utterly absurd, since it merely reflects the truths God chooses to create; whether we consider reason in Pascal, who, though a scientist and rationalist, believed in reason only to define its limits; whether we consider it in our time, in Valéry, for example, where it is really a kind of light to which man clings in an absurd world—then we perceive that what has been called French rationalism has always been, in actual fact, pessimistic. French rationalism is a reflection on an irrational situation, accompanied by a profound feeling, even among the most rationalistic, in Voltaire, for example, that in the last analysis the universe at a certain point eludes reason. Reason is the struggle against a universe that everywhere escapes us and that we try to recapture; it is a kind of limited confidence in human freedom seen in a situation which is just about hopeless.
But reason in America, on the other hand, is first of all technical, practical, and scientific. It is immediately defined by its efficacy. It seems to go about proving either that the universe is rational or, at any rate—as the pragmatists and instrumentalists declare—that we can rationalize the universe. Consequently American rationalism is optimistic. This optimism has a profound significance upon which it is unnecessary to insist. We are familiar with American history. We see how there is room for optimism in America. But there is no doubt that when this optimism comes to Europe in American books that have been more or less popularized, it leads us straight to “scientism.” And, in like fashion, the Russian type of optimistic rationalism similarly leads to a “scientism” that is destructive to culture. Problems then disappear. Whether we take “scientism” from the Americans or from vulgarized Marxist thought, we learn in both cases that truth is merely data, the facts, that all we need is to follow science the way a locomotive follows the rails, and that, consequently, there is nothing to seek for, there is no risk, there is no doubt, and there is no evil.
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But the French writer, whatever he may be, has for centuries been under the impression that evil exists. This evil might have been the religious wars, the Jesuit culture Pascal attacked, or, in the age of the Encyclopedia, a certain conservatism. French writers have always waged a struggle for social justice against the powers-that-be and against established ideologies; not because French writers are more generous or intelligent or fair-minded than others, but because the cultural situation was such that it was practically impossible to take any other side; because, for example, the destiny of freedom of thought was bound up with the destiny of certain classes, as was seen in the 18th century, when the bourgeois and the writer joined forces.
Thus, there is a tendency, which is a real and living tendency in France, I shall not say (since the word has been so run down) to “engage” or “commit” oneself, but, at any rate, to consider the whole of the community in all its aspects as the object and subject of literature.
The intellectual and the writer are distinct from one another in America. However, a writer in France is also an intellectual. In America the writer is often a rough-and-ready sort of man, without technique, who says what he has to say and then disappears after saying it, whose statement does not constitute a reflective cultural phenomenon, but rather a kind of lyrical explosion. This is the case of Faulkner, Caldwell, etc. The American intellectual is, on the other hand, more the university type; he produces nothing, he does not care for his own country’s writers, finding their brutal power objectionable. He turns toward Europe—though scorning it—because he misses a certain type of European civilization. He seeks aestheticism, the hallmark of intellectual superiority, largely because he is not given a real role in American civilization.
In France this division between writer, intellectual, and community does not exist. As a result of chance and our good luck, the writer, and even the artist, have social and political influence. They have always had it, and, if we manage to preserve culture in France, they always will. In America, if one is not an expert, the things one says do not have a ponderable value in the political or social realm. One may create a great stir with a work of political economy or with a well documented work on sexuality like the Kinsey Report, but a novel or play is never a social event.
Thus, if France allows itself to be influenced by the whole of American culture, a living and liveable situation there will come here and completely shatter our cultural traditions and create a certain relation between the intellectual and the writer that will have no meaning for us. The fact that American intellectuals are not productive has not much importance since, in American society, writers generally do not come from the intellectual classes. But among us, where the intellectual and the writer are one and the same, if the American influence accustoms the writer to the idea of aestheticism and of being socially impotent, we shall be engulfed in scholasticism.
There is, in particular, an American virus that might very quickly contaminate us, namely, the pessimism of the intellectual. In the early pages of his remarkable book on the Negro in America, Myrdal stresses a fact that seemed to him quite general and which I regard as one of the characteristics of the American intellectual. In the midst of the optimism which is called Americanism are to be found a certain number of intellectuals (professors, etc.) who believe that no change can be achieved by them and who consider themselves as being utterly without power. It is obvious that if this mixture of optimism (which consists in saying, “Let’s not talk about oppression; let’s not think about it and it will disappear; there’s no evil in the depths of the human heart”) and pessimism (which consists in saying, “The country is too big; at any rate, intellectual influence is too weak to change anything”) is introduced into France, it can bring about only one result: the shattering of the framework of French culture.
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Can French culture be defended per se? To this I answer simply, “No.” France, left to its own resources, has no other solution, on the bourgeois level, than to turn to America, to ask for its help and consequently to adopt its ideology. On the other hand, it has no other solution, on the socialist level, than to turn to the ideology coming to us from the Eastern countries and likewise to lose our own culture. And anyone who, like Jules Lemaître in 1899 and 1900, wants to preserve French culture intact within a conservative framework for which he contemplates only a few structural reforms—chiefly a slight industrial progress, thanks to help from America—can rest assured that, by this very attitude, he will destroy French culture.
Do we have any other means for saving the essential elements of this culture? Yes. But on condition that we take up the problem in an entirely different way and realize that today it is no longer a question of a French culture, any more than of a Netherlands or Swiss or German culture. If we want French culture to survive, it must be integrated in the framework of a great European culture. All European countries are in a common situation. The same problems and the same dangers are to be found in Italy, France, Benelux, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Greece, and Austria.
The same economic problem, first of all: that is, the necessity of re-equipping their economies and the impossibility of applying for aid elsewhere than America. People everywhere in Europe have lived through the same catastrophe, which has left behind it the same landscape. Rotterdam was profoundly different from Florence but, right now, whether you walk about in the neighborhood of the Uffizi or in Rotterdam or in Le Havre, you are always in that same landscape. And even if you live in cities that were spared, the presence of those ruined cities weighs upon and changes the landscape: we know that there is a mutilated city and that this mutilated city is European.
At the same time, the catastrophe that caused this landscape to spring up all about us has confirmed us in the tragic idea of evil and the struggle against evil, has confirmed us in the idea that optimism is not possible or rather that optimism is possible only within a framework in which evil is assumed. While we were learning from the Occupation, from tortures, from all that occurred during four years, that for certain men it was possible to resist to the extreme limit, to the point of death, we were also learning that there are situations with no other solution than death. And not necessarily a heroic death, but simply death.
There is no doubt that in recent years most Europeans were forced to live—and in many cases still live—a morality of extreme situations, a morality in which one asks oneself how man will behave in the face of torture, famine, and death, situations that, thirty years ago, seemed like abstract problems which a philosophy professor, who had never actually experienced them, might set before his students. “Would you speak under torture?” was an academic question. In a morality of extreme situations, man either achieves the maximum of human resistance and freedom or, on the other hand, if he yields, suddenly falls into the most despicable of situations.
This morality does not seem to me to be necessarily the best or the only one. There are moralities of average situations; they are called casuistries. Today we have both our Jansenists and our Jesuits; and if, as Jean Bloch-Michel has written, we have to beware of the man we become in “great circumstances,” the fact remains nonetheless that the prevailing morality in contemporary Europe is not the optimistic and Jesuitic morality of the Americans, but a Jansenistic morality of great circumstances.
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In all realms, the political, the social, the economic, and even the metaphysical, the European of today is faced with the same situation. Circumstances, the past, and the immediate future confront him with the same problems, with the result that a French student, for example, is much closer to a student from Berlin than to a student from Boston or Princeton.
We discover here a very remarkable mutual European understanding. Before the war, when you traveled, you met extremely polite and courteous people who tried to enter into your ideas as you did into theirs, but very often there was no immediate rap port. National problems were different, intellectual interests were different, the culture was different Today you meet Swedes, Netherlanders, and Greeks; there is immediate contact. Whether it be the war, the American novel, or the latest book, you immediately have a subject, and you speak, not the same tongue, but the same language.
And most of the cultural works which have charmed present-day Europe are works that any European writer might have written. Plivier’s Stalingrad, written by a German, is evidently the book of the Nazi defeat, though it reminds Frenchmen of the defeat of 1940. The Days of Our Death, by the Frenchman David Rousset, is the book of the concentration camps; the Germans can read this book. In the books of the Italian Carlo Levi, we find the same preoccupations as among us. Thus we have clearly before Us the elements of a European culture. It does not yet exist, but we possess the basic ingredients because the same problems face everybody.
This cultural unity cannot be established without a political context. Of course we can ask governments, organizations, and individuals to inaugurate cultural relations; we can multiply exchanges, translations, and meetings; we can launch international journals. That was all tried before the war of 1939. Today these undertakings, which do have a certain interest, would be ineffective because we would then have a superstructure, a cultural unity, that would not correspond to any unity in the economic and political substructure. A unity of culture will have no meaning and will be nothing but words if it does not place itself within the frame of a much deeper effort to achieve the economic and political unity of Europe. This cultural unity can exist only if it is one of the elements of a politics that seeks to defend not only the cultural independence of Europe against America and against the USSR, but also its own political and economic unity, so that Europe may stand as a whole and single force between the two blocs—not as a third bloc but as an autonomous force.
The cultural problem today is only one aspect of a much greater problem, the entire fate of Europe. And if one thinks that no action is possible between the two blocs, if one thinks that a Europe divided between two zones of influence must be a battlefield, then European culture is surely lost.
If anyone supposes that European culture will be saved by a kind of monasticism whereby writers in convents go on talking about birds while fighting goes on around them, it is already lost, and forever. If, on the other hand, we assume that there is a possibility of setting up a unified, socialist European society in which economic problems are solved on a European and not on a national scale, and if this Europe tries to regain its autonomy vis à vis the United States and the USSR instead of being batted back and forth between them, then perhaps it may be saved. In other words, since culture is only one element in the total fact of history, we are dealing with a total problem, which presupposes and requires a total solution.
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