The Sartre–Camus Quarrel and the Fall of the French Intellectual

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual.

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présentation des Temps modernes,” in Situations, II, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1948), 7–30. See also “Introducing Les Temps modernes,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 252, 255, 264, and 265.

2. John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

3. Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (London: Picador, 1981), 1.

4. Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 87, 88. See also Tony Judt, “The Lost World of Albert Camus,” New York Review of Books, 6 October 1994, 3–5.

5. Judt, “The Lost World of Albert Camus.”

6. See William E. Duvall, “Camus Reading Nietzsche: Rebellion, Memory and Art,” History of European Ideas 25.1–2 (1999), and “Albert Camus against History,” The European Legacy 10.2 (2005).

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 109–10.

8. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 266–9; Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Putnam, 1965), 271–72.

9. See Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, ed. and trans. David Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: Humanity Books, 2004).

10. Pierre Nora announced in 1980 that the universalizing intellectual oracle had had its day, having been replaced by the technician, the specialist, the expert, the scholar, the university professor, as well as the journalist and the media “intellectual,” at the same time that within the French university there occurred a shift in emphasis from the humanities (literature, philosophy) to the human sciences, from reflection to method and technique. In all of this, he says, the ethical function of the thinker disintegrated. See Pierre Nora, “Que peuvent les intellectuels?” Le Débat 1 (May 1980): 3. Coincidentally, 1980 is the year Sartre died. So did Roland Barthes. Jacques Lacan died in 1981, Raymond Aron in 1983, Michel Foucault in 1984, and Simone de Beauvoir in 1986. The brightest lights of two intellectual generations in France were quite literally dying away. Jean-Francois Lyotard, three years later in a Le Monde article entitled, “Tombeau de l’intellectuel” [Tomb of the intellectual] (16 July 1983) suggested that the social and political interventions of the universalizing, totalizing intellectual were troublesome, misleading and impossible. The death of the intellectual has been a slow one apparently, for in celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his journal, Le Débat, the first issue of which contained the article mentioned above, Nora entitled another article, “Adieu aux intellectuels?” [Good-bye to the intellectuals]. As a side note, Lois Oppenheim has noted that between 1980 and 2001 over 100 books focused on the intellectual were published in France. See “France Takes Its Intellectuals to Heart, Even As They Doubt Themselves,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 September 2001.

11. Sartre, Situations, 109.

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Condemned of Altona, trans. Sylvia and George Leeson (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1963), 20.

13. See, for example, Jean-Yves Guérin, Albert Camus: Portrait de l’artiste en citoyen (Paris: Editions Francois Bourin, 1993), 130.

14. Albert Camus, Carnets III, Mars 1951–Décembre 1959 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989), 147. “Existentialisme. Quand ils s’accusent on peut être sûr que c’est toujours pour accabler les autres. Des juges pénitents.”

15. Albert Camus, Essais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1965), 897–98. “Si certains Français considèrent que, par ses entreprises coloniales, la France (et elle seule, au milieu de nations saintes et pures) est en état de péché historique, ils n’ont pas à désigner les Français d’Algérie comme victimes expiatoires … , ils doivent s’offrir eux-mêmes à l’expiation. … [I]l me paraît dégoûtant de battre sa coulpe, comme nos juges-penitents, sur la poitrine d’autrui, vain de condamner plusieurs siècles d’expansion européenne.”

16. Roger Quilliot and others have pointed to parallels between Camus's novel and Sartre's autobiography. I wish here to reflect specifically on how the strategies of the judge-penitent link the two books.