An Existential Life

On June 22nd, Marshal Pétain concluded an armistice with the Germans. Under the terms of the armistice, France was split in two. The German ran the territory they had occupied during their invasion. Pétain, with his National Assembly government based in Vichy, ran the other half in preparation for when Germany would fully occupy France – this was scheduled for November 1942. On July 10th 1940, the National Assembly gave Pétain the right to rule by authoritarian methods to rid his half of France (known as Vichy France) of its “moral decadence”. The police in Vichy France proceeded to round up those considered to be decadent. The police helped the Germans round up Jews who were sent east to the death camps. To some, if there was a police state in German-occupied France, there was a police state in the other part of France – run by a Frenchman. 

Sartre responded to this in his essay “La Republique du Silence” in 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…”