Posts tagged war
“All the same?” said Jacques in astonishment. “Go and tell that to the millions of men who are preparing to be killed.”
“And what then?” said Mathieu genially. “They have carried their death within them since the day they were born. And even if they are massacred to a man, humanity will still be up to strength; not an empty place, not one person missing.”
“Except for a loss of twelve to fifteen millions,” said Jacques.
“It isn’t a question of numbers,” said Mathieu. “Humanity replenishes itself, none is missed and none awaited. Humanity will continue on its futile journey, the usual people will ask themselves the usual questions and wreck their lives in the usual way.”
Jacques looked at him with a knowing smile.
“And what does it all come to”
“Well, just to nothing,” said Mathieu.
At the time Russia was at war. And, in the name of Christian love, Russians were killing their fellow men. It was impossible not to think about this. It was impossible to avoid the fact that killing is evil and contrary to the most basic principles of any faith. And yet prayers were said in the churches for the success of our armies, and our religious teachers acknowledged this killing as an outcome of faith. And this was not only applied to murder in time of war, but, during the troubled times that followed the war, I witnessed members of the Church, her teachers, monks, and ascetics condoning the killing of helpless, lost youths. As I turned my attention to all that is done by people who profess Christianity, I was horrified.
Jean Paul Sartre on The French Resistance.
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.
“Republic of Silence,” by Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 498-500.
The 30 September 1943 issue of the Résistance newspaper, Défense de la France.
WWII and Jean Paul Sartre
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…”
