Previous excerpt and essay here.
Sartre, « La République du silence », Les Lettres françaises, n° 20 du 9 septembre 1944 Situations, III, Paris 1964, pp. 11-14.
“We were never so free as we were during the German occupation.
“We’d lost all our rights, first that of speaking freely : we were insulted to our faces every day and had to keep quiet; they deported us en masse, workers, Jews or political prisoners; everywhere, on the walls, in the journals, on the screen, we encountered the revolting, withered face our oppressors wanted to us to have : all of this freed us. Once the Nazi venom had crawled into our way of thinking, every thought was a conquest; once the all-powerful police wanted to force us to be silent, every word became as precious as a declaration of principles; once we were hunted, every gesture had the weight of a commitment. The often atrocious circumstances of our battle forced us to live without make-up, openly, this divided, unbearable situation we call the human condition. Exile, captivity, the death above all that we so cleverly mask during our happy days, we turned into the perpetual objects of our concern, we learned that these aren’t avoidable accidents, nor even of constant menaces coming from outside: this must be our lot, our destiny, the deep source of our reality as human beings; we lived every second fully, in the sense of that banal phrase, “All men are mortal.” And the choice each made was authentic since he made it in the presence of death, since it would always be expressed as “Better death than…” I’m not talking here about that elite who were the the real Resistants, but of all the French who, every hour day and night for four years, said No. The cruelty of the enemy pushed us to the extremes of our condition by forcing us to pose the questions that elude us during peacetime: every one of us – and what French person didn’t find himself in this position at one time or another ? – who knew a few details about the Resistance had to anxiously ask himself, “If they torture me, will I hold up ?” That was the way the question of liberty was put and we were close to the most profound knowledge man can have of himself. Because a man’s secret isn’t the Oedipal complex or his inferiority, it’s the very limit of his liberty, it’s his power of resistance to torture and death. For those who took part in clandestine activity, the circumstances of their struggle brought about a new experience: they didn’t fight in daylight, like soldiers; hunted in solitude, arrested in solitude, it was in a condition of the most complete neglect and destitution that they resisted torture: alone and naked when confronted by well-shaven, well-dressed, well-fed tormenters who mocked their miserable flesh with a satisfied air and an overwhelming social power that gave every appearance of being in the right. Even so, at the most profound level of this solitude, there were the others, all the others, every comrade in the resistance who they defended; a single word suffised to provoke ten or a hundred arrests. Total responsibility in a solitude no less total, isn’t this the very revelation of our freedom ? This abandonment, this solitude, this enormous risk was the same for all, for the commander and for his men; for those who carried messages ignorant of their content just as for those who made decisions for the entire resistance: imprisonment, deportation, death. No army in the world exists where one finds such equality of risk for the soldier and the general. And that is why the Resistance was a real democracy: the same danger and the the same responsibility for the soldier as well as leader, even the same absolute liberty within the discipline. And so it was that the strongest of the Republics came into being in shadow and blood. Each of its citizens knew what he owed to others and that he could not count on anyone other than himself; each realised his historic role while bereft of any help. Each of them, against the oppressors, undertook to be himself irredeemiably and in choosing to do so freely, chose liberty for all. This republic without institutions, without an army, without police, couldn’t have existed if the French weren’t up to the task, living it moment to moment against the Nazis. We’re now approaching another Republic: can we not desire that it preserves in daylight the austere virtues of the Republic of Silence and Darkness ?”
A few notes may be in order here….
Sartre was writing ahead of the curve, raising an insanely idealistic flag as his idea of what a new French government might look like. Like other European countries in the aftermath of WWII, France had to create a framework for the sort of country it intended to be, and the document had to reflect current realities. Is Sartre really arguing for a country without police, without an army ? This three-pager has a Kierkegaardian ethos of solitude, exists as a kind of outline for J-P Melville’s devastating film Army of Shadows and yet is somehow optimistic at its core.
The French don’t tie themselves into knots over their founding fathers, venerating the constitution like some kind of holy writ. They know that they were here before the latest round of politicians trooped on stage and will still be here when the next regime collapses. What’s surprising is that after a disastrous run of mediocrities (Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron), there isn’t more of an outcry for a sixth republic. Macron only got retirement reform through with the help of the obscure but useful Constitutional Articles 47-1 and 3, which allowed him to bypass the Assembly entirely at the cost of bringing about the effective end of his presidency. Culture wars are in full swing and neither side seems to notice they’re pulling the country apart piece by piece, Left and Right equally captured and all too happy to accommodate; it’s easier work than constitutional reform, which has few friends. France feels more than a bit like it’s trapped inside a novel by Michel Houllebecq.
A bit of background for the historically minded : over two hundred and thirty years France has had five republics, each with different constitutions. In short order they are the First Republic, the opening salvo in the creation of a modern France in the aftermath of the Revolution (1792-1804); the Second, a response to the workers’ revolts of 1848 (1848-1852), both the first and the second brought to a halt by men named Bonaparte; the Third, which during its first forty years now looks like a Golden Age of art, science and peace (1870-1940); the Fourth, the reconstruction of France after the Second World War (1947-1958); and finally the return of De Gaulle and the beginning of “modern French politics” (1959-present). A healthy dose of scepticism is useful when reading on-line accounts (especially in English) of the different constitutional republics. Par example, the Fourth Republic gets a bad rap (too many Prime Ministers, too much instability) when it in fact laid the ground for 30 years of domestic peace and rising standards of living. The first De Gaulle government in the postwar period shared power with Socialists and Communists, established social security and paid vacations, made university education more widely available. Les Jours Heureux indeed ! The current Fifth Republic created a presidency with nearly unlimited powers. De Gaulle may have been a diplomatic genius but it was under his leadership that African independance was thwarted and during his reign that technocrats, exemplified by Prime Minister Pompidou, stole the best seats in the house. Both the Fourth and (at least the early years of) the Fifth Republic saw real efforts at the decentralisation of power away from Paris, something the current president, Macron, has needlessly gone out of his way to reverse, taking power from the Communes, the local and most legitimate, most approachable power center most French will ever encounter. Political rough and tumble (as exemplified by the ’50s) seems far preferable to rule by technocrats, whose un-arousing campaign song is always Don’t Get Your Hopes Too High, France.
La Maison de le Vieux Chêne (the Old Oak) was a revolutionary club operating on Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement in the 1840s; banned by authorities they employed a rare (and still preserved) wood carving of an oak tree as a decoy for the room in the back of the building where the group met in secret. During Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, 69 Mouffetard was transformed into a dance hall. The use of an oak tree as their symbol may harken back to Saint-Louis (Louis IX), whose Ordonnance, read for the first time under the oak tree in the Bois de Vincennes where the King held public gatherings, declared ‘One Justice for rich and for poor.’
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