Sartre's confrontation with colonialism [Ressource électronique] : the Algerian case and his engagement against communism / Araceli Hernandez-Laroche

Ph. D. : French : Berkeley, University of California : 2009

Bibliogr. p. 188-201

This dissertation confronts misconceptions regarding Jean-Paul Sartre's relation to communism in order to clear the way for a thorough appreciation of his analysis of colonialism and his stand against torture during the Algerian War. I emphasize how the tumultuous collapse of both the Third and Fourth French Republics influenced Sartre's engagement with Algeria's decolonization. I argue that to fully understand Jean Paul Sartre's theorizations on colonialism, especially as it brutally climaxed during the Algerian War with the widespread use of torture, we must closely examine his earlier grave disappointments and confrontations with the two dominant French political classes-socialists and communists-during fascists wars (the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and World War II, 1940-1945). I examine two key Sartrian works written during war periods threatened by anti-democratic governance: Les Sequestres d'Altona (1958), during the Algerian War, and his postwar trilogy, Les Chemins de la Liberte. I demonstrate that far from shrinking from criticizing the left out of loyalty to the French and Soviet Communist Parties, Sartre attacked the left in those works. I show why, and in what terms. The Socialist-sponsored and Communist-supported State of Exception legislation in France during the fifties, and the same parties' failure to defend the Algerians' struggle for independence recalled their past failures with regard to the Spanish Republic and the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. I show how the timing of Les Chemins de la Liberie and Les Sequestres d'Altona-published in the early years of the Cold War and during the Algerian crisis-increased their political and moral significance. I examine why Sartre had an easier relationship with the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) than with his own country's communist party and even socialist leaders. I contend that Italy's strong communist inclinations in the aftermath of World II and its collective mythical perception of its colonial history as a non-serious, fumbling endeavor, led Italy to feel less implicated than its other Western European counterparts in Sartre's ethical inquiries on race and torture. I show how domestic colonial questions were integral to the founding theorizations by Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti on Italian Marxism. I explore how Italian communists could have read Sartre's engagement with Algeria as his Southern Question and why his support for the Algerian independence unleashed a considerable lasting interest for his works in Italy. Jean Paul Sartre did not conflate Marxism with communism. Yet, he has been commonly misrepresented as a communist thinker despite his numerous confrontations with French communists and Stalinists. It is true that after the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Ridgway Affair (July 14, 1953) Sartre more vehemently opposed American hegemony by publicly supporting the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF). His relations with the party, however, were riddled with mutual mistrust because he prized his right to criticize controversial positions as an unaffiliated sympathizer. Sartre most passionately exposed their incompetence and complicity during a period riddled with fascism and what he considered to be a neo-fascist refusal to decolonize Algeria.