Documents: JP Sartre

JPS

La jeunesse, au temps où j’en étais, reçut, pour peu qu’elle ne fût pas hermétique aux livres, une impression durable de la lecture de Jean-Paul Sartre, son théâtre, ses nouvelles, son autobiographie, sa Nausée (les premières pages)… Il fut peut-être le dernier représentant de cette longue tradition d’intellectuels au long manteau qui permit à tant d’apprentis écrivains de s’élever au-dessus des préoccupations vestimentaires pour se consacrer entièrement à leur vocation. Son strabisme particulier était un élément crucial de son charisme.

Ceux qui m’ont connu à l’époque bénie où le travail n’avait pas encore corrompu et dégradé notre classe d’âge, savent que je fumais alors des cigarettes de la marque JPS, bon marché. En hommage à celui qui faisait largement consensus dans la catégorie des maîtres, j’en vins, pendant un temps, à donner aux cigarettes le nom de Jean-Paul : « Je peux te taxer une jean-paul ? » C’est ainsi que nous émaillions nos discussions de café, qui n’étaient peut-être pas non plus aussi brillantes que je pourrais essayer de vous le faire croire.

Puis, la fin des études approchant pour beaucoup, les considérations utilitaires et bassement pratiques prirent le pas. Nos vies empruntèrent des chemins différents mais nous finîmes tous par nous renier. Certains, qui auraient fait de bons comptables, sont devenus de mauvais artistes, d’autres, qui auraient été des intellectuels brillants, se sont abonnés au Figaro. Peut-être suis-je le seul de cette génération à avoir encore quelque chose à dire au sujet de Jean-Paul Sartre.

A y est pour une morale

Après sa mort, ses disciples et fidèles, sous l’impulsion de sa fille adoptive, publièrent des écrits inédits de Sartre sous le nom de Cahiers pour une morale. Ils montrèrent là leur mentalité d’écoliers attardés. Je ne doute pas que ces manuscrits d’une période d’ailleurs ancienne étaient consignés dans des cahiers mais je vois surtout que le choix d’un tel titre les trahit comme attardés. Et même, s’ils avaient été parfaitement honnêtes avec eux-mêmes, ils auraient appelé ces écrits A y est (ou Ayé) pour une morale – comme le petit enfant sachant à peine parler qui balbutie « Ayé » quand il a fait sa commission –, afin de bien montrer leur fixation au stade de la formation au pot. Cette obsession du cahier est la marque irréfutable de celui qui n’est jamais sorti de l’école (primaire). Nous revenons plus loin sur l’essence normalienne de Sartre et de ses disciples.

Septembre noir

En cherchant sur internet l’article À propos de Munich que Sartre écrivit après l’attentat palestinien aux Jeux olympiques de Munich de 1972, dans lequel perdirent la vie plusieurs athlètes israéliens, je compris que je ne trouverais pas cet article, dans lequel il justifie l’attaque terroriste de l’organisation Septembre noir, dans le texte original français. Une phrase par-ci par-là, c’est tout ce que l’on en peut connaître. Mais tout le monde n’a pas les mêmes préventions et j’ai trouvé une partie de cet article en anglais, que je livre aux lecteurs de ce blog accompagné de ma traduction française de la traduction anglaise, ce qui est tout de même un comble.

Jean-Paul Sartre, About Munich, translated by Elizabeth Bowman

La Cause du peuple–J’accuse, N° 29, du 15 oct. 1972.

(Republished in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 11-17 nov, 1982, under the title A New Sartre Scandal)

Those who affirm the sovereignty of the Israeli state and also believe Palestinians have a right to sovereignty for the same reason, and who take the Palestinian question as fundamental, must admit that the Israeli establishment’s policy is literally crazy and deliberately aims at avoiding all possible solutions to this problem. It is therefore politically accurate to say that a state of war exists between Israel and the Palestinians. In this war the Palestinians’ only weapon is terrorism. It is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no other, and the French who approved FLN terrorism against the French must approve in turn the Palestinians’ terrorist action. This abandoned, betrayed, exiled people can show its courage and the force of its hate only by organizing deadly attacks. Of course these should be viewed politically, by assessing the intended results against those actually obtained. We would also need to settle the highly ambiguous question of the real relationships among Arab governments, none of which is socialist nor has socialist tendencies, and the feddayin, which leads us to ask whether the Palestinians’ primary enemies may not be these feudal dictatorships, several of which have supported them verbally while at the same time trying to massacre them, and whether the first effort of the Palestinians, whose war necessarily dedicates them to socialism, must not be to side with the peoples of the Middle East against those Arab states which oppress them. But these problems cannot be treated in an article.

It must be said that for those who agree with the terrorist attacks to which the Israeli establishment and the Arab dictatorships have reduced the Palestinians, it seems perfectly outrageous that the French press and a segment of opinion should judge the Munich attack an intolerable outrage while one has often read dry reports without comment of strikes in Tel Aviv that cost several human lives.

Ma traduction :

Jean-Paul Sartre, À propos de Munich, article publié dans La Cause du peuple, 15 octobre 1972.

Ceux qui affirment la souveraineté de l’État israélien et sont en même temps convaincus que les Palestiniens ont droit à la souveraineté pour la même raison, et qui considèrent la question palestinienne comme fondamentale, doivent admettre que la politique de l’establishment israélien est littéralement insensée et vise de manière délibérée à éviter toute solution possible à ce problème. Il est par conséquent politiquement juste de dire qu’un état de guerre existe entre Israël et les Palestiniens. Dans cette guerre, la seule arme des Palestiniens est le terrorisme. C’est une arme terrible mais les opprimés n’en ont pas d’autre, et les Français qui ont approuvé le terrorisme du FLN contre des Français doivent également approuver l’action terroriste des Palestiniens. Ce peuple abandonné, trahi et exilé ne peut montrer son courage et la force de sa haine qu’en organisant des attaques mortelles. Naturellement, celles-ci devraient être considérées politiquement, en évaluant les résultats escomptés contre ceux réellement obtenus. Nous aurions également besoin de traiter la question fortement ambiguë des rapports entre les gouvernements arabes – dont aucun n’est socialiste ni n’a de tendances socialistes – et les feddayin, ce qui nous conduit à demander si les principaux ennemis des Palestiniens ne seraient pas ces dictatures féodales, dont plusieurs les ont soutenus verbalement tout en essayant en même temps de les massacrer, et si le premier effort des Palestiniens, que leur guerre voue nécessairement au socialisme, ne doit pas être de combattre au côté des peuples du Moyen-Orient contre ces États arabes qui les oppriment. Mais ces problèmes ne peuvent être traités dans un article.

Pour ceux qui approuvent les attaques terroristes auxquelles l’establishment israélien et les dictatures arabes ont conduit les Palestiniens, il semble parfaitement indigne que la presse française et une partie de l’opinion jugent l’attaque de Munich un outrage intolérable, alors que l’on a souvent lu des rapports laconiques sans commentaires au sujet des grèves de Tel Aviv ayant coûté plusieurs vies humaines.

J’ouvre les Œuvres romanesques de Sartre dans la collection La Pléiade. Les romans sont précédés d’une chronologie biographique de pas moins de 69 pages (XXXV-CIV), extrêmement détaillée. À l’année 1972, je ne trouve pas la moindre mention de cet article À propos de Munich. Vous me direz que les auteurs d’une telle chronologie n’ont pas souhaité recenser les nombreux articles de journaux écrits par Sartre, car on ne peut pas tout dire, même en 69 pages. Or de nombreux articles et interviews sont rappelés, par exemple, pour cette même année 1972 : « Juin : [Sartre] Donne une interview sur la politique à la revue hispanophone Libre » (dont je suppose que tout le monde se fiche éperdument).

Vous me direz alors qu’il fallait bien que ces auteurs fissent un choix. Le choix est en effet on ne peut plus clair. À l’année 1967, on lit : « [Sartre] Prend position pour Israël en ce qui concerne l’ouverture du golfe d’Akaba. Violentes réactions dans les pays arabes dont certains interdiront les œuvres de Sartre et de Beauvoir (la veuve de Frantz Fanon interdira que la préface de Sartre aux Damnés de la terre figure dans les réimpressions de l’ouvrage). » Merci aux responsables de cette édition : Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, Geneviève Idt et George H. Bauer.

Le “casseur de pédés”

L’un des personnages du roman L’Âge de raison (1945) est un homosexuel et Sartre évoque, à propos du milieu homosexuel, une « franc-maçonnerie de pissotières » (à croire qu’il avait aussi une dent contre les francs-maçons).

Dans La Mort dans l’âme (1949), un roman ultérieur reprenant les mêmes personnages, ce pauvre type homosexuel nous est montré se promenant dans les rues désertes de Paris, où les Allemands viennent d’entrer, et jubilant comme ce n’est pas permis. Son franc-maçon de pissotières devient un super-collabo. Je ne sais plus dans lequel de ces deux romans ce franc-maçon d’un genre spécial écrit d’ailleurs une longue lettre dans laquelle il évoque en termes exaltés une conversion religieuse, que le personnage qui la reçoit commente dédaigneusement d’un simple : « Ces vieilleries… » d’un effet irrésistible.

Avec ce personnage, Sartre reprend un thème qu’il avait traité dans la nouvelle L’Enfance d’un chef, parue dans Le Mur en 1939. Un jeune poète initié au haschisch et à l’homosexualité par un vieux poète surréaliste finit par rejoindre les royalistes d’Action Française, participant à des agressions antisémites.

Il semblerait que Sartre ait eu un compte à régler, peut-être sans animosité personnelle mais plutôt par un sens bien compris de sa carrière d’écrivain. En effet, avant lui l’écrivain normalien n’est pas vraiment une figure qu’on prend au sérieux. Les gens ne voient pas trop ce qu’un bon élève, un fayot destiné à devenir professeur de lycée pourrait leur dire d’intéressant sur la vie ; ils préfèrent les cas marginaux, les vies déjantées, les expériences moins ordinaires. Un point de vue dont on retrouve dans Zola un écho d’une sanglante ironie (décrivant un journaliste boulevardier) :

« Il avait gardé de l’École normale tout un dogmatisme, un pédantisme étroit, dont rien n’avait pu le laver, ni ses efforts herculéens pour être sceptique et léger, ni les vingt années de sa vie de Paris, au travers de tous les mondes. Magister il était, et magister il restait, jusque dans ses laborieuses frasques d’imagination et d’audace. Dès l’entrée, il s’efforça d’être ravi de Silviane (…) l’idée lui venait que rien ne serait plus parisien, d’une belle humeur parisienne plus détachée de pédanterie, que de la soutenir, en lui trouvant du talent. » (Paris d’Émile Zola, 1898)

C’est à ce préjugé que s’attaque Sartre, en démystifiant pour le vulgum pecus l’idole canaille, homosexuelle et/ou opiacée qui, faute d’une saine philosophie existentialiste, rejoint les rangs de la réaction quand cela devient son intérêt ou parce qu’elle s’est tôt fatiguée de ses vices et succès de librairie.

XL The Lord of Saxy-Beaulieu

A Controversial Letter on Celts

A couple of days after I had published in a journal some considerations on the use of the Celtic cross by people calling themselves ‘white nationalists,’ questioning the symbol’s relevance as the Celts were only a part of the white peoples and not the whole of them, I received a letter from a relative who took the opportunity of his having read my paper to air his ideas on the relationship between Saxons and Celts through the ages up to our day. The perusal of his letter provoked such a strong impression on my mind that I could not stop thinking about it for days. Eventually, I asked him if he would allow me to share it on my blog.

He agreed with two provisos. First, his identity would be given through his title, Lord of Saxy-Beaulieu, and the following true biographical elements made public: “A member of the highest Saxon and Norman nobility with relatives in the U.S. and the British Isles (including Jersey & Guernesey, the Isle of Sark and the whole of France since Joan of Arc, who was burnt at the stake as everyone knows).” Second, he asked me to apologize in his name if his English was found faulty: He has stopped practising modern English because Celts are speaking it as a language of their own, and he now only uses an old, local Saxon that he learnt in family registries from the early Middle Ages. He has no social life any longer, being satisfied with giving orders to his Celtic servant by hand signs in the family manor of Saxy-Beaulieu.

Here’s the letter.

“Dear son,

Despite the fact that you have been neglecting a relative for an unduly long time, especially with regards to my quality, I take the opportunity that is given me of reading your public prose to share with you the thoughts that have been the substance of my soul for the last decades, on the particular topic that you touched, namely the relationship between the Celts and us.

You are right to stress that we Saxons and Normans will never place ourselves under a Celtic banner of any sort [I never stressed this, actually]. However, you are wrong not to acknowledge publicly your own ancestry, as you are wrong to have anything to do with Celts at all. ‘Tis your parents’ mistake not to have taught you with due clarity the rank that was ascribed to you in this life, and each time you and I met I did my best to correct the pernicious influence of that modern education that is levelling everything, but that was only from time to time and unfortunately not enough to root sound principles in a young soul bewildered by a machinery of perversion.

Celts have always been our slaves and servants. They have been given us as such by God, as is clearly laid down in the Scriptures. To every place we came, spreading from the Womb of Nations, we found them, along with other species. They seemed to us the most suitable people for serving us, and we chased the others away.

Every European nation is no nation in the meaning that you and your so-called white nationalist acquaintances ascribe to it. There is no nation, only households, with masters – the Saxons – and servants – the Celts. In the same way that they deceive you with their idea of nation, they deceive you with their idea of a white race and civilization. These people say they want to save the Western civilization, but before talking like this they should learn that Western civilization has always meant for them to serve us. Only their rebellion has been the cause that others came to do their task. They have undermined the foundations that our benevolence as masters had provided them, and now they whine that the world is upside down. They have never been upside but always down, where they belong.

Celts are now living in a Cosmopolis of debauchery and treachery. Is this our fault? We have not changed a single thing in our habits and customs. We see the world going asunder but we will not join their motley, discordant movements. They are not our equals. We know that our time will come again when things get too bad, because we are the only ones who can rule and bring order in this world. In the meantime, we will ignore the madness around us and enjoy the company of our genealogical trees and books. We will never be reading a book younger than 215 years of age. We will never walk in a crowded street. We will never talk to no one who does not master old Gleeshire Saxon. If we do not find enough of our good people, we will make more of them with our own sisters. We have always done that in the past. The only television noise that will ever reach our ears is at our French Riviera villeggiatura: It is the Celtic neighbour’s television heard through modern-manufactured partitions – ah, those French would have learnt what a partition is at the Manor of Saxy-Beaulieu! Let that neighbour spend his whole life before his Celtic mirror, that is, television. We do not live in the same world. This is not the same world we are talking about at all.

Always will you be welcome at Saxy-Beaulieu.”

*

Yet the lord of Saxy-Beaulieu has not always been an old crackpot. On the contrary, he used to be young and learned (I mean in other things than Saxon feudal law). Here’s a story he once told me.

“Many years ago, my dear friend X. was involved in an amorous flirt with the Duchess of W. As things became serious and he, as an educated man, worried about the consequences, he told me that he wanted to break off and wished to know the most appropriate way to do so.

I remembered having found in Kierkegaard the solution to his problem. As the philosopher says, there is a philosophical way to break with one’s lover when the circumstances demand it. In order to depart her without her falling apart, it was necessary to act in such a manner that she could not keep any esteem for him; she would thus believe that her eyes had been opened on the true nature of a man unworthy of her sentiments. Otherwise, if he did not disappoint her and she kept her sentiments for him, she would suffer, and he would be a rascal.

One way to attain this goal, I suggested, was to act in a cynical way regarding her marriage (for she was still married at the time). If he made her an indecent proposal, adding: “Are you ready to cheat now?”, she would definitely think him to be an unrefined person of limited outlook, deserving not the emotions she had thought she had felt for him; she would leave him on her own initiative, a little bit shocked maybe but spared much of heart’s ache. He would thus keep his mind at rest that his conduct had been chivalrous.

He agreed with my plan, thanking me profusely for the good idea. Unfortunately, English was not his mother tongue and, as the moment came, due to his faulty pronunciation he actually said: “Are you ready to sh*t now?” The perversity of the demand was for the Duchess, as the degenerate lady she was, too charming a trait to be resisted, and his attempt to break off failed miserably.”

*

This being said, the lord of Saxy-Beaulieu has always had peculiar ideas. This from another of his letters.

“α) Were it not for the social pressure that makes the adolescent feel compulsory to look for a sweetheart, even though, in reality, it is not at all aimed at sexual relief in most cases, he would ignore such compulsion to wasting his time and devote his energy to more fruitful activities. Petting is that form of intercourse that is fit for female nature and unfit for male nature. That it has so developed among young people is proof that our culture has become womanly.

ß) The actual state of a race is represented above all by the male individuals. Women have a tendency to manifest the traits of the anterior state; they evolve more slowly because, as a result of sexual selection which distributes hereditary traits according to the result of males’ competition, males are more subject to variation. As a consequence, in a country like the United States of America, which original immigrant stock is predominantly Nordic, blondness is more a woman’s trait, and blonde women in general are blonder than blond men. [For an account of this fact from a slightly different perspective, see my essay Eyes of Blue & Comment #1 here. FB]

γ) According to the count of Boulainvilliers, an early (17th century) French racialist and aristocratic opponent to royal absolutism, the French nobility of Frank ancestry, blue-eyed and blond, racially differs from the core population of France. Boulainvilliers’s theory was utilized by Cardinal Richelieu to denounce as mongrelization and oppose marriages between aristocrats and rich bourgeois.

Count Arthur de Gobineau, another early racialist (or you may want to call him a racist, as he disserted on the “inequalities” between races), said the same of Germany. He thought the German aristocracy was Aryan whereas the rural masses were Slavic. Actually, he thought the European aristocracy was an Aryan ruling class over populations ethnically different.

Later, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a Social Darwinist (and Socialist), considered France and Germany almost equally poor in Aryan blood. He considered as the only Aryan nations of his time (end of 19th century) the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Yet, in the case of the British Isles, he overlooked the historical dichotomy, based on anthropological differences, between Saxons and Celts, akin to that between Frank noblemen and Gauls in France and that between German noblemen and Slavs in Germany.

Δ) Recently, a Harvard black professor was arrested in his home by a white policeman who had been called by a neighbor alarmed at seeing the black man break open a door. It turned out the Harvard professor had left his keys somewhere and the house he broke in was his.

As the professor saw the police coming, he became angry and offensive, so the policeman manacled him and took him to the police station. Later, President Obama said the Harvard professor was a friend of his and the police had been stupid. The professor said America was racist and the four residents of the White House (the President and his family) the only persons living in a post-racial America. Newspapers around the world told the story of the Harvard professor victim of white America’s bias and prejudice. (I too lost my keys one day: I called a locksmith.)

A so-called specialist in American affairs told the story on French TV. Describing the events, he said the professor “touched the door” and the neighbor called the police. The specialist even illustrated his words with a rapid gesture imitating a man grasping the handle of a door. I guess this is only because it would have been difficult on a TV studio to render the behavior of a man breaking a door open, with shoulders and all – or is it because it would have made the neighbor’s alarm appear more understandable and the professor’s behavior less rational?”