Literature & Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre

Author:Jean-Paul Sartre [Sartre, Jean-Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
Published: 2012-01-16T23:00:00+00:00

1. Etiemble: “Happy the writers who die for something.” Combat, January 24, 1947.

1. To-day his public is spread out. He sometimes runs into a hundred thousand copies. A hundred thousand copies sold, that makes four hundred thousand readers. Thus, for France, one out of a hundred in the population.

1. Dostoievsky’s famous “If God does not exist, all is permissible” is the terrible revelation which the bourgeoisie has forced itself to conceal during the one hundred fifty years of its reign.

1. This was somewhat the case of Ju’es Valles, though a natural magnanimity constantly struggled within him against bitterness.

2. I am not unaware that workers defended political democracy against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte much more than did the bourgeois, but that was because they thought that by means of it they would be able to bring about structural reforms.

1. I have so often been accused of being unfair to Flaubert that I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting the following texts which anyone can verify in the correspondence:

“Neo-catholicism on one hand and socialism on the other have stultified France. Everything moves between the Immaculate Conception and the workers’ lunch-boxes” (1868).

“The first remedy would be to put an end to universal suffrage, the shame of the human mind” (September 1871).

“I’m worth twenty Croisset voters” (1871).

“I have no hatred for the communards for the reason that I don’t hate mad dogs” (Croisset, Thursday, 1871).

“I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones important are a small group of spirits, always the same, who pass the torch from hand to hand” (Croisset, September 8, 1871).

“As to the Commune, which is on its last legs, it’s the last manifestation of the Middle Ages.”

“I hate democracy (at least what it is taken to mean in France), that is, the exaltation of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of law, in short, anti-sociability.”

“The Commune re-instates murderers.”

“The people is an eternal minor, and it will always be at the bottom of the scale since it is number, mass, the unbounded.”

“It’s not important for a lot of peasants to know how to read and no longer listen to their priest, but it’s infinitely important that a lot of men like Renan or Littré live and be listened to. Our salvation is now in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that a majority which will be composed of something other than mere figures.” (1871).

“Do you believe that if France, instead of being governed, in short, by the mob, were in the power of the mandarins, we would be in this mess? If, instead of having wanted to enlighten the lower classes, we had been concerned with educating the upper ones?” (Croisset, Wednesday, August 3rd, 1870).

1. In The Devil on Two Sticks, for example, Le Sage novelizes the characters of La Bruyere and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; that is, he binds them together by the slender thread of a plot.

2. The procedure of writing the novel in the form of letters is only a variation of what I have just indicated.

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