Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times:
If post-war history took the new nations of Africa and Asia down a
series of blind alleys, often terminating in horror and savagery,
Europe’s experience offered more comfort. This was unexpected.
The prevailing mood in 1945 was despair and impotence. The
European era in history was over. In a sense Hitler had been the last
truly European leader, able to initiate world events from a Euro-
centric vision. He lost that power at the end of 1941. The vacuum
opened by his colossal fall could not be filled by European rivals. At
the end of the war, the two non-European superpowers stood, as it
were, on the rim of a spent volcano, peering contemptuously into its
still smouldering depths, uninvolved in its collapse but glad it no
longer had the daemonic energy to terrify humanity.
On 26 October 1945, at the opening of the new ballet at the
Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the drop-curtain by Picasso was hissed
by the packed high-society audience. 1 That was the old Paris. Three
days later, at the Club Maintenant, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a
lecture, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism 5 . Here was the new Paris. This
occasion, too, was packed. Men and women fainted, fought for
chairs, smashing thirty of them, shouted and barracked. It coincided
with the launching of Sartre’s new review, Les Temps modernes, in
which he argued that literary culture, plus the haute couture of the
fashion shops, were the only things France now had left — a symbol
of Europe, really — and he produced Existentialism to give people a
bit of dignity and to preserve their individuality in the midst of
degradation and absurdity. The response was overwhelming. As his
consort, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, ‘We were astounded by the
furore we caused.’ 2 Existentialism was remarkably un-Gallic; hence,
perhaps, its attractiveness. Sartre was half-Alsacian (Albert Schweit-
zer was his cousin) and he was brought up in the house of his
grandfather, Karl Schweitzer. His culture was as much German as
French. He was essentially a product of the Berlin philosophy school
and especially of Heidegger, from whom most of his ideas derived.
Sartre had had a good war. Despite the surface enmities, there was a
certain coming together of the French and German spirit. Paris was
not an uncongenial place for an intellectual to be, provided he could
ignore such unpleasantnesses as the round-up of Jews, as most
contrived to do without difficulty. 3 As the Jewish intellectual Ber-
nard-Henri Levy was later to point out, radical, proto-fascist forms
of racialism were rarely repugnant to the French, not least to French
intellectuals: he even called it ‘the French ideology’. 4
The Paris theatre flourished under the Nazis. Andre Malraux later
snarled: ‘I was facing the Gestapo while Sartre, in Paris, let his plays
be produced with the authorization of the German censors.’ 5 Albert
Biissche, theatre critic of the Nazi forces’ newspaper, Pariser Zei-
tung, called Sartre’s play Huis Clos ‘a theatrical event of the first
order’. He was not the only beneficiary of German approval. When a
new play by the pied-noir writer Albert Camus, Le Malentendu, was
presented at the Theatre des Mathurins on 24 June 1944, it was
hooted by the French intellectual elite (then largely fascist) because
Camus was known to be in the Resistance. Biissche found it ‘filled
with profound thoughts … a pioneering work’. 6 Camus did not
share Sartre’s aloofness to the war; he was in fact one of only 4,345
Frenchmen and women who received the special Rosette of the
Resistance medal. But his thinking reflected the growing contiguity
of French and German philosophy which the Occupation promoted
and which was an important. strand in the post-war pattern. The
most important influence in his life was Nietzsche, whom in effect,
through his novels UEtr anger and La Peste, he gallicized for an
entire generation of French youth.
Sartre and Camus came together in 1943—4, protagonists – and
eventually antagonists – in a cult centred on St Germain-des-Pres
which sought to relate philosophy and literature to public action.
Their caravanserai was the Cafe Flore, itself a symbol of the
ambiguities of French intellectual life. St Germain had been a haunt
of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, who had congregated in the old
Cafe Procope. The Flore dated from the Second Empire, when it had
been patronized by Gautier, Musset, Sand, Balzac, Zola and Huys-
mans; later by Apollinaire and later still by the circle of Action
Franqaise, led by Maurras himself: Sartre occupied his still-warm
seat. 7 Existentialism in its post-war presentation was derived from
Kant’s ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through
your will a general natural law’. Our positive acts, Sartre taught,
created ‘not only the man that we would like to be ourselves’ but also
‘an image of man such as we think he ought to be’. Man could shape
his own essence by positive political acts. He thus offered a rationa-
lized human gesture of defiance to despair – what Karl Popper called
‘a new theology without God’. It contained an element of German
pessimism, characteristic of both Heidegger and Nietzsche, in that it
placed exaggerated emphasis upon the fundamental loneliness of
man in a godless world, and upon the resulting tension between the
self and the world. 8 But for young people it was magic. It was a form
of Utopian romanticism with much the same attractions as the
Romantic movement 150 years before. Indeed it was more attractive
because it offered political activism too. As Popper complained, it
was a respectable form of fascism which, needless to add, could
easily be allied to forms of Marxism. Camus insisted he was never an
Existentialist, and in 1951 he and Sartre quarrelled mortally over the
latter’s defence of various forms of totalitarian violence. But it was
Camus’s re-creation, in modern terms, of the solitary Byronic hero,
who resists fate and an alien world by defiant acts, which brought the
cult so vividly to life and gave it actual meaning to youth on both
sides of the Rhine.
Thus Existentialism was a French cultural import, which Paris then
re-exported to Germany, its country of origin, in a sophisticated and
vastly more attractive guise. The point is worth stressing, for it was
the first time since the age of Goethe, Byron and De Stael that young
people in France and Germany felt a spontaneous cultural affinity, a
shared Weltanschauung. It served, then, as a preparation for a more
solid economic and political harmonization, for which circumstances
were also propitious. Yet this might not have come about but for two
further circumstances. The first was the final (and possibly terminal)
maturing of Christian activism in politics, which for a vital genera-
tion became the dominant mode in Europe. The second was the
emergence of a group of European titans — not Byronic, not young,
not romantic, not indeed heroic in any obvious still less Existentialist sense — who were to revivify the corpse of a Europe which had slain itself. Both the agency, Christianity, and the agents, Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle, were by nature abhorrent to the founders of Existentialist activism. But then history habitually proceeds by such ironies.
