Translated from French
Sartre supported Stalin during the Gulag. Sartre supported Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Sartre prefaced Fanon by transforming anti-colonial violence into mental hygiene ("killing a European is killing two birds with one stone"). Sartre went to visit Andreas Baader in his Stammheim prison in 1974 and came out defending the terrorist. Sartre signed, in 1977, with Beauvoir, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, the petition for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors aged 13.
We need to pause for a second on this list. Because it has no equivalent in the intellectual history of the 20th century. There is not a single great totalitarian or criminal shift of the last century that Sartre did not, at some point, justify, excuse, or refuse to condemn. When the century manufactured a nightmare, Sartre held the door open.
And yet, he is on the curriculum. For the baccalaureate. For the agrégation. In the textbooks. In the theses. His street in Paris. His ashes in the Montparnasse cemetery, on pilgrimage. His intellectual statue intact. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme is taught to high school sophomores as if it were a sermon by Bossuet.
It is not Sartre who is the scandal. Sartre is just a man (with his cowardices, his fanaticisms, his intimate theater of radicality). The scandal is us. The scandal is that an entire civilization decided, collectively and silently, that being systematically on the side of the executioners was not disqualifying for becoming a nation's great intellectual.
Compare with Raymond Aron. Aron was right about everything. About Stalin, about Mao, about the gulags, about totalitarianism, about decolonization, about the Cold War, about the market economy, about Europe. Everything. He wrote L'Opium des intellectuels in 1955, thirty years before the French left, embarrassed, discovered that Solzhenitsyn was indeed not lying. Aron had the lucidity of an entire century, condensed into a limpid body of work, written in French of surgical precision.
Aron is not on the curriculum. Aron has no street. Aron has no Panthéon. When one speaks of Aron, it is with that little shrug that means "yes, interesting, a bit cold, a bit right-wing, you know." Sartre, on the other hand, is incandescence, engagement, youth, flame.
Merleau-Ponty's phrase has remained famous: "better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron." It is not trivial. It is the decisive admission. It explicitly states what cultivated France has tacitly decided for seventy years. That being right is less important than being on the right side. That truth is a bourgeois detail. That what matters is not the accuracy of the analysis but the purity of the posture.
What it reveals is terrible. A civilization chooses its prophets, and that choice defines it for a hundred years. France chose the brilliant flatterer of executioners over the sober analyst of reality. And it paid dearly for that choice. An entire intellectual class, trained in Sartrian reverence, learned that engagement matters more than accuracy, that surface generosity matters more than real consequences, that loving "the people" in theory authorizes contempt for people in practice.
The entire pathology of the contemporary French intellectual is already there.
