• DOI:10.1177/002200946700200204
• Corpus ID: 150438929

Jean-Paul Sartre and Politics

@article{Bondy1967JeanPaulSA,
  title={Jean-Paul Sartre and Politics},
  author={François Bondy},
  journal={Journal of Contemporary History},
  year={1967},
  volume={2},
  pages={25 - 48}
}

• François Bondy
• Published 1 April 1967
• History
• Journal of Contemporary History

Three friends two of his own generation and one younger played an important part in awakening Jean-Paul Sartre's interest in politics; first Paul Nizan, the communist who had broken with the party after the Hitler-Stalin pact, and who even after his death in action in I940 continued to be attacked by his ex-colleagues as a 'traitor' and 'police agent'; then Albert Camus, the militant member of the Resistance; and finally Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who for vital years was responsible for the political material in Les Temps Modernes, the journal which he edited jointly with Sartre, and who initially regarded the Soviet Union as the realization of an historic hope which must therefore be judged otherwise than bourgeois states, but who later rejected this theory. Jean-Paul Sartre has never been a communist and he has often taken the communists severely to task, particularly the French but on important occasions also the Russian. Nevertheless he has strongly attacked various intellectuals, including Marxists, and contributors to his own journal, for criticizing the communist party too sharply. Because he was never a member of that party, Sartre, unlike the avowed Stalinists, feels under no obligation to criticize the Soviet regime. In a reply to Daniel Martinet (not to be confused with Gilles Martinet, of the Parti Socialiste Unifie) Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes of July I950: