Resistance & Coloniality by Jean-Paul Sartre

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#17, SEPT-NOV/2015

Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, above all the right to speak; in the face of daily insults we had to remain silent, we were deported en masse, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners. Surrounding us everywhere – on the wall, on the screens, and in the newspapers – we encountered the foul, insipid image that our oppressors wanted to us to accept as ourselves. Because of all this we were free. Since the Nazi poison seeped into our ruminations, every accurate thought was a victory; since an all-powerful police force tried to render us mute, every word became precious as a declaration of principle; since we were wanted men and women, every one of our acts was a solemn commitment. The often dreadful circumstances of our struggle made it possible for us to finally live out that anxious, unbearable, heartrending situation known as the human condition in a candid, unvarnished way. Exile, captivity, even death, which in happier times we artfully conceal became our perpetual concerns; we learned that they were not avoidable accidents nor an external menace; but must be recognized as our lot, our destiny, the profound source of our human reality. At each moment we lived to the full the meaning of that banal little phrase: “All men are mortal.” And the choice each of us made of our human being was an authentic choice, since it was made in the presence of death, since it could always be expressed in the form: “Rather death than – .”

And I am not speaking here of the elite among us who were actual Resistance fighters, but of all those French people who, every hour of the night and day for four years, said “No.” The very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of our human condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions we sidestep in peacetime. All those among us aware of any information about the Resistance – and what Frenchman was not at one point or another in that position – asked ourselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to hold out?” Thus the very question of freedom was posed, bringing us to the precipice of the deepest knowledge human beings can have of themselves. For the secret of human being is not some Oedipus complex or an inferiority complex, it is the very limit of our freedom, our ability to resist torture and death.

For those involved in underground activity, the circumstances of struggle afforded a new mode of lived experience: they did not fight out in the open like soldiers; hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude, they resisted torture in the most complete abandonment, alone and naked in the presence of clean shaven, well-fed, well-dressed torturers, who mocked their wretched flesh – torturers who, by their untroubled consciences and boundless social power, gave every appearance of their own righteousness. Yet, in the depths of this solitude, others were present, for they were defending every one of their comrades in the Resistance; a single word was enough to instigate ten, or a hundred, arrests. Is not this total responsibility in total solitude the very revelation of our freedom? This abandonment, this solitude, this enormous risk – these were experienced by everyone, for leaders and men alike. For those who carried messages without knowing the contents and for those who directed the entire Resistance effort, the punishment was the same – imprisonment, deportation and death. In no army in the world is such an equality of risk shared by the troops in the frontline and the leadership. As such the Resistance was a true democracy: for the footsoldier as for the commander, the same danger, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within discipline. Thus, in the shadows and in blood, the strongest of Republics was forged. Each of its citizens understood he had an obligation to all and that he had to rely on himself alone. Each, in the most total abandonment, fulfilled his role in history. Each, standing against the oppressors, made the effort to be himself irremediably. And by choosing himself in freedom, he chose freedom for all. This Republic without institutions, without army or police force, was something every French person had at every turn to conquer and assert against Nazism. We are now on the threshold of another Republic. Let us wish that this one will, in the full light of day, retain the austere virtues of that Republic of Silence and Night.

original published as “The Republic of Silence” for Lettres francaises, September 1944. This Brotherwise Dispatch translation relies heavily on Robert Denoon Cumming’s version included in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, (Vintage Books, 1965, 2003) pp.233-4 and Chris Turner’s more recent version included in The Aftermath of War, (Seagull Books, 2008) pp.3-7.