SARAH BAKEWELL, AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ: FREEDOM, BEING AND APRICOT COCKTAILS, CHATTO AND WINDUS, 2017.
When I was a lot younger, I used to swallow pretty much every book I came across whole, without thinking very much about it. I was a quick and undiscriminating reader, and a lot of what I read, looking back on it, was probably rubbish. But it didn’t matter, because life was long, and there was plenty of time for correcting reading selection malfunctions later.
Much older now, I have acquired the habit of circling around books before I read them, hesitating before buying them, and then hesitating to start them. As you get older, reading a book properly is an investment of time which it becomes more and more obvious you will never get back.
So it was with Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. It went onto my “possible” list when it first came out in 2017 to ecstatic reviews, The paperback version appeared the next year. And then, quite unexpectedly, I came across a French translation in a bookshop in Paris. Translations from the English are common enough in France, but translations of English-language books about France are much, much rarer. So when I was sent some Amazon vouchers for my birthday, I looked through my Wanted list and added Bakewell’s book to it.
When it arrived and I took it out of the packet, I thought, oh Lord, I’ve made a mistake again. From the cringe-inducing subtitle to the twee drawing of Sartre, de Beauvoir and someone else (Camus? Merleau-Ponty? Aron?), looking warily at the aforesaid cocktails in an idealised Parisian café, it all seemed to confirm that I’d made another purchasing decision error. This was going to be a gossipy account of the glamorous lives and loves of romantic French intellectuals with strange names and difficult ideas, set among the jazz, the politics and the intellectual controversies of Paris after the War.
It took me some months to actually get around to reading the book. When I did so, I realised that my doubts about it were partially justified. It was a gossipy account of the glamorous etc … among other things. But the book was more than just a gossipy account, even if not nearly as much as it should have been. And the rest of this review is intended to enlarge on that rather gnomic judgement. We’ll start with what the book covers, then move onto what it says well and and should perhaps have said better, then to bits that could have been left out, and finish with what it doesn’t say at all, but perhaps should have. The last is actually indispensable for understanding the most influential philosophical movement of the twentieth century, and it’s a pity it hardly figures in the book at all. And after that, I'll try to explain why the issues the book raises are actually very significant for our time: probably more than the author herself realises. So let’s start, very briefly, with the story the book tells, and then we’ll look at how it tells it.
II
By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear that western philosophy had run into a dead end. Philosophers spent their entire careers writing footnotes to Kant and Hegel, producing yet more readings of Plato, and debating issues of ethics and epistemology to which definitive, or even useful, answers were impossible, even in principle. There were some interesting mavericks like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (who both had some influence on the early development of Existentialism) but they were well outside the mainstream. It was not unfair to see philosophy in those days as a kind of glorified, sophisticated discussion club, with nothing at all to say about issues that arose in real life. Now, at its best, philosophical writing had always been able to provoke and stimulate: Leibniz’s question “Why does something exist, rather than nothing?” resonates down the centuries with the force of a Zen koan. But by then, it had become incapable of providing any practical guidance on how to live: philosophy had gone a long way off course since Aristotle, or even Montaigne. There were two broad reactions to this parlous situation, one of which the book doesn’t mention, the other to which it is almost entirely devoted.
So in the interests of inclusivity, let’s just say that the first is generally called Logical Positivism, and it held that the only valid knowledge is that which can be empirically demonstrated. Traditional metaphysical debates were not so much wrong, therefore, as meaningless, and personal experience was irrelevant. The only real philosophical questions were those of the analysis of language. Logical Positivism was, as you might expect, especially popular among scientists and mathematicians, some of whom clearly saw it as a way of putting philosophy on the same footing as physics. The tradition flourished in Vienna and in Cambridge in England, and its best-known (if not necessarily most typical) exponent was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent time in both cities. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, exploded a bomb under conventional philosophy, and the pieces are still coming down. Even if, like me, you’re neither a philosopher or a mathematician, it’s still an intoxicating read, with its famous conclusion that there are just some things that we can’t talk about in words, so we would do well to keep quiet about them.
Wittgenstein was a mystic, but for a lot of people, and for all its elegance and rigour, Logical Positivism was of little interest, because they wanted something that would actually be useful to them in the world. Which brings us to the first of the figures described in the book, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Husserl, though trained as a scientist, took off in completely the opposite direction. “Phenomenology” as he christened his philosophy, was interested in what we actually experienced in the world, and what we could say about it. Rather than debating what the Platonic Form of a coffee-cup would look like, he said, look, here is an actual cup of coffee. What can I say about it? How do I perceive it? Human reactions, including our emotions, beliefs, and a sense of beauty and wonder, become viable subjects for philosophical study, thus starting to reconnect philosophy with real life after a separation of some centuries. So “things” matter: indeed, said Husserl, a mind that isn’t imagining “something” isn’t a mind at all.
If Husserl tends to be the province of specialists today, almost everybody has heard of his most famous pupil, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), if only for the wrong reasons. His masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), in spite of being extremely difficult, dense and often obscure, with its newly minted philosophical vocabulary, is one of the most influential works of philosophy of modern times. It didn’t hurt that Heidegger was a brilliant and inspiring lecturer. For our purposes, it’s enough here to say that Heidegger was obsessed with the question of what “being” is, and he argued that our “being” as an individual, is dependent on our relationship with other things, what he called “being in the world.” Yet this contribution is overshadowed, in this book as in real life, by one single act of Heidegger “in the world”: he joined the Nazi party in 1933, as a requirement for the post of Rector of Freiburg University. Even though he resigned from the Party not long afterwards, his pro-Nazi sympathies had been evident before, and he doesn’t seem to have lost them entirely, or at least for some years. So ever since, Heidegger has been less well known for his philosophy than for raising the question of how someone so intellectually distinguished could have been taken in by Hitler (I suggest an answer a little later).
By now, we can see some of the bits of Existentialism beginning to assemble themselves. But it was left to Sartre to bring the mixture together. He was in Paris at the end of 1932 with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had known since University, and their friend Raymond Aron. According to de Beauvoir, on whose autobiography much of this book is based, they were drinking apricot cocktails, and Aron was telling the others about this exciting new subject Phenomenology, and the work of Husserl. Immediately enthralled, Sartre leapt up (it’s not clear whether he finished his cocktail) and ran to the nearest bookshop in search of a book which would explain this wonderful new idea. However that may be, it is true that Sartre subsequently managed to take time away from his uninspiring teaching post, and went to Berlin in 1933 to study Husserl and Phenomenology (although he never actually met the former, and significantly modified the latter). He brought back with him his own developing cocktail of ideas: Phenomenology mixed with Kierkegaard and even a bit of Hegel, and with a strong French flavouring. First in a novel (Nausea, 1938) then in an intimidating philosophical tome written during the German occupation (Being and Nothingness,1943), then in a much more approachable essay, originally a lecture, delivered after the Liberation (Existentialism is a Humanism,1945), and thereafter in a torrent of studies, articles, novels and plays he produced almost until his death, he developed, refined and sometimes reversed his ideas.
There’s an awful lot in Being and Nothingness, but for our purposes we can see it as an extended meditation on human freedom: not idealistic or utopian or normative, but rather practical, and even brutal. We can start with consciousness, which consists of our personality traits, memories, aspirations and resentments. But none of this, says Sartre, defines me. Only I can do that, and I am free to do so. Indeed, unless I decide what I shall be, I am effectively nothing. I exist, but I have no essence until I make choices. Even refusing to choose is, in fact, a choice. The world does not intrinsically make sense and we should stop demanding that it does so. Things are as they are. Now of course, he adds, we don’t like this radical idea of freedom, so we invent external constraints as a way of rationalising our fear. We say, “I must get up” when the alarm rings, but actually that’s only because we have decided to do so. We say, “I have an appointment with X”, whereas in theory we could not go. It’s not that Sartre is advocating a life of nihilistic random behaviour; rather that he wants us to understand that we are not passive creations of our race, class, education, family, past experiences or anything else. These factors exist and may be very powerful, but they do not totally control us unless we let them. To claim otherwise (“I had to”) is to act in what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Above all, we should clearly recognise what we can and cannot control, and not make excuses. Nor should we search for other people or outside forces to demonise, so that we can use them to justify not exercising the freedom we do have. This freedom, to be sure, may be extremely limited. I may be a resistance fighter sentenced to death, but I can determine how I face my death. Nothing and nobody can take that away from me. Sartre recognised that this rather brutal, unsentimental idea of freedom could be a burden and a source of fear as much as a means of liberation. Thus, in his famous words, we are “condemned to be free,” whether we like it or not, and we are thus responsible for our choices and actions.
To a greater extent than with most philosophers, Sartre’s life was a reflection of his beliefs. For the last forty years of his life he had no teaching job or other paid position, and systematically refused honours, awards and prizes (including the Nobel Prize, which many thought he deserved). Sometimes short of money, he virtually never wrote just to earn it.
This was intoxicating stuff, and, for a while, everyone was an existentialist, or wanted to be. As Bakewell quite correctly says, existentialism was a way of life as much as anything else, and for the young, recently liberated from the grey Vichy years, it principally meant staying up late dancing, and drinking in cafés on the Left Bank, while simultaneously annoying not only their parents, but the two major intellectual forces in French life at the time: the Catholic Church and the Communist Party. But things changed. As the Cold War developed at the end of the 1940s, new choices had to be made. France was riven by strikes, demonstrations, street violence and fears of a coup d’état from Left or Right. Another war in Europe seemed likely, if not certain, and this time the weapons would be nuclear. Some, like Camus, tried to avoid taking sides. For Sartre and de Beauvoir, as for many others, a choice had to be made, and they supported the Soviet Union. They continued to do so, with ups and downs, stops and starts, until the end. They also threw themselves into the anti-colonial struggle, and Sartre, in particular, wrote fervently and violently in favour of the independence of Algeria, then legally part of France. For them, a new type of existentialism was needed that took account of collective struggles and political organisation.
In popular intellectual culture, the fifties and sixties were the years of the dominance of existentialism and the moody, romantic and slightly agonised culture that went with it: an existentialist was a young woman with long dark hair sitting in a café in St Germain des Prés, reading the latest issue of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s journal Les temps modernes before going off to take part in a demonstration. And she probably had copy of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in her bag. (When I was an impressionable schoolboy learning French in the sixties, this was very much the dominant image of France.) Existentialism conquered the Anglo-Saxon world, and existentialist writers like Colin Wilson became explosively, if briefly, popular. It influenced The Catcher in the Rye and the Beats, and films like The Wild One.
But already things were changing. Camus and Merleau-Ponty both died at the beginning of the sixties. The “events” of 1968 probably owed more to Marcuse than to Sartre, although the students in Paris still cheered him when he spoke to them. Already, new names were arriving with very different ideas: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, later Foucault ….By the seventies, Sartre’s health was in decline. He and de Beauvoir had always consumed rock-star level quantities of alcohol and medicinal (and other) drugs, and Sartre was almost blind at the end. He died in 1980, already a little dépassé, as the French say. De Beauvoir, three years his junior and still well-known, followed him in 1986. And that was pretty much it. Sartre’s novels are still in print, and his plays are occasionally performed, but his politics are an embarrassment now, and hardly anyone takes an interest in Existentialism.
And yet, and yet. When Sartre died, fifty thousand people turned out for his funeral. The square in front of the Church of St-Germain-des-Prés, where Chinese tourists photograph each other on the terraces where the existentialists used to gather, was renamed the Place Sartre-Beauvoir after the latter’s death, perhaps in a quixotic attempt to retain at least a distant echo of the once-vibrant cultural life of what used to be the intellectual centre of Paris, and therefore, some would say, the world.
III
So that, briefly, is the story behind the book, and that the book tries to recount. How does it do? Let’s look at the positive side first.
To begin with, the author not only understands philosophy, but is able to explain it clearly and straightforwardly. Anyone who can make Heidegger sound coherent, and even make you want to read him, frankly deserves a small medal. Likewise, the development of Existentialism, its influences, its disputes, some of its consequences, and the complex interrelationship between its main figures, are all well recounted and logically connected. Likewise, there is coverage not only of the giants, but also secondary (but still significant) figures like Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In other words, if you are looking for a relatively short, approachable, and easily digested history of Existentialism, with excursions into the wild and wacky lives of some of its stars, then this is the book for you.
But you get other things too, and here we’re into questions of personal taste. One is the strong presence of the author herself: in (small) part, this is a book about her discovery of Existentialism, and her reaction to it. Personally, I could have done without that, for all that it typifies an increasingly popular mode of writing. More importantly, much of the book is devoted to the lives of the philosophers themselves—again an increasing tendency in books about the subject.
In practice, of course, it’s seldom possible, or even desirable, to completely separate the life of an intellectual figure from their work. Writing about the life of Voltaire, or Nietzsche, or Orwell, or Hemingway, without recounting their life in detail would be pointless. But not all philosophers fall into that category. Everything we know for sure about the life of Aristotle would fit into a couple of paragraphs, but it’s doubtful whether we would be much the wiser about his philosophy if a few more turned up. It’s essentially a question of degree.
In some cases, the book’s emphasis on “lives” as well as “works” is justified: in the case of the First Couple of Existentialism, for example. Sartre put an awful lot of himself and his life into his philosophical novels, and even his treatises. In Nausea, the town of Bouville (“Mudville”) is the Le Havre to which Sartre was exiled as a teacher, and the ideas and imagery in the book (and later in Being and Nothingness) owe a lot to his childhood fantasies and nightmares. And he was open about the fact that the angry and violent tone of his anti-colonial writings had its origin in painful memories of being bullied at school. In de Beauvoir’s case, her strident opposition to marriage and having children, her multiple affairs and dalliance with lesbianism, which so horrified her critics and delighted her early readers, can be traced directly to her rigid upbringing by an ultra-conservative mother (her father was much more easy-going), and her desire to avoid, at all costs, perpetuating for another generation what she called the “catastrophe” of mother-daughter relations. Indeed, as the book rather suggests, her life and work was primarily an unending delayed rebellion against her mother,
It’s also true that the two of them led lives, both independently and together, which are objectively interesting and worth writing about, the more so since Existentialism is famously “a way of life” as much as a philosophy. Companions for fifty years, they never lived together but met every day they were in Paris to work, and to read and criticise each other's texts. Both were highly promiscuous, and indeed for interested readers, the more famous lovers are listed in the book. It used to be thought, following the genre stereotypes of the time, that it was Sartre who imposed this curious relationship on his partner, but de Beauvoir’s own memoirs show that she was at least as enthusiastic a bed-hopper as he was. Sartre had been the only child of a widowed mother, adored and flattered in his youth: he found seduction just as easy when he got older, in spite of an appearance which was universally compared to that of a frog. But, Reader, it does seem that they loved each other. They were faithful in their own way, wrote long letters to each other when separated, and were probably each other’s best friends. Seeing the dazed, numb mask of grief on de Beauvoir’s face at Sartre’s funeral (mentioned in the book) it’s not hard to speculate that they could actually have been a stable couple, if philosophy and their own complicated childhoods hadn't got in the way.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but not all existentialists had lives as interesting as that. There are all too many descriptions in the book of Heidegger and Husserl communing with nature in the woods and Merleau-Ponty dancing to jazz music in Montparnasse. Here, the practice of writing about philosophical movements through the lives of their members gets in the way. It produces a slightly uncomfortable mixture—cocktail, if you like—of quite serious discussions of the ideas themselves and their origins in the turbulent Europe of the time on one hand, with extended human interest stories on the other. Thus, the story of the smuggling of Husserl’s manuscripts out of Germany gets more space than the entire Second World War. The proportions, in other words, are all wrong. I did wonder whether the inclusion of so many of these stories, like the twee subtitle and the jokey descriptions of the contents of each chapter, weren’t added by a nervous editor, unsure that the public would pay for a book with a more serious tone.
But the fact is, that you can’t discuss Existentialism without discussing the grimmer side of the period when it flourished: it’s not all apricot cocktails. And it’s here, I think, that the book falls down, because its treatment of the history and politics is cursory at best (the fall of France in 1940 gets a paragraph) and is generally taken from memoirs and literary secondary sources. Yet not only is the history and politics of the time essential for understanding Existentialism, but the reasons why it disappeared as a popular cultural force have a lot to tell us about the troubled nature of politics and society today. So let’s have a go, very briefly, at filling in the gaps.
III
The rise and flourishing of Existentialism (roughly from 1920-1950) took place during probably the most turbulent, frightening and disorienting period of modern European history. And that’s saying something.
There’s a tendency sometimes to treat the 1920s and 1930s as the boring bit, the interval between the rounds when the contestants retired to their corners, or the pause while they went into training for the next match. And it’s true that, throughout that period, and just as much among ordinary people as among the elites, there was a sour, depressive, doom-laden sense that another war and even worse things were coming in the immediate future.
It’s not hard to see why. The First World War was one of those events in history that destroyed, without creating anything new of value. Three Empires fell overnight (the Hapsburg, the Romanov and the Ottoman) and quite suddenly tens of millions of people found themselves living in new nation-states designed at Versailles. The ostensible victors, Britain and France, were exhausted and bankrupt, and their leaders, who knew their Classics, must have reflected with Pyrrhus that another victory like that and they were done for. The War had, famously, solved nothing: Germany had been defeated and humiliated, but its industry was intact and its population and its industrial potential meant that one day it would want its revenge. For most thinking people in the inter-war years, it wasn’t a question of whether, but when.
Not that Germany was the only problem. The end of the War in November 1918 proved to be just the beginning of more violence. At that stage the Russian Civil War had already been in progress for a year: it would continue until 1921, drawing in some twenty other nations. Russian troops nearly took Warsaw. Other countries saw failed Communist revolutions, some were quickly taken over by autocracies of the extreme Right. Few of the newly created nations were stable, or even logical. Poland had been reassembled from bits of Germany and Russia. Protestant Czechs and Catholic Slovaks found themselves bundled into a new nation with an irritable German-speaking minority, whose home, the Sudetenland, had been welded on to the new country to give it more defensible borders. Wars, revolutions, coup d’états and dictatorships followed everywhere.
The biggest problem was one of identity: of existence itself. Suddenly the question was, Who am I? From being the capital of a huge Empire, Vienna became a provincial afterthought in a tiny new country. Citizens of that Empire suddenly found themselves Czechs, Poles, Rumanians and Italians, sometimes minorities within minorities within minorities. Borders moved in all directions with little apparent logic and at great speed.
Similarly with ideas. Organised religion had taken a terrible beating as a result of the war; new ideas, in politics, in ethics, in culture, even in fashion, were coming from all directions. The Left had split irreconcilably into a reformist (Socialist) wing and a revolutionary (Communist) one. In some countries, traditionalist conservative elites based on Church, Family and Army took power, but in others new, radical mass parties of the Right, with paramilitary wings, were becoming increasingly powerful.
How, in all of this, to define yourself and your beliefs? We can see in the literature and politics of the time the need to identify with something, to make a commitment of some kind, to make a choice and stick to it. Many joined the Catholic Church, many others the Communist Party. Perhaps Sartre would have said they did this in bad faith, but at the time it was understandable: after all, it was obvious to everyone that the Big One was coming. This was even truer after the rise of the Nazis, and for many thoughtful people the issue was then clear. Democracy was too feeble to survive, and the future necessarily belonged either to Communism or Fascism. Everybody had to choose between those two options, each far from perfect, and everybody was responsible for their choices. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was the emblematic moment: you had to be for or against the Republic or Franco, there were no half-measures. And if you backed the Republic (as George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway did) you could not avoid ultimately aligning yourself with Stalin. If you opposed the Republic, you couldn’t help, in effect, aligning yourself with Hitler.
But of course worse was to come, and the long-dreaded Second World War eventually broke out, even as the last Republican prisoners were being executed in Spain. For the French, whose geographical situation meant that they could only wait for the inevitable attack, it was like being in a dentist's surgery waiting for the drill. But when it came, as we’ll see in a second, it was still an existential shock. And as the Nazis took over most of the rest of Europe, political and social systems fragmented, ethnic and political groups allied with the Nazis out of convenience, resistance groups fought each other as well as the Germans, and were backed by different outside powers. Even the defeat of Germany in 1945 was the signal for new and violent struggles throughout central and eastern Europe, culminating in large-scale massacres, massive population movements, wholesale changes of frontiers and widespread ethnic cleansing. An actual civil war broke out in Greece.
Throughout this long period of anticipation of the worst, followed by the reality of the even worse, what comfort could philosophy bring? Seminars on the theory of Platonic Ideas, the careful mathematical dissection of language, or the obsessive scab-picking of the Frankfurt School arguing about why the western European working classes hadn’t revolted in 1918, all just seemed beside the point. To the question: How should I live? Communism and Catholicism supplied answers for some, but many were unconvinced. .
IV
It’s against this background that we have to consider the rise of existentialism in Germany, and in particular Heidegger’s controversial involvement with the Nazis. Whole books have been written about that: I just want to comment on one point, which is not covered in Bakewell’s book. The prevailing mood of numb fatalism I mentioned earlier, with its ineffectual political gestures and desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, also produced a popular desire for strong, determined leadership that would stop the drift and actually get something done. When economic collapse was added to the endless political logjam, voices started to be raised calling for someone, anyone, to just get their sleeves rolled up and do something. The idea of dictatorship or authoritarian rule suddenly didn’t seem so unacceptable when you looked at the actually existing alternatives.
It was particularly true in Germany. 1918 was probably the “strangest defeat” that any country has ever suffered. Unconditional surrender without a single enemy soldier on your territory, the Kaiser’s abdication to avoid taking responsibility for the defeat, the hasty establishment of a Republic, whose leaders were presented with an imposed peace treaty by the victorious powers: altogether, not an auspicious birth for a new political system. Conspiracy theorists aside (and they were numerous) large numbers of Germans, overcome by shock and disbelief, felt estranged from the new Republic from the beginning.
Then things got worse. Just as the new Republic was finally starting to bed itself in, the financial crisis arrived from across the Atlantic. Particularly exposed by the need to pay enormous reparations, the German economy essentially died. Six million people were unemployed, as the poor starved in the streets. Germany became a frightening place to live, as Communists and extreme nationalists fought running battles in the streets. And the government did … essentially nothing. It wasn’t easy to form a government anyway. The Social Democrats were always the largest party, but never a majority. To keep the powerful Communist Party out, they had to find coalition partners in parties of the Centre and Right with whom they had fundamental differences. In 1930, the system broke down completely, and President Hindenburg appointed a minority right-wing government to rule by decree. Their only policy for reducing unemployment was to cut wages. The Republic was effectively dead. No wonder people looked around for alternatives.
And there was one. The previously-obscure Nazi Party, barely represented in Parliament before, won a stunning 18% of the vote in the 1930 elections. This increased to 38% in July 1932, though after that the Nazis were in decline, and their vote fell quite noticeably in the last democratic election in November of that year. So why did this happen?
The first thing to bear in mind is that all of the alternatives were either played out (like the Social Democrats) or unacceptable to some (like the increasingly powerful Communists). Indeed, if you total the votes of the Nazis, the Communists and various other small parties, some 60% of Germans voted explicitly against the Republic in 1932, in one way or another. But the vote for the Nazis themselves was a protest vote, clearly transient, and under normal circumstances the party (which was effectively bankrupt) would have disappeared from the political scene quite quickly. This makes a lot of the complicated and agonised hand-wringing about authoritarian personality traits beside the point. A minority of Germans, terminally exasperated with the system, voted disastrously against the status quo, and for something new and different. The Nazis, never strong on coherent ideology, had a party programme unchanged since 1920, and their campaigns were long on rhetoric and atmosphere but short on policies.
Most people had little idea exactly what they were voting for.
Which brings us back to Heidegger. As I’ve said, the longing throughout the western world was for someone, or several someones, who would just get up and do something. The Nazis projected that image. First, they had youth. Hitler was not yet 45, Goering barely 40. There was an unavoidable and painful contrast with the geriatric top-hatted politicians who governed the country. Most of them had fought in the War (Goering had been a fighter pilot). They espoused modernism and technology: the motor car, the radio and the aeroplane were used as powerful symbols of the transformation that Germany needed. Democracy had failed, they said, and more modern political ideas needed to take over. Even their ideology of racial struggle seemed to be based firmly on the latest discoveries in biology. Above all, they promised action. End unemployment by putting people to work, revoke the Versailles Treaty by being strong, recover the lost territories by force if necessary. These were objectives most of the population could go along with; the difference was that the Nazis promised to actually do something. Scenting a chance to put together a stable parliamentary majority, the right-wing parties offered the Nazis a couple of seats in the Cabinet. The rest is the history of the later twentieth century.
Now it’s important not to make facile comparisons between Nazism (and fascism more generally) and existentialism. Rather, the two were different responses to the confusion and fear of the inter-war period. Heidegger, with his interest in being, and self-definition through action, evidently recognised something in the Nazi rhetoric, at least, that resonated with him. This
is why perhaps, as Bakewell recounts, he refused to make a token grovelling apology for being a sympathiser and (briefly) a party member. The fact is that, like a lot of others, he had been seduced by the can-do approach of the Nazis, and their initial, if qualified, success in putting their ideas into action.
Moreover, like everybody else, he had to choose. We are so inured to the appalling, gigantic shadow that the Third Reich has cast, backwards as well as forwards, that we smugly assume that everyone in 1932 was gifted with perfect foresight, and retrospectively morally guilty if they didn’t resist or emigrate. (Indeed, sitting in moral judgement on this and other episodes in the past has become an art form in recent years.) In the confusion and fear of Germany in 1933, though, it was not clear what the alternative to Hitler actually was. Most probably, it would have been continued political blockage, increasing political violence and the possibility of Communist risings, leading to some kind of an authoritarian military dictatorship, like Franco’s Spain. The Nazis promised, and largely delivered, stability, even at the point of a gun. But those who disappeared into the newly-opened concentration camps were marginals: communists, socialists, trades union leaders, as well as homosexuals and “degenerate” artists. Jews were excluded from a number of professions, and there was talk of expelling them from the country. All this worried many: it just seemed less bad than any likely alternative.
As it happened, Sartre was in Berlin during this period, though he doesn’t seem to have taken much interest in politics. Indeed, his published work before the War was essentially concerned with philosophy: his first novel Nausea published in 1938 was effectively a fictional treatment of the ideas of Husserl. Even after the defeat and the occupation, Sartre’s political role was limited. He dabbled a little in the (exceptionally dangerous) business of resistance publications, but mostly kept his head down, as did most French people. To understand why, and to then understand why a different spirit arose, we need to go into a little history, and look at the catastrophic, almost catatonic, shock produced in France by the defeat of 1940.
Everyone had expected a long, grim struggle like 1914, beginning with a German invasion. There were only three possible routes. The most direct, straight across the frontier, was effectively ruled out by the Maginot Line, and indeed the Germans never seriously considered invading that way. This allowed the French to move most of their forces further west. That left the Germans with two options—through the Ardennes, with its forests, hills, valleys and rivers, or across the plains of Flanders. The second was easier, but longer, and involved going through Belgium and the Netherlands too. In practice, they would have to do both: the question was, which was the main effort and which was the diversion? You only have to see the Ardennes to realise what a nightmare a military advance must have been. So the French (and British) deduced that the main German attack would come through Belgium, and indeed this was the original German plan. But not long before the attack the Germans changed their plan, risking everything on a main effort through the Ardennes. Belgium would be a diversion. To put it kindly, the plan was a bold one: the uncharitable would have called it madness, because it required perfect weather, faultless coordination and a slow reaction by the French and British. In the end, they got all three.
That was the first shock, but it was recoverable. But the Germans, as attackers with weaker forces, also had new tactics available. Roving armoured groups, coordinating with airpower by radio, was a technology to which there was no answer at the time, and would not be for several years. Refusing to fight pitched battles, the Germans used confusion and destabilisation instead.
But even that was recoverable. Many in the Government wanted to fight on, from Algeria if necessary. But Weygand, the military commander, refused, and dared the politicians to sack him. Many of them, like the military commanders, were terrified of a Communist revolution if the war went on much longer, and so they agreed to ask for an armistice.
It’s difficult to overestimate the shock and despair that these events produced in the minds of ordinary people. Half the French Army had never seen the enemy, those that had, had fought well and inflicted heavy casualties. But now it was all over, just like that, in a few weeks: no wonder people assumed treason. The country was split in two: half controlled directly by the Germans, half ruled by a new authoritarian regime led by Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun. Resistance was effectively impossible: the Army was demobilised and limited to 100,000 men stationed in Algeria. Two million French soldiers were prisoners of war. The few acts of violence against the occupiers were met with brutal reprisals, and even distributing clandestine tracts could send you to a concentration camp or a firing squad. The British could do no more, for the time being, than defend their island.
Above all, the situation was what the French call hallucinante, even surreal. Everything had changed but more or less everything remained the same. There were German soldiers in the streets, but also French policemen. Everyday life was much more difficult and demanding, but in outline it continued much as before. Pétain’s regime had been installed legally, since the French Parliament had voted him full powers: it was also recognised by the United States, for example. There was no effective political opposition, apart from a little-known General in London with a handful of supporters. Yet the country was already being asset-stripped by the Germans. Everybody was hungry. Everybody was in a state of shock, unable to absorb the enormity of what had happened. The new regime, based at the spa town of Vichy, installed an authoritarian, traditionalist government, began its own persecution of opponents, and worked desperately to achieve the maximum freedom (that word again) from German control.
And everybody had to choose. Shock and despair made many people disappear into themselves, and just wait for things to change. But in practice most people were faced with choices in daily life. How to relate to the occupier? How to relate to the new regime, installed overnight? What was called “collaboration” (technically this was the relationship between Vichy and the Germans), came in many forms, and was seldom the result of a deliberate choice. It’s easy to condemn the industrialist (and there were many) who received contracts from the Germans. But what about the workers on the production line? What about the staff in the canteen? What about the secretary whose husband is in a prisoner-of-war camp? What about the baker on the corner, some of whose clients are Germans? What were these people actually supposed to do, for themselves and their families? Starve?
“Life” remarks one of Sartre’s characters in his allegory of the Occupation The Flies, “begins on the far side of despair.” And it is there that, slowly, the idea of resistance (not the Resistance, that came later) began to form. People began to realise that they might be generally helpless, but there were still tiny things they were free to do. Scrawling an anti-German slogan, defacing a picture of Pétain, giving wrong directions to a German officer, even listening clandestinely to De Gaulle broadcasting from London: none of these things was going to win the war, but that wasn’t the point. Slowly, groups began to form. Intellectuals like the poet Louis Aragon wrote poems and tracts for distribution. A clandestine publishing house Les Editions de minuit (the Midnight Press, which still exists) began to print and distribute subversive literature. Slowly, and with British help and funding, Resistance groups began to form, to gather intelligence, to help Allied aircrew who had been shot down, and to carry out targeted operations. Most of all, they were there to prepare a government in waiting, and a military capability to hit the Germans from the rear when the Allies landed. And in spite of the Gestapo, the Vichy Police, betrayal, torture and death on a massive scale, they largely succeeded.
When Allied troops approached Paris in August 1944, there was a popular insurrection, led by the Resistance, against the occupier. The fighting was heavy: almost a thousand dead among the Resistance fighters, and three times as many among the Germans. When the French Second Armoured Division entered the city, it was effectively already liberated. And all over France, the Resistance moved to take power in towns and cities, expel the invader, and prepare the way for De Gaulle’s provisional government.
Like Existentialism, Resistance was a state of mind as much as an activity. The two were not causally connected, but in the euphoria of the Liberation, Existentialism was a powerful and relevant vocabulary and set of concepts that seemed to reflect the mood of the times. In early 1945, Sartre published the first two volumes of his Roads to Freedom trilogy, set before and during the war, which made many existentialist ideas available in popular form. In reaction to criticism of the books from the Communist Party and others, he gave a public lecture that October, later published as Existentialism is a Humanism. For everyone who had struggled through Being and Nothingness, a thousand people read these texts. That was the high-water mark of Existentialism.
V
I said earlier that I would conclude by discussing the relevance of Existentialism today, not least since the book scarcely mentions the topic, and it’s important. But let’s look first at what happened in the decades after the War.
Existentialism came out of a period of doubt, choice and crisis, which did not stop neatly in 1945. The start of the Cold War, the political crises in Eastern Europe, the threat of nuclear devastation, the war in Indo-China, the war to keep Algeria part of France, the Cuban missile crisis, the Hungarian Rising in 1956, the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of the Fourth Republic in 1958, the attempted coup against De Gaulle in 1961, Vietnam … there was no shortage of things to worry about. No shortage, either, of choices to make. The Algerian war and the anti-colonialist struggles in different countries tore the French intellectual world apart. True to his beliefs Sartre (with de Beauvoir) plunged in unreservedly on the side of the FLN, going so far as to praise the killing of white Algerians. Like many intellectuals of the time, he also came down definitively on the side of the Soviet Union in the developing Cold War. It was, once again, a choice that had to be made, and then a choice which had to be lived absolutely.
But if the outer garments of Existentialism remained, and were familiar to all of us born after WW2, the heart of this rigorous, demanding philosophy of life began to lose the purity of its appeal. Partly, this was the fault of its originators. Husserl was dead, Heidegger largely an unperson. Sartre himself spent the last part of his life deeply embroiled in political struggles and closely attached to the Communist Party which had once condemned Existentialism as bourgeois. Famous for beginning many more books than he ever finished, he wrote most of his memorable works in quite a short period, from Nausea (1938) to his play Dirty Hands a decade later. Enormous studies of Genet and Flaubert, and an abortive attempt to write a sequel to Being and Nothingness didn’t add very much in the end.
Existentialism went up-market. Sartre and de Beauvoir were well-known, prosperous media figures, with real influence. And like much of what the French call the “caviar Left,” their interests moved away from the everyday. Bluntly, they were more voluble about support for the Vietnamese peasants than about the condition of peasants—or indeed workers—in France. As Bakewell points out, Existentialism rapidly became absorbed into the burgeoning counterculture in the US and Europe, as a favourite pose for middle-class teenagers who really had to, like, get around to reading that book one day, but in the meantime primarily just demanded the right to be different.
Similarly, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, whilst a work of polemic rather than philosophy, helped unwittingly to create the Human Potential movement (“you can be anything you want to be!”), the Law of Attraction, The Secret, and any number of Californians telling us to “live your dream!” . Her message of rebellion against the traditional female roles of wife and mother, after her own disastrous youth, was obviously only applicable to a small proportion of mostly middle-class educated women. She had advantages—intelligence, education, talent, good looks, a solid bourgeois background— that gave her possibilities denied to the woman who cleaned her apartment, the woman who did her laundry or, for that matter, the waiter who served her apricot cocktails. In a sad little coda, Bakewell tells the story of one woman, taking part in a survey of readers of de Beauvoir’s book, now living in poverty as a single parent. For every woman who became a successful lawyer, a business executive or a politician, there were many others who wound up like that. Indeed, de Beauvoir doesn’t seem to have realised that the shattering of the nuclear family she advocated would in the end work more to the advantage of men than women. In the end, Existentialism can be said to have perished partly as a result of its own success and partly just from inherent difficulty of living it properly.
And, as always, there were new ideas in town. Actually, the most significant wasn’t new at all, but was discovered afresh by the rebels of the 1960s. Critical Theory goes back to the Frankfurt School, a group of middle-class Jewish Marxist intellectuals in the early 1920s, who grappled with the question of why the European working classes had not rebelled and created a revolution after 1917. Their pessimistic conclusion was that the workers were held back, not by force, but by the burgeoning capitalist society of mass production and the integration of the proletariat into it. Without ever precisely saying so, the Frankfurt School clearly considered the working class to be stupid: indeed, some dismissed them as masochists who sought their own domination. The job of theory then was to illustrate the ways in which this domination was exercised. But it was an entirely theoretical approach. There would be no revolution, since that was impossible, but there was interesting analytical work to be done to explain why that was so.. (Cynics noted that many of the School’s luminaries came from wealthy families, and their Marxist studies were being financed by their fathers: revolution would mean an end to that.)
Over the next few decades, in Germany, then in exile in the US, and in some cases later back in Germany, thinkers like Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm developed theories of surpassing grimness and negativity about western society, which they saw as every bit as repressive and totalitarian as the Nazi regime they had fled. This repression was reinforced in every possible way: all knowledge, all practice, all theory, all rules, all laws served simply to buttress capitalism. Scientific objectivity was a myth, sociology was just an ideology of repression, logic, rationality and reasoned argument were just tools of capitalist domination. To teach, say, physics or statistics, without explaining how their “laws” acted to reinforce capitalist domination, was to connive in that domination. A “critical” approach was therefore required, and the School sought to provide that. Activists could only try to change the world in various ways they argued: the point, however, was to philosophise it.
The paradigm of this grim, hopeless doctrine was Marcuse’s 1961 book One Dimensional Man, which presented an (American) working class so drugged with the comforts of consumer society, reinforced by mass media, that all thought of rebellion had to be abandoned. Even liberal political ideas such as free speech and tolerance, were just further instruments of repression he argued. Bizarrely, though, and for reasons Marcuse himself never really understood, the book’s theories were taken up by the New Left of the 1960s and turned into a revolutionary doctrine which led ultimately to 1968. It was a strange revolutionary doctrine though: an elitist, middle-class one, which in a sense paralleled the way in which Existentialism had developed, and appealed to the same intellectual market among educated middle-class idealists.
As usual, American ideas found their way to Europe, and Marcuse started to replace Sartre as the latest intellectually exciting guru. At the same time, other glamorous new ideas like postmodernism, structuralism and deconstruction were entering the public discourse, and interacted with the revisionist Marxism of thinkers like Louis Althusser. Few of the “generation of 68” had actually read these works: as with Existentialism, though, they had a new vocabulary and a new set of ideas with which to confront the older generation. There was no direct involvement in the Vietnam war to motivate French students: they were essentially middle-class young people impatient with the conformism of society and with the poor organisation and provision of university education at the time. Once their demands for university reform were substantially met, the protests evaporated and the protesters went into politics, government, business and academia as they had always anticipated.
So another reason for the decline of Existentialism then, was the appeal of new and glamorous ideas: the strange cocktail of heretical Marxism, Critical Theory and Deconstruction which has become dominant in France (and most other western countries) today, albeit with the Marxist element somewhat in disguise. Along the way, some very sensible ideas of Foucault (that intellectual paradigms change with power structures for example) were carelessly read, misunderstood, and then allowed to spiral out of control.
But why this decline? Obviously intellectual fashions come and go, but the complete eclipse of Sartre and Existentialism since the 1970s must result from more than that. Yes, the Cold War is long over, and Sartre’s largely uncritical support for the Soviet Union, which he never recanted, sets teeth on edge today. Yes, some of his extreme views on de-colonisation, or Algeria, leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. But others were wrong as well. And neither Althusser’s murder of his wife in 1980, and subsequent internment, nor Foucault’s much-publicised paedophilic holidays in Morocco in the 1970s, seem to have affected their popularity or their influence very much. Likewise, Camus, who broke from Sartre and de Beauvoir over support for the Soviet Union, is still venerated, because he never really took firm positions. He was against the war in Algeria, but not that much. He was a leftist, but not that much. He spoke out about Stalin, but not that much.
The answer, I think, is that Existentialism is inherently hard. It’s not all apricot cocktails. To accept that the world has only the sense you give it, that you are free whether you like it or not, that only you can take decisions and you are then responsible for them, is just too much for many people. “We’re on our own,” said Sartre. “There are no excuses.” How much more agreeable to believe that there are excuses, that you are weak and powerless, and thus that you are therefore not responsible for anything.
Consider: this strange cocktail of elements, shaken together, produces a mixture which seems like a point by point refutation of Sartre. Essence precedes existence. The world has a sense: it’s in this book I was reading. I am (like you) totally determined by my race, gender etc. I am imprisoned in an oppressive structure of ideology and discourse. I am a helpless victim. I cannot choose because all alternatives are ultimately the same. I do not even control my thoughts. And I am not responsible for my actions. Above all, whereas Existentialism was born of a period where there was no one to help you, this modern cocktail asks all the time, Please help me. Make it go away. In his 1945 lecture, Sartre recounts how one of his students came to him with a terrible dilemma: to leave his mother alone, and go to join de Gaulle, or to stay at home and become an effective collaborator. Sartre’s reply, unsurprisingly, was: only you can decide, and you are responsible for the choice you make. It’s hard to imagine such bracing advice being given to a student in any context today. This cocktail is, in essence, the drink of a stable society, where wars, revolutions and repression are things of the past. (It is worth pointing out that Existentialism was, and still is, taken much more seriously in countries where war, revolution and repression still exist).
To get an idea of the practical change, consider the difference between two eras of government. Many political leaders and government officials in the 1950s came from the Resistance and the Gaullist exiles. Some had come directly from concentration camps. They rebuilt France economically and politically in record time, irrespective of political party, they put an end to colonisation and they radically modernised the country. Then consider what might be described as the first genuinely “post-68” government in France, when members of that generation had completely dominated politics, intellectual life and the media for years. In particular, they had total control of the Socialist Party. After the unpopular Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12), the Socialists already controlled most of the political levers in France. In 2012, they won the Presidency with François Hollande, and control of the National Assembly. They could do anything. They did nothing. Or rather, the main activity of the government was managing the incessant, vicious internal feuding, by giving every interest group its own government post, from which they could make performative gestures and hand-waving speeches. Factories closed, jobs went overseas and social problems continued to mount. Challenged on what the government was actually for, they eventually claimed that their policy was “the struggle against all forms of discrimination.” But of course governments don’t “struggle”: they do things and make things happen. Retribution was swift: in the 2017 elections, the Socialist candidate was eliminated in the first round with scarcely 5% of the vote. As this is written, the Socialist candidate in 2022 looks likely to be beaten by the candidate of the Communist Party. Yet oddly, or maybe not, the current President, Emmanuel Macron who was not even born in 1968, makes a fetish of the refusal to choose. We can have everything, he says: his famous catch-phrase is “en même temps”: “at the same time.”
In 2020, as the pandemic started to change everything, sales of Camus’ 1947 book The Plague took off again. The book is an Existentialist allegory of the Occupation, and shows how individuals responded to it, some well, some badly, some heroically. It schematically illustrates the different choices that were made at the time, some involving the willing acceptance of danger and death. But it’s different this time. Governments the world over have now decided to surrender to the Virus for fear of political disturbances, just as the French government surrendered in 1940, and intellectuals have passed their time in vicious Twitter fights about pronouns, much as Joseph Grand, in The Plague, obsessed over the first sentence of a book he was unable to write. And since I started writing this review, the conflict in the Ukraine has broken out. The long, complacent liberal dream of an eternal, stable post-Cold War world is ending, the world economy seems to be visibly shredding, and it is not clear that our culture, which has no philosophers but only actors who play them on TV, is intellectually equipped to handle the stresses and strains that might result.
Read Bakewell’s book, therefore, and ponder the lessons it inadvertently provides for our era. We may be moving into a period as dark, in some ways, as that when Existentialism was born, and it’s one of those books which has become more relevant with the passing of time than, I’m sure, the author ever suspected it would, when she sat down to write about Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.