What the Nazis Saw: Les Mouches in Occupied Paris

Recently much debate has turned around Jean-Paul Sartre’s alleged duplicity during the Occupation: did he or did he not knowingly replace, in 1941 at the Lycée Condorcet, a Jewish professor who had been deprived of his post simply because he was Jewish? Did this make Sartre a knowing, albeit passive, accomplice to Vichy racial policy—an accomplice, like millions of others in wartime France, in that he was, with an apparently clean conscience, willing to take advantage of another’s—a Jew’s—misfortune? ¹

At this late date, it seems difficult to adjudicate this issue and proclaim Sartre’s bad faith. We can never know for certain what he knew, and when he knew it. To try to understand Sartre’s problematic position under the Occupation, I think one must go to the actual writings we have at our disposal: his essays, plays, and interviews. Failing this, we will always be constrained to judge him based on innuendo, negatively: what he wasn’t doing, but should have done; what he may have known, and yet did not act upon. I think if we turn to his writings, or at least one of them, we will be confronted with a different problem. The question of Sartre’s shadow-collaboration turns not around what he knew, or what we can know about his knowledge, but around what we can and cannot know about what wartime audiences knew and did not (could not) know of the supposed message of Sartre’s wartime drama.