Jean-Paul Sartre: Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and the Tricontinental Revolution

In his introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays on colonialism and neocolonialism, Robert J.C. Young situates Sartre within the intellectual culture of the tricontinental revolution, thereby opening up fresh perspectives on the relationship between Sartre’s intellectual work and the development of his political commitments. “[There] is comparatively little in [Sartre’s] early work,” Young writes, “to suggest his later increasing preoccupation with social justice at a global level.” Nevertheless, over the second half of his life, as his philosophical work was restaged, transformed, and activated by the intellectuals of the tricontinental revolution, Sartre became increasingly occupied by the politics of social justice, with particular emphasis on the revolution against colonialism in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Despite his stature as one of the giants of twentieth century philosophy and Western literature, for many within the revolution, Sartre was, in the words of Mudimbe, “an African philosopher,” insofar as he recognized the revolution as an epistemological as well as political formation, one that reanimated indigenous traditions of thought and praxis over and against the empty shell of the European Enlightenment. During his later life, Sartre went to some length to avoid his conscription into the project of that Enlightenment—famously rejecting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964—and while his posthumous reputation remains very much that of a Dead White Man, Young insists upon seeing Sartre as a generative influence upon postcolonial thought, a deferential comrade in the struggle over theory and practice.

For Young, the definitive moment in Sartre’s turn toward the anti-colonial revolution was the Second World War and, more particularly, the experience of participating in the French Resistance. “Sartre,” he argues, “was the first philosopher who responded to his historical experiences of the war by reformulating his political and philosophical position.” Young is not alone in noting the significance of the war to the overall shape of Sartre’s intellectual project. And there is, of course, no dearth of scholarship concerning the impact of the war on European intellectual culture. What one draws from Young’s reading, however, is just how differently different intellectuals, and different intellectual traditions, grappled with the war and its consequences for political thought. “The war showed [Sartre] that life was not simply a series of existential choices against circumstance: that the domination of power turns the subject into an object: in this situation, freedom is constituted by taking responsibility to transform oneself back into an agent.” While the intellectuals of the German left all but rejected the politics of radical transformation, fearful that such commitments led, inexorably, to the gulag and the death camp, and the French left plunged headlong into the generative anti-humanism that now travels under the name post-structuralism, Sartre—with the revolutionaries of the Third World—was quietly reinventing the human.

By and large, European intellectuals responded to the moral and political crisis of the war by throwing out the Enlightenment and, with it, the idea of the human. The concentration camp, they argued, was the ultimate expression of human reason, its most pure, and brutal, manifestation. If, after all the great schemes for humanizing the world, all the idealism and the debate and the dogma, all you got was calculated, mechanized, impersonal death, perhaps it was best to leave the Enlightenment alone. There is, of course, something very compelling about the argument, but a whole lot of baby went out with that bathwater. As so-called Third World intellectuals have been pointing out for the past sixty years, fascism wasn’t the telos of the Enlightenment, but its dialectical handmaiden. Slavery? Colonialism? As Aimé Césaire suggested, Hitler’s crime was not the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Catholics, Roma, Communists, and homosexuals, nor was it his totalitarian project for a German Reich that would engulf Europe. It was, rather, introducing to Europe, and practicing upon “white people,” brutal techniques of population management and social control that were invented for use in the colonies. This hypocrisy was laid bare, in Algeria, during the VE Day celebrations in Sétif, where the gendarmes massacred thousands of Arabs that had massed in support of Algerian independence. Fortunately, the new anti-humanism of the French left demonstrated, conclusively, that the desire for freedom was atavistic. In calling for independence, the Arabs were merely demonstrating their backwardness.

Among European intellectuals, Sartre was one of the few who took such hypocrisy as the basis of an ethical imperative. As Young suggests, Sartre’s continuing engagement with humanism should not be understood as an uncritical or naïve endorsement of the Enlightenment, but as his commitment to the cultural and epistemological project of the Tricontinental revolution. Third World revolutionaries understood themselves, very consciously, as engaged in the project of remaking humanism; of inaugurating a modernity that embraced, and benefitted, the totality of humanity, rather than its palest portion. In the later years of his life, Sartre identified himself with this project: his philosophy evolved as a critique of the racist underpinnings of the Enlightenment problematic, and a commitment to the realization of a new humanism in the revolutionary movement toward emancipation. As such, Sartre’s post-war work is ever more framed by the practicalities of anti-colonial revolution, to the extent that his European intellectual contemporaries would come to rail against his influence among university students in the 1960s, especially when it came to Sartre’s position on the role of violence in social struggles.

For his commitment to the politics of anti-colonial revolution, Sartre was declared a Stalinist by his friends and physically threatened by his enemies. In the early 1960s, French colons, enraged by Sartre’s support for Algerian independence, attempted an assassination by planting a bomb in the Left Bank apartment he shared with Simone de Beauvoir. The bomb went off, but the plot failed; they had placed it in the wrong apartment. Despite his critics, Sartre would go on to become something of a hero of the New Left. When the students of Paris closed down the universities in May 1968, it was Sartre to whom they directed their demands, because only Sartre, they felt, could understand their concerns.

What’s striking about Sartre’s writings on colonialism, as represented in the Routledge collection “Colonialism and Neocolonialism,” is the extent to which—the title aside—France remains, for him, the locus of political commitment. Of the essays collected in this volume, nearly half are about De Gaulle; and in these, Sartre goes on, at some length, about the relationship between the Algerian war, and the desecration of French democracy. After the armistice in 1962, he wrote:

“Today, no one is unaware that we have ruined, starved and massacred a nation of poor people to bring them to their knees. They remained standing. But at what a price! While the delegations were putting an end to the business, 2,400,000 Algerians remained in the slow death camps; we have killed more than a million of them. The land lies abandoned, the douars have been obliterated by bombing, the livestock—the peasants’ meager wealth—has disappeared. After seven years, Algeria must start from scratch: first of all win the peace, then hang on with the greatest of difficulty to the poverty we have created: that will be our parting gift….[I]n order to avoid the famous selling-off of our Empire, we have sold off France: in order to forge arms, we have cast our institutions into the fire; our freedoms and our guarantees, Democracy and Justice, everything has burnt; nothing remains. Simply ending the fighting is not enough to reclaim our wasted wealth: we too, I am afraid, in a different area, will have to start from scratch. But the Algerians have retained their revolutionary strength. Where is ours?”

In passages like these, Sartre speaks to the dynamics of our present crisis. In his estimation, during the Algerian war, French democracy was held hostage by the intransigence of the pieds-noirs, their inability to recognize the inevitability of Arab independence, and the moral right of Arab Algerians to self-determination. This, of course, was not an uncommon analysis of the Algerian situation, even at the time, particularly among those French and Algerian-French liberals, like Albert Camus, who hoped for Algeria to remain part of France. Camus, among others, argued that “the problems” in Algeria were prompted by disreputable segments of the European population, people who were so aggressively racist that they could not imagine granting Arabs social, political, or economic rights on par with Europeans. Sartre saw this line of reasoning as collaborationist nonsense. France could not solve the Algerian crisis through reform because colonialism cannot be reformed. Colonialism, he argued, is a system designed to allow for the most brutal and systematic exploitation of indigenous resources. If you reform exploitation out of colonialism, it stops being profitable, and if it stops being profitable, the system collapses. This was the materialist point that underwrote his feelings about the inevitability of Algerian independence. At some point, the Algerian war started to cost France more than France could possibly hope to get out of Algeria. Although the conflict would continue as long as vanity, ego, and pride got in the way, economic rationality would eventually win the day. Sartre, however, took this even further. One could not hope to save French Algeria, he argued, because it was only through Algeria that France could hope to save itself.

This is maybe the most crucial point in Sartre’s later work, and it’s where we might want to start thinking about the present moment. It would be easy to read Sartre’s engagement with the politics and culture of the anti-colonial revolution as another example of a white man hoping to find himself by traversing the heart of darkness and discovering its secrets. (It’s easy to imagine this as Lacan’s objection to Sartre, but since my Lacan has been constructed through Zizek, maybe I’m telegraphing.) My sense, however, is that Sartre was not particularly interested in therapeutic engagements with “alien” cultures, not that he was entirely above such things. In his essay on Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of China, for instance, he more or less thanks the photographer for killing his Orientalism; suggesting that, on the one hand, he had indulged such fantasies but that, at the same time, he was glad to be rid of them. Instead, what I draw from Sartre is more a sense of political opportunity, and moral obligation, in the face of the Third World revolution. This all sounds incredibly squishy, but it comes down to a set of questions that are, in some sense, rather practical. After independence, when the pieds-noirs fled Algeria, they destroyed what remained of its commercial and political infrastructure. Sartre understood, all too well, how the extraction of this indemnity handicapped the newly independent nation. Just as previous generations had obliterated almost all hope for an independent Haiti by forcing its government to compensate France for the loss of its property, the vicious destruction of Algeria’s infrastructure all but ensured a long period of economic austerity and political turbulence. For Sartre, at the end of the Algerian war, the only way for France to recoup its moral standing in the world was to become a model of political morality among the post-imperial powers; and to become that model was to commit French resources to the rebuilding of Algeria. In calling on the French to save themselves, Sartre was calling upon them to refuse the domestic politics that would allow for neo-colonial exploitation, and to build a new France alongside the new Algeria.