What the Nazis Saw: Les Mouches in Occupied Paris
What the Nazis Saw: Les Mouches in Occupied Paris
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纳粹所见：被占领的巴黎的莱斯穆什
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发表时间：
2003
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Allan Stoekl
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作者：
Allan Stoekl
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 Lycee 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. Was Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les Mouches, published in April 1943 and first performed that June in Occupied Paris with the approval of the German censor, a Resistance play? Was it meant to convey a pro-Resistance message? The debate has swirled for a number of years, giving rise to accusatory books, such as Gilbert Joseph’s Une si douce occupation, arguing that Sartre never was a Resistance figure, and that the works he published under the Occupation were harmless, and hardly noted for their insurrectional fervor. On the other hand, defenders— starting with Sartre himself after the war—have argued that key wartime works such as Les Mouches were really calls to resistance; given censorship, however, it was necessary to mask the message with, for example, the setting of ancient Greece. 2 Sartre even argued that the drubbing administered by collaborationist critics was proof that they understood the play’s true intent: an argument for human freedom, in opposition to the Vichy doctrine of remorse and eternal
