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to let them determine or limit his freedom of action for the future. But
for Frantz to accept his past and deny guilt for it would be to assert
that torture, like murder, may at times be a justified act of opposition
to the inequities of the world. Frantz shows a final heroism in recognizing
his past--escaping from the "bad faith" with which he had concealed it
from himself-and then dying in an act of refusal to countenance the
possibility that a torturer can choose to re-create his life after such an
act of denial of the humanity of any other.
In an interview with Oreste Pucciani
(Tulane Drama Review,
Spring 1961) Sartre corroborated what everybody in Paris already knew,
that the immediate subject of the play was the Algerian problem and
the use of torture by the French forces there. Why, then, had he
written about an ex-Nazi in Germany rather than about an ex-soldier in
France? "For the simple reason that there isn't a theatre in Paris that
would have produced it," Sartre replied. But also, we must add, because
he wants to stress the similarity between the actions of France in Algeria
and those of the Nazis in France during the Occupation, which the
French had believed criminal and uncivilized. Sartre had made this
point in an editorial in
Les Temps M odernes
in May 1957, on the oc–
casion of the publication of testimony by recalled French civilian-soldiers
on the army's conduct in Algeria. The French had insisted, Sartre
recalled, upon the collective responsibility of the German people for
the actions of their leaders and soldiers which they did not actively
attempt to oppose; the French had held all the Germans guilty of the
concentration camps because they all knew at least something of their
existence and did not speak out against them. France, he held, was
in the same position with respect to the actions of its police and army
in Algeria and should assume its own collective responsibility for these
actions. Sartre told Professor Pucciani that his concern in writing
Les
Sequestres d'Altona
had been the French soldier who tortures in Algeria
and "who is none the worse for it. He lives perfectly well with what
he has done." By contrast with this soldier who on return to France
takes up civilian life as if nothing had ever happened, Frantz, in finally
recognizing that he must assert and thus create his responsibility for
what he does to or for others, becomes an existentialist hero in his
death, a symbol of Sartre's assertion that all of France must take moral
responsibility for what was being done in Algeria in its name.
If
this were all there were to the play, we might well consider it
an already outdated piece of political propaganda-though there
is
an
awesome complexity of story and character which, despite being a little
