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of course, is not recommending an unqualified pacifism in face of ag–
gression. He himself engaged in militant resistance against the Nazis;
and in dying against the Nazis, Mathieu, Sartre's hero in the first two
and a half books of
Les Chemins de la libertc,
came his closest to finding
the act which would define him as a free man. Both Mathieu and
Frantz had acted in conscious desire to assert their existential freedom,
but Sartre finds the act of Mathieu valid, that of Frantz not. The
distinction is that Sartre had also made Mathieu finally act out of a
developing sense of unity with his comrades; while, as he observed
in
an
interview with Aragon's
Lettres Franfaises,
the degeneration of Frantz
from the idealistic youth who attempted the one apparently good act
of saving a rabbi is ascribable
to
the fact that Frantz "does not truly
love people. When one does, there are things that one cannot do."
Mathieu had finally acted from feeling for others, while Frantz quickly
came to desire only to act for himself. But are these differences in the
motives of the armed resistance of Mathieu and of Frantz (for, with
the closing invocation, we are no longer concerned simply with the
case of torture) sufficient explanation why we, the reader-as opposed
to the character himself, who assigns his own values valid for himself–
should consider Mathieu's act one of valid existential engagement and
that of Frantz not? Sartre would have it that, because Mathieu believed
in his fellow man, therefore his armed resistance must, deductively, be a
valid act of engagement; but we may think that it is rather because
Mathieu's act was in defense of a cause that Sartre favored that he
endowed Mathieu, by
fiat,
with an existentially valid motive and Frantz
with a motive not valid.
We in America have seen the too-easy assumption that those on
our side are necessarily of good faith and those against uS conspirators
often enough to be able to recognize the same fallacy when it comes
cloaked in existentialism. Ultimately, Sartre's judgment of the political
act must rest not upon his existential analysis but upon his own personal
decision which side represents the better of humanity, which side is
fighting for the freedom of the individual against oppression. Neither
the "bad faith" of Frantz' motives nor the invocation of the spectre of
the bomb-that argument from which so many intellectuals assume
there can
be
no appeal against their conclusion---can fill Sartre's need
for a logical basis on which he can make the story of Frantz expand
to "answer for the century."
The danger of engaged art is that it may, as here, show one thing–
the case against torture or the case against the army in Algeria-and
