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Sartre on Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

A. A. Fatouros
A. A. Fatouros
Affiliation:
University in Bloomington
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Extract

In the fifth volume of his collected essays, Jean-Paul Sartre has brought together thirteen pieces written during the last ten years and dealing with the problems of colonialism and decolonization. They range from prefaces or reviews of books to polemical articles and interviews on the Algerian question and French politics; as is to be expected, they vary widely in quality as well as importance. Some of them are perhaps better seen as documents, testimonials of Sartre's courageous stand against the policies of successive French cabinets toward Algeria. At a time when the majority of the French people and of their leaders were striving to avoid seeing or acknowledging the profound moral issues confronting them, Sartre's voice was among the few raised to point out the real problems, to remind Frenchmen of their own recent experience under the Nazis, and to warn them against imitating those Germans who "did not know" what was happening at Dachau and Auschwitz. At the time of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, Sartre did not let his commitment to Marxism and to the left still his voice or his conscience. During the Algerian war, in the late 1950's, he became once again the conscience and the voice of French humanism and French culture. He and his collaborators and friends kept up the intellectual (and sometimes material) contact between France, as a nation and as an idea, and her rebellious colonial subjects.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , July 1965 , pp. 703 - 719
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1965

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References

1 Paris 1960.

2 Thus, he accepts “historical dialectics” but rejects “dialectical materialism” (i.e., the applicability of the dialectical method to nature and the natural sciences). For a succinct exposition and defense of his views on this point, see his contribution to Sartre, J.-P.Garaudy, R., and others, Marxisme et existentialisme—controverse sur la dialectique (Paris 1962).Google Scholar A more complete and complex discussion is found in his Critique de la raison dialectique (cited hereinafter as Critique). See also Desan, Wilfrid, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York 1965).Google Scholar

3 See especially his discussion of colonialism in Critique, 669–88.

4 In Justice Holmes's words, “Men's systems are forgotten, their aperçus are remembered” (Holmes-Laskj. Letters, ed. by Mark DeWolfe Howe, 1 [Cambridge, Mass., 1953], 277). And cf. ibid., 300.

5 “In Defense of Apartheid,” Foreign Affairs, XLII (October 1964), 140.Google Scholar

6 This is, of course, one of the fundamental differences between modern (nineteenth-century) colonialism and the acquisition of overseas territories in previous centuries.

7 For instance, one might use similar terms with respect to the relationship between tionship is surely one of his most imaginative and penetrating contributions to our understanding of the human condition. See Sartre, , L'Etre et le néant (Paris 1943), 431ff.Google Scholar; or Being and Nothingness, trans, by Barnes, H. (New York 1956), 364ff.Google Scholar

8 In this connection, see the interesting, though somewhat hasty, comparisons between nineteenth-century European colonialism and the colonial, or imperial, expansion in Greek and Roman antiquity and at the time of the conquest of the New World, in Plamenatz, J., On Alien Rule and Self-government (London 1960), 6ff.Google Scholar

9 And it is clear that all the Europeans in the colonies were members of the dominant group and profited from its position. On this point, Sartre seems to fall into an attitude of “bad faith” (in his own sense of the term) when he attempts to exonerate “the petty civil servants or European laborers” who, he claims, cannot be considered as colons, since they are “victims as well as innocent beneficiaries of the regime” (p. 27n). This statement is most surprising. Is Sartre implying that executioners and victims have to be distinct persons and to belong to different classes, or is it that being a victim makes one necessarily innocent of victimizing others? In Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur (Paris 1957), 18–22Google Scholar, Albert Memmi points out that there is no innocent petit colonisateur, since all Europeans in the colonies are privileged members of the ruling group, regardless of their relative mind on this point since 1958, when the essay quoted from above was first published. In Critique de la raison dialectique, he now stresses the solidarity of the colons as a group, as against the colonized, without stating or implying any qualification exempting a particular class or group.

10 Memmi, 79.

11 Sartre, L'Etre et le néant, 85ff.; Barnes trans., 47ff.

12 “D'une Chine à l'autre,” Situations, V, 7–24.

13 One may note, in passing, Sartre's insistence on the importance and historical precedence of military conquest of colonial or semi-colonial territories. This view, which may be attributed to his concern with the French experience in Algeria and elsewhere, is not necessary to his main thesis and tends to oversimplify a complex and diverse historical record. Whether political or military domination preceded economic domination is not particularly important. It is the continuing relationship between all the various forms of domination that should be of greater concern.

14 For an excellent discussion of colonial stereotypes, see Memmi, 90ff., 105ff., and passim. And cf. Sartre, Critique, 344ff. (note).

15 Almost identical stereotypes have been (and to some extent still are) current in the United States with reference to Negroes. This is not surprising. The condition of the Negro in the United States has been, in the past, very similar to that of the natives in Africa and Asia, especially in its psychological and sociological aspects and, in some respects, in its economic aspects as well. Some of the psychological similarities remain today, but there is increasing differentiation in other respects, which is due in part to the acquisition of national independence by the previously colonial territories, and in part to the increasingly social and economic character of the civil rights struggle in the United States.

16 See, on this point, the interesting, though unfortunately too brief, discussion of pre-independence “scientific observations” on Algerian criminality, in the chapter “De l'impulsivité criminelle du Nord-Africain à la guerre de libération nationale,” in Fanon, Frantz, Les damnés de la terre (Paris 1961)Google Scholar, 224ff Fanon, by profession a psychiatrist, was greatly admired by Sartre, who wrote tie preface to the abovementioned book; reprinted in Situations, V, 167–93.

17 For some tendentious and uneven but often illuminating comments on this subject, see Fanon, “De la violence,” Les damnés, 27ff.; and cf. Sartre's comments in his preface, Situations, V, 175ff.

18 Fanon, “Guerre coloniale et troubles mentaux, Série A,” Les datnnés, 192ff.; and cf. Situations, V, 200–202.

19 See the forceful discussion by ben Salah, A., “Significations et perspectives de la decolonisation,” L'Esprit, XXV (1957), 891ff.Google Scholar

20 Memmi, 121ff.

21 There is a significant similarity between Sartre's observations in this connection and Stanley Elkins's perceptive discussion of the effects of slavery on personality (Elkins, Stanley, Slavery [Chicago 1959], 81ff.Google Scholar).

22 See “La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba,” Situations, V, 194–253.

23 Cf. Sartre, “Les damnés de la terre” (preface to Fanon's book), ibid., 167–93; and see also Fanon, 111ff. For a description of the Cuban revolution in similar terms, see Sartre, , Sartre on Cuba (New York 1961), 47–61.Google Scholar

24 For a helpful but frustrating attempt, see Rossi, Mario, The Third World (New York 1963), 73–75.Google Scholar

25 Especially in Sartre on Cuba, 24–43, and “La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba,” 244–45.

26 Sartre himself refers to the Algerian rebels' assertion that even if they were happy under the French bayonets, they would still fight for independence (p. 26).

27 “The worst decolonization will always be superior by far to the best colonization. The difference between decolonization and colonization is not a matter of degree …” (Césaire, Aimé, “L'homme de culture et ses responsabilités,” Pràsence Africaine, N.S., No. 25–26 [1959], 118Google Scholar).

28 The suggestion of an analogy to the developments within the Western national legal orders in the past three centuries is implied in the use of this terminology. From the status order, with its inherent formal and factual inequalities, the Western societies passed into the contract stage, where the formal principle of equality before the law obtains, eliminating formal inequalities, but allowing free play to the factual inequalities of power, wealth, etc. As a result of (formal) political equality, however, Western societies have moved toward the welfare state—that is, the utilization of legal, social, and political institutions to counterbalance and compensate for the inequalities of fact. With the passing of colonialism, the international society seems to have reached the contract stage; it may be seen today as making tentative and somewhat unconscious steps toward the stage beyond. For some related observations, see Fatouros, A. A., “International Law and the Third World,” Virginia haw Review, L (June 1964), 783ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for a similar interpretation, see Röling, B. V. A., International haw in an Expanded World (Amsterdam 1960).Google Scholar

29 Memmi, 29–61.

30 Fanon, 240, 242. Also cf. ibid., 73–74.

31 This does not mean that Sartre has not quite often criticized the Soviet or official Marxist viewpoints. We are concerned here only with his position on the colonial issue and the confrontation with the “third world.”