Gender Disgussed

6     My essay thus explores the complicated relationship between Sartre's celebrated antifascist art and philosophy and fascism. Although I do not intend to minimize in any way the atrocities committed under German fascism, my argument also aims to establish the continuities between Western modernity, including French cultural discourse, and the catastrophe that was early-twentieth century fascism.

7     Similar to the Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) about the uniquely German nature of the Holocaust, a debate that German intellectuals have engaged in with varying degrees of virulence since 1986 and that was stirred up again in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, France's and French citizens' relationship to Nazism and the German occupation of France during WWII have been the subjects of a recurring debate. The trials of Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet and Paul Touvier, the 1997/8 trial of Maurice Papon in Bordeaux, and the revelations about François Mitterand's questionable past again brought up the issue of the complicity of the Vichy Regime in Nazi war crimes. Former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin took the Papon trial as an occasion to proclaim that concerning the period of Nazi occupation, "il n'y a pas de culpabilité de la France parce que [. . .] Vichy était la négation de la France et en tout cas la négation de la République" (Montvalon 8).[1]Jospin's affirmation was very favorably received in the National Assembly (as well as by the RPR's Jean-Louis Debré, showing that this assessment transcended party lines).

8     In spite of such proclamations denying any French complicity, the American historian Robert Paxton wrote in 1999 that "the often expressed American view that the French won't confront the dark side of their response to Nazi occupation has been false for thirty years. Ever since students began challenging their elders' reticence in 1968, France has undergone binges of self-scrutiny, whose feverish and repetitive character led Henry Rousso to give his book on history and memory the title 'The Vichy Syndrome'" ("The Trial of Maurice Papon" 32). Indeed, for some years now, France has been engaged in what Caroline Wiedmer calls a spectacular reassessment of its past, and specifically of its "uniquely ambiguous relationship to Nazi Germany" (3).[2]Cf. also the work of Henry Rousso, for instance <em>La hantise du passé</em>.

9     It is often argued that Sartre embodies the twentieth century better than anyone. In 2000, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy published a study of the twentieth century entitled Le siècle de Sartre. I will posit that Sartre's work specifically highlights the ambiguities inherent, in the twentieth century, in the tensions between fascism and antifascism. Notwithstanding Sartre's role in the intellectual Résistance and his reputation as an antifascist writer and activist, a feminist and psychoanalytical examination of Sartre's early texts clearly points to the limits of this antifascism. In this essay I will not discuss in more depth the compromises Sartre made to get his work published during the occupation years — his articles in the collaborationist cultural review Comœdia; his publishing with Gallimard, which had been "dejewed" (désenjuivé) by the liste Otto; the public performance of his plays in occupied Paris, or other tacit accommodations with state antisemitism. In that respect as well, Sartre is more or less typical of what Omer Bartov calls "the moral confusion and the depth of accommodation that characterized the French intelligentsia in the first years of the Occupation" (65-66).

10     In my textual analysis of the rhetoric of Sartre's work, I will instead start my investigation with a brief exploration of Sartre's "Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?" before embarking on a detailed examination of Sartre's famous drama Les mouches, a play first performed in Paris in 1943 under German occupation (1940-44). Whereas Sartre repeatedly emphasized the antifascist intentions of Les mouches, and whereas David Carroll, in his excellent study French Literary Fascism, counts Sartre, together with Adorno, as one of the "important antifascist theorists" (12), my analysis of the rhetoric of alterity in Les mouches and other early texts identifies the blind spots of Sartre's anti-fascism, revealing a language that is deeply patriarchal.