SARTRE Jean-Paul (1905-1980).

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  3. SARTRE Jean-Paul (1905-1980).
  4. Lot n° 188 
Lot n° 188
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SARTRE Jean-Paul (1905-1980).
AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIT, [late 1952 or 1953]; 107 pages in-4 on graph paper, in a Diane block. Important drafts for a political text, in support of pacifist activists prosecuted for demoralization. The manuscript, in midnight blue ink on the front of sheets of a grid paper block, shows erasures and corrections. Some passages are taken up successively on different sheets, sometimes incompletely filled in, with important passages crossed out. Unpaginated, and in disorder, the manuscript could present some gaps. Let us quote the beginning: "Mr. Vigne, general secretary of the combatants of Peace writes an article entitled: "The freedom to say that we want Peace". The government took legal action against him under the law on the Press. The court of Beauvais acquitted him in 1950 and the Court of Appeal of Amiens confirmed the judgment in 1951. The reason for the acquittal was that the offending article was a manifestation of opinion. Eighteen months later and for the same article, Mr. Vigne was prosecuted before the military court, under the qualification of treason. This means, if I am not mistaken, that a manifestation of opinion which is not even a press offence and which is solemnly certified as the simple use of the right to express one's thoughts, can be at the same time a real treason. One can be a traitor just by using one's rights as a citizen. Or if you like: the act itself is not blameworthy. But a perfectly lawful act can be criminal at the same time. What Mr. Vigne is reproached for is not of course to have made known his opinion on the war in Indochina, you say? The government is too happy to know it! No: what he is reproached for is having expressed it in order to demoralize the Nation" .... Sartre reacted to the law penalizing "attempts at demoralization". He sees there an attack directed against the Communist Party. "The 1950 project risks succeeding where the occupier failed, with a little luck, it will destroy the regime. What does he demand? The right to imprison Communists whenever he wants and without being obliged to question the Party itself. In short, the right to violate the Constitution [...]. The real demands of the project are hidden from us and, although they are perfectly untranslatable in democratic language, it is in this language that they choose to express them. In short, words are taken, bent, twisted, forced into monstrous puzzles, given the appearance of defining the crime [...] in fact, a trompe-l'oeil is produced, whose meaning shimmers from afar and vanishes up close; arbitrariness is translated as equality, exceptional law as universality, government policy as universal truth; the principles of terror are exposed in terms of liberty, and war is described under the name of Peace." Sartre attacks the government and those who incarnate it: "Our ministers are small people who live in small weeks [...] To move, to arrange, to move, here is the clearest of their existence"... [We did not find this text of Sartre in the Writings of Sartre listed by Mr. Contat and Mr. Rybalka. In the years 1952 and 1953, Sartre engaged in the fight for Peace, by participating in the Congress of Vienna, by taking a public side in favor of Henri Martin, a communist militant against the war in Indochina, and by publishing three articles in Les Temps modernes on The Communists and Peace] Plus a typewritten sheet: Text of the letter sent by the International Commission resulting from the Peoples' Congress.
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