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Roads of Freedom IV
Jean-Paul Sartre
www.continuumbooks.com
This work is published with the support of the French Ministry for Culture –
Centre national du livre
Acknowledgments vii
Notes 209
Works Cited 220
Index 221
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Sartre stopped work on these texts in the early 1950s, and yet they have
remained unavailable to the Anglophone audience for over half a cen-
tury. The story of the two pieces of the fourth volume is itself an interest-
ing and somewhat complicated one with respect to issues of reading,
understanding and translating. Elements of this story will be addressed
in this introductory essay, and again in an essay of philosophical analysis
presented at the end of this volume, where readers, then familiar with
the contents of Strange Friendship and The Last Chance, will be more likely
to appreciate them.
It is well known that Sartre’s Roads of Freedom is a trilogy. And yet here
we present the fourth volume! Not only that, but this fourth volume has
not been entirely unknown; the first section of it, “Strange Friendship,”
was published in French in Les Temps modernes in 1949 (numbers XLIX
and L). Although in length it cannot appear to be a full volume on par
with the other three (each of which runs close to 400 pages), as a com-
pleted piece of the story, published by the author, it clearly merits recog-
nition and inclusion. Thus it is peculiar that “everyone knows Roads of
Freedom is a trilogy.”
Sartre’s novel has a name at two levels: the whole is called “Les
Chemins de la liberté,” but each of the parts has its own, completely
independent title as well. As a result, in one sense, there is no text that
has the title “Roads of Freedom”; rather, Roads of Freedom is a set (or
cycle) of novels, The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, Death in the Soul, Strange
Friendship, and The Last Chance. In 1970, the BBC produced and aired
a multi-part series for television based on Roads of Freedom, under the title
Roads to Freedom.2 We hope the BBC will one day re-release it. But my
interest here is to note the use of “to” rather than “of” in the title. This
choice was also the choice of the editors of both the Vintage edition
sold in the United States, and the Penguin edition sold in the United
Kingdom: the book jackets indicate that the novels are parts of Sartre’s
Roads to Freedom.
What difference is conveyed by rendering “de” (which means “of” or
“from”) as “to,” as though it were “à” (or more correctly, “vers” in this
case)? Sartre certainly could have entitled his cycle Les Chemins vers la
liberté, but he did not, and it is worth pondering what the difference is.
Sartre’s title could be seen as equivalent in meaning to “Freedom’s
Roads” or “The Paths of Freedom,” because in these novels we encounter
or cross the paths of many freedoms, that is, the paths of many individu-
als who are trying to cope with their lives in 1938–1940. This is a com-
pelling suggestion, since in his major philosophical work of the same
years he writes that “What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish
from the being of ‘human reality’.”3 His is a philosophy of responsibility,
and the novels examine how a set of characters live their responsibility,
their freedom, in these particular historical circumstances. Most impor-
tantly, in reading this cycle, we are witnessing the development of the
in the United States as Troubled Sleep, and in the United Kingdom as Iron
in the Soul. Neither of these titles is an accurate rendering of La Mort dans
l’âme, which unambiguously says Death in the Soul. In this volume, again,
we will refer to the third volume as Death in the Soul, and hope that in the
coming years these incorrect titles will disappear. Sleep is not even a
theme in the novel, which is about the defeat of the French forces in
June 1940, in what Sartre called the “drôle de guerre.”4
The BBC title for the third part was The Defeated, which would have
been preferable. But in the novel itself, the phrase “death in the soul”
occurs three times as Schneider and Brunet argue about why it’s so
difficult for Brunet to get Frenchmen to join the Communist Party:5
“Am I to blame if the French are a bunch of bastards with no initiative
and no courage?” says Brunet. And Schneider replies that, yes, he
(Brunet), Pétain, Stalin, Hitler, are all to blame:
The whole lot of you are busy explaining that these poor devils are
doubly guilty—guilty of having made war, and guilty for having lost it.
You’re going around taking away from them all the reasons they
thought they had for fighting. Here’s a poor guy who thought he’d
embarked on a crusade for Justice and the Rights of Man, and now you
want to persuade him that he was duped into taking part in an imperi-
alist war. He doesn’t know what he wants, he’s not even sure what he’s
done . . . There he is, he’s fallen outside the world, outside history, with
a bunch of dead ideas, he’s trying to defend himself, to rethink his
situation. But with what? Even his tools for thinking are out of date:
you’re fuckin’ killing his soul.6
Just a minute later, Schneider uses this expression again, but about
Brunet now:
You could try to escape, but you don’t dare to, because you’re afraid of
what you’ll find out there. You agitate, you organize, you make contacts:
but you’re running away. The rest of us, we’re like stalled machinery,
but you, you keep on running, as if that were worth anything anymore.
You know it, you know you’re out of gas, and you’re just like us. You’ve
got death in your soul. You might even have it worse than us.7
And a little later, Brunet uses the expression as he reflects: “Death in
the soul. Ok, and so what? ‘That’s just psychology’ he said to himself
scornfully.”8
simple present tense whenever Brunet is the main character, because the
reader will find that, here, in The Last Chance, the Brunet narrative is
always in the present tense.12
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soldier, Schneider, seems to hit it off pretty well with him, and they talk
politics. As the novel draws to a close, they are all being transported by
train from a makeshift camp in eastern France toward a POW camp
inside Germany. On the trip to the camp, one of the men—a printer—
jumps from the train, then tries to get back on, and is shot down by the
Germans. The hatred the rest of the Frenchmen feel for the Germans at
that moment is a revelation for Brunet, and the book ends with him
soberly reflecting that tomorrow the black birds will come for the body.
By this time, one has read about 1,200 pages, been through numerous
historical moments of the late 1930s, seen fictional parallels to many of
the themes discussed in Being and Nothingness, and been treated to impres-
sive insights into the upheaval of many kinds of people’s lives, at many
levels. The reader is full of questions and hopes, and identifies with the
despair of the French prisoners. The reader does not, however, feel that
these have been stories of roads to freedom.
In English, that’s as far as one can go, but in French one could read
another hundred pages in 1949, when Sartre published Drôle d’amitié
(Strange Friendship) in his journal, Les Temps modernes. (Death in the Soul
had also appeared in 1949.) In 1981, when Sartre’s complete works
of fiction were published as Oeuvres romanesques in the Pléiade edition,
La Dernière chance (The Last Chance) appeared for the first time. This is
quite a different text from all the others, truly reconstructed after the
fact, through the labor of George H. Bauer and Michel Contat, from com-
pletely unorganized manuscript pages.20 It consists of three extended
segments, and a series of fragments still at the draft stage. Though the
piece called Strange Friendship (also consisting of three sections) is a little
longer, Sartre made clear in the 1945 interview at the Café Flore, that it
was his plan to call the final volume The Last Chance, hence the choice of
The Last Chance for the overall title of this fourth volume.
Once the reader has been through Part II (Strange Friendship and The
Last Chance), he or she may well be interested in a little more context and
bibliographical information. To this end, and especially for serious read-
ers of Sartre’s thought, I have included several supplementary texts from
the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres romanesques: the interview at the Café Flore,
Sartre’s two “Please Insert” notices for the novels (Part I), and four essays
of analysis (Part III). One of these is an overview of the place of Roads of
Freedom in Sartre’s life and work, by Michel Contat. Two others address
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1. FIRST SECTION
Brunet wakes up, leaps to the floor, lights a lamp; cold diamonds cover
his skin, the shadows dance, it smells like night and like morning, it
smells like happiness.
Outside, in the dark, there are two hundred dead barracks, thirty thou-
sand guys sleeping. Alone, upright, Brunet places a hand on the top of
the bunk and leans over a little pile of sleep:
“Get up!”
Moûlu shakes his head without opening his eyes; a large sharp mouth
opens in his unseeing face. “What time is it?”
“Time to get yourself up.”
Moûlu sighs and sits up, his eyes still closed: “Must have been a freeze
last night.”
He opens his eyes, takes a look at his watch, and gives his daily stupe-
fied cry: “Jesus Mary! 5 o’clock!”
Brunet smiles; Moûlu cries, his hands in his hair, rubbing his head;
Brunet feels like stone, a happy cold stone.
“5 o’clock!” says Moûlu. “There’s not a single fucking barracks in the
whole camp except for this goddamn one where the guys get up at 5—
the Krauts don’t even ask us to get up before 6. At this point it’s not cap-
tivity anymore, it’s like jail.” He hesitates, he thinks, his eyes suddenly
shine and he joyfully fires his favorite morning shot: “Dirty fascist!”
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