Most human beings spend their lives pursuing freedom in one way or another. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his trilogy Roads to Freedom to portray French society and how his philosophy applies to such a pursuit. In The Reprieve, the second volume of the series, he depicts the lives of people from the full spectrum of the social strata as the threat of war with Germany looms over their heads. The uncertainty of their lives in the face of probable death and disaster is compellingly described and the anxieties of people with the horrific memory of World War I in their near past is well-articulated. It is a grim picture of a society on the brink of atrocity.
A lot has been said about the style Sartre chose to write this novel. The narrative switches between people, location, and situations unpredictably. Sometimes the transition is from scene to scene, sometimes it takes place over a paragraph or two, and sometimes it even happens mid-paragraph or mid-sentence. Some transitions are abrupt while others overlap or hinge on minor details that two or more characters have in common. This method is effectively done and creates depth and literary textures that may not have been possible otherwise. It blends the lives of all the characters and shows how they are all part of an organic whole, even if their connections to each other are only tenuous or remote. Sometimes they even cross paths at random, making the reader see how we are all connected without even knowing it.
Some people really love this writing style while others hate it but very few people comment on the themes throughout the story. A full range of people are portrayed. At the top is Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier meeting in secret council to discuss negotiations for peace and the German annexation of Sudetenland, the western rim of Czechoslovakia. A step or two down there is Mathieu, the protagonist of the first book in Roads to Freedom. While visiting his brother Jacques and his wife Odette who secretly loves Mathieu, the two brothers debate the pros and cons of defending Czechoslovakia while Mathieu wonders whether he should commit suicide or go fight in the war. Philippe is the stepson of an upper-class army general; he has embraced the ideology of pacifism, admires the life of Arthur Rimbaud, wishes to be a poet, and gets himself into trouble by publicly announcing his opposition to the war. Lower down the social scale are Maurice and Zezette, a working class proletarian couple who must break up as Maurice gets called up to fight. Zezette does not like the idea of war but Maurice is a committed communist and he sees it as a chance to end poverty. At the lowest end are a good natured but illiterate shepherd who arrives in Marseilles to find work but ends up, to his disappointment, getting deployed. And there is Charles, a physically disabled veteran of World War I who lives at the mercy of nurses who manage a home for invalids. When the war is about to start, the patients are transferred by boxcar to another location to keep them safe from the invading German troops. The characters of Sarah, Ivich, Boris, Daniel, and Marcelle from The Age of Reason also reappear and there is a whole host of other people with their own subplots throughout the book. Each is faced with the freedom to make choices despite the seeming inevitability of an unwanted war. They still have freedoms even if they are not the freedoms they want.
All the characters have their reasons for being for or against the war. For some it means liberation in the long run, for most it appears to be an unwanted obstruction to the pursuit of the lives they were already living. For Mathieu it is both. Most of the characters think of the war as a means of defending Czechoslovakia against the German aggressors and most of them do not care about that issue. Most of them do not think much about the Holocaust or the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of Jews. They know about the atrocities but their reasons for wanting to prevent the war are mostly selfish as if the issue of Sudetenland is used as a smokescreen and distraction to prevent them from thinking about the Holocaust. The issue is discussed by some Jewish characters in the novel but Sartre made this such a small issue to show how willfully ignorant the French populace was to the injustice of fascism. He is also throwing a punch at the anti-war people who can not see that peace would guarantee the slaughter of millions of innocent people. That is what happened anyways but reusing to engage with that issue proves that their pacifism is well-intentioned but an act of bad faith.
If you are wondering what the French people get a reprieve from, you have to read the novel to its conclusion to find out. But it can be said here that their reprieve is an illusion. Sartre shows how the people are too close to their situation to be able to see it with clarity while, at the same time, they are myopic and can not see beyond their own noses well enough to comprehend the bigger picture. The consequences of their naivete is examined in the third installment, Troubled Sleep.
The Reprieve is worth reading both for the smooth complexity of its narrative stylization and the nervous ambiguity of its themes. It is a deeply detailed and believable portrait a society’s collective mind when faced with the uncertainty of an unwanted disaster that is too close for comfort.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Reprieve. Vintage Books/Random House, New York: 1973
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