One evening in April 1967, French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir stood before a largely female audience at Cairo University. Along with her partner Jean-Paul Sartre and their friend and associate Claude Lanzmann, Beauvoir was on an extended tour of Egypt and Israel on behalf of Les temps modernes, the journal she and Sartre had cofounded in 1945. The primary purpose of the trip was to study Arab–Israeli relations, but on this occasion Beauvoir did not speak about such matters. Instead, she delivered a forceful lecture on the “subordination of women” in Egypt, which she characterized as “a problem of human dignity.” Egyptian men, Beauvoir charged, behaved like “feudal lords, colonialists, and racists toward women.” As a result, not only did the country's female inhabitants suffer, but also Egyptian society as a whole experienced a “great loss”: the potential political, intellectual, and economic contributions of half the population.
Narrating this episode in Simone de Beauvoir: Creating a Feminist Existence in the World, French historian Sandrine Sanos casts a critical eye toward Beauvoir. The philosopher's view of Egyptian women's lives, Sanos writes, was “biased and partial,” revelatory not of “reality” but of a preexisting conviction that “Islam was a backward religion when it came to equality between men and women.” De Beauvoir, she concludes, “fell prey to the orientalist belief that Muslim nations were less civilized than Europe, revealing one of the blind spots that haunted many intellectuals in those years” (148). Yoav Di-Capua, a historian of Egypt by training, provides an account of the same speech as part of an extended consideration of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Lanzmann's trip in No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. Interestingly, however, his version is far more charitable: Beauvoir's speech, Di-Capua writes, was “passionate, courageous, and penetrating.” It constituted a “firsthand” testimony to Egypt's patriarchal social structure and a powerful, incisive application of “the familiar terms of neocolonialism” to “the state of women” in the country (204).
It is striking that Simone de Beauvoir's little-known Cairo speech features in both Sanos's and Di-Capua's recent books on the lives and ideas of postwar French existentialists—and indicative of a new determination among historians in the wake of the imperial and global turns to resituate such quintessentially French figures as Beauvoir and Sartre in transnational, cross-cultural, and geographically diverse dialogues and contexts. No Exit hopscotches from Paris to Cairo, Beirut to Baghdad, with stops in Gaza and Jerusalem as well. Simone de Beauvoir, meanwhile, is surely the first biography of the French writer ever to open with a set of world maps visualizing European empire and decolonization, to linger over the meanings and practitioners of négritude, or to invoke the 1955 Bandung Conference as a turning point. And yet if Di-Capua and Sanos share a commitment to broadening the global vision of French intellectual history, an interest in breaking down what Di-Capua terms “historiographic ghettos” originally determined by imperial geography (18), and a desire to revise tired Cold War tropes for depicting the postwar Parisian intellectual scene, then their different evaluations of Beauvoir's speech signal that the result is hardly a new consensus about how to evaluate the leading lights of French secular existentialism. Taken together, Sanos and Di-Capua's two excellent works suggest that practicing a more international, postcolonial, or “globalized” intellectual history will not, in itself, resolve the difficult problems of historical interpretation and normative judgment with which such ethically complex, politically engaged figures as Sartre and Beauvoir perennially confront us.
It is important to stress at the outset of this essay's linked assessment of No Exit and Simone de Beauvoir that the books are directed toward two very different audiences. Di-Capua's work is a scholarly monograph that uses Arab engagement with Sartrean philosophy as the jumping-off point for a dazzling narrative of intellectual and political exchange. Over the span of nine chapters, his deeply researched account draws upon texts in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English to pursue two distinct aims. First, he examines Sartre's political and intellectual involvement in the Arab world, tracing the winding path that led to the philosopher's signing of a pro-Israeli petition in the lead-up to the 1967 Six Day War. Second, by way of explaining why this signature was interpreted as a devastating act of treachery by Sartre's Arab interlocutors, Di-Capua excavates the forgotten history of existentialism's flourishing as a philosophy and a culture in the Arab world of the 1950s and 1960s, employing “old-fashioned . . . storytelling” to bring “back to life” an eclectic cast of Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian philosophers, novelists, poets, editors, critics, and activists who identified as existentialists (21, 23). These men and women “read Sartre for breakfast,” Di-Capua writes, but they did not digest his work as “a ready-made philosophy waiting to be ‘implemented’” (13, 11). Rather, they modified Sartrean existentialism “to the point of reinvention” in the service of a radical generational endeavor of intellectual decolonization (11). Di-Capua's account of this process is intended as an act of “historiographical cross-pollination” and is accordingly directed at specialists across several diverse fields of inquiry (14).
In contrast, Sanos's Simone de Beauvoir, a contribution to the Lives in the World series produced by Oxford University Press, is a biography intended for classroom use by undergraduates with no prior knowledge of French history, existentialist philosophy, or feminist theory. (Other figures profiled in the series, edited by Bonnie G. Smith, include Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Anwar Al-Sadat, and Margaret Thatcher.) The book is a marvel of concision, clocking in at a slim 238 pages, including notes, suggestions for further reading, and a substantial set of translated primary source excerpts with accompanying “study questions.” Within the brief span of the narrative text, Sanos not only relates Beauvoir's life story but also provides insightful readings of her major texts, notably The Second Sex. In keeping with the mission of the series, she also structures her account to remind readers at every turn of how Beauvoir's life and writing were “embedded in the world” (1). Sanos intends this in a specifically transnational and imperial sense. Simone de Beauvoir may be a book for teaching—an outstanding one—but it nevertheless makes a series of implicit arguments about how postwar French intellectual life was intertwined with the drama of decolonization. In more than one way, her case resonates with Di-Capua's much more explicit agenda in writing about “the global Sartre” (14).
Nonetheless, Simone de Beauvoir and No Exit cannot readily be compared as texts. Beyond the obvious distinctions between a book crafted for students and one aimed toward scholars, there are also major generic differences between them. While Sanos provides Beauvoir's cradle-to-grave life history, Di-Capua's study is in no sense a biography of Sartre. Nor is it particularly focused on reading his major texts. Existentialism, Di-Capua underlines, was given real substance for the majority of its eastern Arab adherents less through Sartre's philosophical and critical writings than through his anticolonial activism on behalf of Third World peoples; hence although No Exit discusses a few Arabic-language reviews of, for instance, What Is Literature?, Anti-Semite and Jew, Existentialism Is a Humanism, and The Critique of Dialectical Reason, it does not cite any of these works directly. Rather, Di-Capua centers his account squarely on the “makers and believers” of Arab existentialism, sandwiching their story between opening and closing chapters that recount the 1967 trip and Sartre's “colossal betrayal” of his Arab admirers just weeks later (4). Di-Capua is no less interested in biographical narrative than is Sanos—indeed, he similarly argues that it “allows the writer to embed human subjectivity in the original social context in which the subject spoke, wrote, and acted.” But he primarily defends storytelling as a means of restoring visibility to actors within “the non-European spheres of global intellectual history.” Thus, if he and Sanos agree methodologically that (in his words) “narrative can represent” (21), they have in mind quite different objects of representation. This essay therefore first considers each of the two books in turn before returning to some of the larger questions raised by both.
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Yoav Di-Capua's No Exit is structured as an extended exploration of non-Algerian Arab engagement with Sartrean existentialism as a “referential grammar” for diverse arguments about “the meaning of freedom at the close of empire” (3). The first chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the two-year-long process by which Sartre's 1967 visit to Egypt and Israel came about, stressing the behind-the-scenes roles of “multiple actors on both sides of the Mediterranean” (29). To date, as Di-Capua points out, historians have considered Sartre's engagement with the Arab–Israeli conflict strictly through close readings of his texts; his interlocutors from within the societies in question have remained unknown. Thus the chapter introduces such figures as ‘Ali al-Samman, a young Egyptian journalist based in Paris who befriended Sartre and helped him to organize a special issue of Les temps modernes about Arab–Israeli relations, and Simha Flapan, an Israeli socialist recently arrived in France who became al-Samman's counterpart. Sartre's trip with Beauvoir and Lanzmann, part of a comprehensive project by Les temps modernes “to investigate the causes and dynamics of the Arab–Israeli conflict,” was a highly politicized affair from the beginning, and Di-Capua provides engrossing details regarding the calculations made by various French, Israeli, and Egyptian actors—including government officials—as the terms of travel were laboriously negotiated (34). But if, given Sartre's celebrity and influence, the stakes were “exceptionally high” for both parties to the conflict, they were ultimately higher for the Arabs: only they “took Sartre personally,” writes Di-Capua (45–6). By excavating the history of existentialism in the Arab world, the following 150 pages of No Exit seek to demonstrate why this was the case.
Di-Capua's second chapter traces the origins of Arab interest in existentialism to the late 1940s, exploring multiple incipient strains of existentialist thought in Egypt and Lebanon to explain why the Sartrean variety triumphed over time. For instance, it offers a vivid sketch of philosopher ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi, who attempted to fuse Sufism with the Heideggerian concepts in which he was trained at Cairo's Fu'ad University by Alexander Koyré. Ultimately, though, the chapter's most consequential figure is Suhayl Idris, a Beirut-based writer and journalist who, upon returning from three inspiring years in Paris, founded the literary journal Al-Adab. Its mission statement, liberally borrowing from that of Les temps modernes, called for a “literature of commitment [iltizam]” that could help to decolonize Arab society from within (68). Chapter 3, titled “Commitment,” explores what iltizam meant to its practitioners in the 1950s as it became a “doctrine of cultural action” and a “weapon” to attack and displace an older generation of Eurocentric intellectual elites such as the Egyptian writer Taha Husayn (78). Although the chapter tells a compelling story of generational combat over the politicization of culture, in the end it is unclear how important Sartre's brand of engagement really was to the battle: Husayn's chief opponents, it would appear, were not the existentialists of Al-Adab but rather communists such as Iraqi Husayn Muruwwa, who called for a socialist realist literature far distant from the vision laid out in What Is Literature? (which, in any case, was not translated into Arabic until the early 1960s). Di-Capua, acknowledging this, suggests that the communists enacted a “hostile theoretical takeover” of what “started as a classic Sartrean project” (79); one wonders if, rather, those who embraced Sartre's understanding of engaged literature were simply marginal to the drama. In any case, the chapter does make clear the ever-heightening political stakes of cultural expression in this fervid milieu.
Di-Capua continues to develop this theme over the following two chapters, bringing into play the role of the revolutionary Arab state as well. Chapter 4 begins by positing that pan-Arabism in both its Nasserist and Ba'thist manifestations “functioned as a political theology” that “underwrote state authority” by equating the state with the nation and depicting it as the sole source of “postcolonial salvation” (109). From here, he examines how some existentialists—notably the editors of Al-Adab—“actively participated” in this project while others—Tunisian author Mahmud al-Mas‘adi, for instance—contested it in the name of writerly freedom (114). Although Di-Capua admits that “most intellectuals were content enough with celebrating the state” in this period (115), he is more interested in those who drew on existentialist themes to undermine authoritarianism. Thus chapter 5 makes the case that a full-blown “existentialist counterculture” flourished in Baghdad's cafes in the 1950s, offering Iraqis a language of aesthetic rebellion against the established order (132). Though Di-Capua's account does highlight some texts—for instance the bohemian poetry of Husayn Mardan—he stresses that “Iraqi existentialism was mostly an oral and performative tradition that left very little written record” (143). Hence he approaches it not as a corpus but as a “way of life” and an urban “scene,” insisting that even if Baghdad's self-described existentialists never read a word of Sartre, they nevertheless drew on an “existentialist repertoire” to express their profound sense of alienation in a context of intensifying unfreedom (141, 132). This is plausible enough, but Di-Capua's narrative is hazy on the alternative modes of cross-cultural transmission by which Baghdadis may have come to identify as “existentialist.” Readers of No Exit would also have benefited from a more richly theorized baseline discussion of the tensions between freedom and commitment in Sartrean existentialism: we are left simply to observe that if Sartre's initial influence on Egyptian intellectuals derived from his model of engagement, resolutely unengaged Iraqis were just as strongly drawn to him. Why?
Chapters 6 and 7, which move forward into the 1960s, shift focus back to those of Sartre's admirers who were more inspired by his political militancy than by his championing of artistic freedom of conscience. Chapter 6 offers a relatively straightforward reception history of key Sartrean texts on anticolonial themes, including “Colonialism Is a System” (originally translated into Arabic by Idris in 1956, but much more influentially republished in a 1960 collection). Sartre's elaboration of an anticolonial humanism, writes Di-Capua, won him increased respect in the Arab East, but Marxists hesitated to embrace a philosopher whom they still viewed as a standard-bearer of individualism. The publication of The Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960 changed this: although Sartre's effort to demonstrate existentialism's compatibility with Marxism was viewed as a failure by most European commentators, “the original colonial context of The Critique and its treatment of collective alterity were sufficient to convince Arab intellectuals that Sartre had reconciled existentialism and Marxism” (162). This cleared the way for them to hail his tiers-mondiste activism as the beacon of “a global humanistic Left” (164). Chapter 7 extends this argument to explain how these intellectuals subsequently came to believe that by participating themselves in the “global movement” symbolized by Sartre's revolutionary engagement, “the Arab person could make a successful passage into universalism, surpass its postcolonial condition, and emerge a liberated citizen” (171). Importantly, as leftist writers recast the Arab East's struggles in universalizing terms, regional discourse on the Palestinian cause was transformed. Thus Di-Capua traces “the birth moment of the global cause of Palestine” to Fayiz Sadigh's Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965), which linked Israel's actions to racist and colonialist systems throughout the world. The book, as Di-Capua observes, “had Sartre's fingerprints all over it” (191–2).
Sartre himself, however, proved hesitant to embrace the Palestinian cause. To explain why, No Exit’s last two chapters return to the narrative that began in its early pages, now intricately tracing the philosopher's 1967 itinerary through Egypt and Israel. Throughout the voyage, Sartre sought to maintain a strict position of “absence” and “ambiguity” regarding the Arab–Israeli conflict, and in particular the problem of Palestine. Di-Capua insists, however, that “his gestures, body language, and overall condescending attitude” during the Israeli leg of the trip “betrayed a profound aversion to Zionism” (227). What is more, during his visit to Gaza, Sartre publicly affirmed a Palestinian right of return. Why, then, mere weeks later, did the philosopher (along with Beauvoir and Lanzmann) ultimately choose to sign a declaration affirming Israel's “security and sovereignty” and condemning “threatening proclamations” on the Arab side (239–40)? Despite his book-length wind-up, Di-Capua's answer to the question ultimately adds little to the prevailing scholarly explanation: Sartre was “petrified by the specter of a second Holocaust” and uncomfortable with the prospect of remaining silent through yet another French betrayal of the Jews (239). Where No Exit is far more revelatory is in its account of the “avalanche of anti-Sartre condemnation” that his act produced throughout the Arab world—from Baghdad, where his books were banned, to Algiers, where they were burned (241). Some held out hope for a further Sartrean about-face (“We hope to win this great intellectual once again to our ranks,” wrote Idris) but, for most, existentialism was discredited along with its figurehead. Abruptly, the “‘Post-Sartre’ era” of Arab intellectual history had begun (246).
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Sandrine Sanos's Simone de Beauvoir does not narrate such a neat drama of intellectual rise and fall as Di-Capua's No Exit. This is, in part, because it covers a much broader stretch of time: Sanos, whose previous work has centered on the interwar period, begins with Beauvoir's birth in 1908 and ends with her 1986 funeral procession. Along the way, she uses the feminist writer's life story to illuminate broader twentieth-century developments—and vice versa. Continually contextualizing and recontextualizing, she not only makes of de Beauvoir an unexpectedly well-chosen Zelig to escort students through eighty years of French history but also helps them to understand the myriad and otherwise incomprehensible contemporary referents in such texts as “An Eye for an Eye” (1946) and The Force of Circumstance (1963) (both excerpted in the appendix along with The Second Sex, Djamila Boupacha, and The Bobigny Affair Report). The result is not an intimate biography à la Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir (1991): Sanos includes adequate discussion of Beauvoir's romantic attachments to figures such as Lanzmann but does not dwell upon them. Nor is the book a literary genealogy akin to Toril Moi's 1995 study Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. It is, rather, an examination of “Beauvoir's place in the world” and, as such, a meditation on the complex web of relations that connect histoire événementielle, individual lived experience, and the written word (5).
Sanos organizes Simone de Beauvoir more or less chronologically, opening with a chapter that surveys the writer's first thirty years, before she began to publish. Beyond rehearsing the well-known story of Beauvoir's youth—her sheltered, religious upbringing as a “dutiful daughter,” her training in philosophy, her momentous 1929 meeting with fellow student Sartre (“her intellectual match”), her career as a provincial high-school teacher, and her early attempts at fiction writing—Sanos brings to life a political and cultural scene in bubbling flux (13). Beauvoir proves a wonderful entry point for discussion of such disparate matters as secularization, reforms to France's educational system, and—especially—shifting sexual norms. However, some of Sanos's efforts to link the self-absorbed young Beauvoir's personal history to broader developments are more strained: readers learn, for instance, that Beauvoir “did not seem interested” in France's harsh interwar laws on abortion and birth control (21), that she was “unconcerned with international politics” (26), and that the domestic far-right demonstrations and riots of the 1930s “did not influence her” (27). Certainly, Beauvoir's indifference to the world beyond her own small circle is itself illuminating of the sometimes limited relationship between individual lives and “History” writ large. Nevertheless, Sanos's effort to use an erudite writer–philosopher's personal trajectory as a thread of continuity through the twentieth century raises unresolved questions about precisely which contexts matter when it comes to intellectual history. For instance, Beauvoir thought a great deal about Immanuel Kant and David Hume in these years; meanwhile, she was “blissfully ignorant” of Paris-based Martiniquan writers Paulette and Jane Nardal (25). So what principle justifies discussing the latter pair rather than the former in a biography that seeks to illuminate the forces that “shaped her life and writings” (5)?
Matters are clearer in chapter 2, on the Second World War, since here Sanos effectively reads Beauvoir's solipsistic silences as symptomatic of more general French moral failures under German occupation. The chapter provides a first-rate treatment of Vichy France for its intended undergraduate readers, laying greatest emphasis on anti-Semitic policies. Sanos also offers a clear-eyed discussion of de Beauvoir's more questionable actions and nonactions during these dark years, perhaps following her subject's own 1946 precept (in “An Eye for an Eye”): “To grasp the coherence of a life, its rapport with the given world, the logic of its development, none of this prevents the wrongful act from appearing as a choice” (192). Sanos stresses that Beauvoir was “no different than most of her fellow citizens” in focusing on her own day-to-day circumstances, failing to become meaningfully involved in organized resistance activities, and paying limited attention to Jewish suffering (37). But she does not thereby rationalize Beauvoir's deeds, which included signing a declaration that she was neither Jewish nor a Freemason in order to keep her teaching job, reporting for Radio-Vichy, and neglecting her Jewish friend Bianca Bienenfeld as the young woman sought desperately to avoid arrest. Sanos also makes clear that Beauvoir's decision to publish her first book, She Came to Stay (1943), from occupied Paris was “a political choice” (42)—and one that the author did not regret. Beauvoir's joy at “becoming an author,” writes Sanos, far outweighed her concerns in these years over “ongoing Nazi persecutions” (49).
The following two chapters of Simone de Beauvoir consider how that authorial identity blossomed in the postwar period. Early in chapter 3, Sanos lays out Beauvoir's “major preoccupations” in these years: “What is the meaning of existence, of freedom? How does one become aware of oneself, free, and act in the world with others? What does it mean to be a subject, and how might one develop an ethics not grounded in religion in a secular world?” (57). She then traces how Beauvoir grappled with these questions in her various intellectual roles—as a novelist, philosopher, and cofounder and editor of Les temps modernes—as well as her personal life. The chapter includes an elegantly readable synopsis of what “existentialism” meant to her protagonist and to its other postwar French adepts. Chapter 4, a sustained analysis of Beauvoir's magnum opus, The Second Sex (1949), likewise includes a good amount of synoptic analysis. Here Sanos offers sustained thematic overviews of both volumes of the work, explaining how Beauvoir approached women's condition of otherness as both a “philosophical object and a political question” (91). Her account carefully tracks Beauvoir's influences and antecedents, from Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal to medieval writer Christine de Pizan. It also, of course, situates The Second Sex in the political and cultural world of postwar France, noting women's new right to vote (which Beauvoir “rarely exercised” (84)) and the flowering of la presse féminine. Sanos concludes that the book was “a symptom of the times changing”—a somewhat reductive statement about a supremely idiosyncratic and rich text, and another indication of the limits imposed on her incisive analysis by the Lives in the World framework (104).
Beauvoir became far more directly involved in responding to major domestic and international political developments in the late 1950s, and hence Sanos has an easier task in the second half of her book. Chapter 5 traces the writer's fierce engagement during the Algerian War (1954–62), highlighting her public defense of young torture victim Djamila Boupacha while—not incidentally—providing readers with an excellent survey of France's passage through the conflict. Chapter 6 then offers a whirlwind tour of the 1960s, Beauvoir's “most politically involved period as writer and public figure” (133). We learn, in thumbnail sketch, about her participation in the Russell tribunal on war crimes in Vietnam, her role in the 1966 “Treblinka affair” over Holocaust memory, and her support for the student and worker revolt of May 1968. Along the way, Sanos notes Beauvoir's many travels—to Cuba, Japan, the USSR—and her account briefly overlaps with Di-Capua's as she relates the Egypt–Israel voyage. The differences in their authorial perspectives are evident well beyond their contrasting assessments of Beauvoir's Cairo University speech: for instance, Sanos judges that Beauvoir and Sartre were “at odds with most of the French left” in their pro-Israeli position on the Six Day War (150), whereas Di-Capua suggests that they stood as one with “Paris's intellectual elite” (240). Additionally, whereas Simone de Beauvoir portrays its subject as “moved by refugees’ living conditions” in Gaza (148), No Exit—harsher in its appraisal of Beauvoir's politics on Palestine than in its evaluation of her feminism—suggests that she “ended up blaming the refugees for their own condition” (213). Such competing claims serve as small reminders of the subjective judgments that shape both of these confidently authoritative, omnisciently voiced narratives.
In addition to international matters, chapter 6 of Simone de Beauvoir also recounts the beginnings of Beauvoir's later-in-life career as a feminist activist, as she lent her endorsement to Marie-Andrée Lagroua Weill-Hallé’s crusade for access to contraception. Feminism remains the chief subject of chapter 7 on Beauvoir's final two decades, during which she became heavily involved in the Mouvement de libération des femmes (founded in 1970) and—on the heels of signing the “Manifesto of the 343,” testifying to having once had an illegal abortion—cofounded the abortion-rights group Choisir. Although Sanos deals thoroughly and thoughtfully with Sartre's 1980 death and Beauvoir's “scandalous” testament to their unusual partnership, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, she also emphasizes that life went on for Beauvoir in the new decade—and, with it, “acting in the world” (182). The feminist writer confronted new subjects up until the moment of her death, Sanos reminds readers. Thus this slim volume that began with the proliferation of the sewing machine and the typewriter ends with the global AIDS crisis. One can, perhaps, raise issues with the inherent limitations of a series premised upon treating individual lives—and the texts produced during them—as “windows” onto “a particular historical era” (Bonnie G. Smith, series introduction, iii). But it is hard to quibble with the idea that history students deserve a tour guide to the twentieth century as complex and compelling as Beauvoir—and impossible to deny the verve, insight, and creativity with which Sanos facilitates their encounter with her.
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What is to be gleaned about the current status of postwar French intellectual history from Sanos and Di-Capua's two very different books (neither written primarily for an audience of postwar French intellectual historians)? Taken together, they suggest that interest in what the late Tony Judt once called the “dominant voices” of the 1940s and 1950s remains far from exhausted despite the welcome recent proliferation of studies focused on figures who were both less famous and less overtly engagés.Footnote 1 They suggest as well, however, a coordinated and long-overdue movement against Judt's own approach to Sartre and Beauvoir's circle. “For many years now,” as Di-Capua observes in the early pages of No Exit, “Sartre's intellectual legacy has been stuck on two narrow, albeit important, issues: his problematic rapport with Soviet communism and his ambivalent stand on violence” (17). Ever since Judt's landmark 1991 Past Imperfect indicted Sartre along with Beauvoir and other contemporaries for their “intellectual irresponsibility” regarding Soviet state terror, historical scholarship on the existentialist couple has been heavily oriented toward normative evaluation of their political choices, and especially reflection on the violence that both were willing to countenance—even celebrate—so long as it was carried out in the service of socialist revolution. Judt's condemnatory treatment of Sartre and Beauvoir as insouciant lackeys of the USSR has been thoroughly criticized over the years both on methodological grounds—as Samuel Moyn points out, Past Imperfect leaves “completely untheorized the relationship between intellectual concepts and social activity”—and for neglecting its subjects’ other political commitments, notably their anticolonialism and antiracism.Footnote 2 Nevertheless, its influence lives on in historians’ continuing tendency toward disapproving moral assessment of Sartre and Beauvoir's political (and, sometimes, sexual) “irresponsibility” rather than dialogic engagement with their ideas.
Di-Capua and Sanos both evidently hope to help “unstick” this history from its post-Cold War ruts, and—building on the work of several others, including Paige Arthur and Jonathan Judaken—they go some distance toward achieving this goal. As a specialist in Middle Eastern studies, Di-Capua is particularly well equipped to help dismantle the dominant paradigms of the French field by situating Sartre's writing in relation to radically different texts and contexts than previous authors have been able to access. In seeking to understand “why existentialism had so much to offer Arab societies” in the 1950s and 1960s, Di-Capua brackets the thorny old problem of revolutionary violence almost entirely (9). For figures such as Idris, he writes, it was instead Sartrean conceptualizations of individual freedom and responsibility that seemed to offer a blueprint for internally decolonizing the Third World subject and producing an authentically universal citizen, “the new Arab man.” In turn, di-Capua writes, Sartre “humanely recognized his Arab interlocutors” and the result—until the 1967 rupture—was an extraordinarily “intimate, intense, and hopeful” moment of “cross-cultural” contact (2). Thus, in place of Judt's damning portrait of a blinkered and obtuse Sartrean circle that “closed the intellectual frontiers” when the Iron Curtain descended, Di-Capua paints Sartre as “probably the first true global intellectual” (171).Footnote 3 Such an assertion depends upon an asymmetrical model of the global exchange of ideas: however “humane” Sartre's interactions with Arab thinkers may have been, Di-Capua presents limited evidence that they ultimately shaped his conceptual apparatus or left substantive traces in his major texts. The phrase is, nevertheless, a provocative counter to those who have treated Sartre's tiers-mondisme as a lightly assumed or transparently instrumentalist pose.Footnote 4
Sanos avoids any such charged claims, instead describing Beauvoir simply as a “worldwide celebrity” (1). Thus she employs a different strategy for pushing back against Judtian historiographic convention. It involves two closely linked moves. First, she aims to decenter politics in favor of literature in her account of de Beauvoir's chief preoccupations during the prewar and immediate postwar years: after all, as she points out, the author of The Second Sex did not attend political meetings or rallies, give speeches, write newspaper editorials, join a party, or lend her name explicitly to any cause until late in the 1950s (68). Second, Sanos puts the Algerian War rather than the “communist question” at the heart of her evaluation of Beauvoir's political morality—indeed, Algeria is both literally and figuratively at the center of her account. Whereas for Judt the conflict in North Africa provided engaged intellectuals with “an ideal exit from the Communist imbroglio,” for Sanos it marks the beginning of Beauvoir's process of political awakening and involvement.Footnote 5 The reluctant writer, Sanos claims, became “an engaged intellectual with the Algerian War” (130–31). At last abandoning the idea that activism was “Sartre's affair” and not her own, circa 1955 Beauvoir decided to cease “tolerating her fellow citizens’ racism and indifference” and throw herself into the fray (116–17). Simone de Beauvoir as a whole does not flatter its subject: Sanos's attitude toward Beauvoir is probably best characterized by one of the most frequently used words in her book, “ambivalent,” and she evidently agrees with her subject's dictum in “An Eye for an Eye” that historical context must not function as a form of moral absolution. But the book does present the writer's anti-torture, pro-independence activism in the late 1950s and early 1960s as admirable, and as marking a turning point in her life toward political struggle on behalf of oppressed and marginalized groups.
All of this adds up to a welcome shift in spatial and temporal focus for de Beauvoir studies. But there are limits to the viability of Sanos's effort to reperiodize Beauvoir's political history. For one thing, it demands a dichotomization between “literature” and “politics” that ultimately proves untenable in discussing the era of engagement. Only a narrow definition of the political could support the notion that the author of The Blood of Others and The Second Sex “came to politics only in the late 1950s” (2–3). Second, it declines to confront some inconvenient facts. Given Sanos's laudable desire to avoid conflating Beauvoir with her partner, it is understandable that she avoids mentioning Sartre's 1952–6 period as a fellow traveler to the French Communist Party. But to omit that information while meanwhile taking care to inform readers that Les temps modernes published “one of the first exposés of the gulags” (a claim based upon a generous characterization of the piece in question) may strike well-versed readers as unbalanced (59).Footnote 6 And Sanos's brief description of Beauvoir and Sartre's break with Albert Camus as “a bitter falling-out over the fate of Algeria” is inaccurate: the rift took place in 1952, over the issue of communist state terror, and was unrelated to Camus's later reluctance to countenance Algerian independence (122, 119). No Exit, which likewise curiously omits all mention of fellow traveling, runs into similar complications. For instance, Di-Capua treats Sartre's attendance at the 1954 Soviet-sponsored World Peace Conference in Berlin as a surprising guest appearance by “the prophet of radical individualism,” musing that “the global front against imperialism was indeed a complex ideological affair” (93). But Sartre was not present as an extraordinary act of anti-imperialist coalition building: he attended multiple such conferences in these years—and justified doing so primarily in reference to Cold War rivalries and French domestic antagonisms, not opposition to colonialism. It would appear, then, that one peril of the necessary work of retelling postwar French intellectual history in a more imperial or global key is that the historian risks ascribing too much explanatory power to anticolonial or tiers-mondiste politics and too little to the hoary old battles over communism in France, Europe, and the USSR.
Interestingly, despite its explicit critique of Judt, No Exit actually tends at moments toward restaging Past Imperfect against a different backdrop. Di-Capua does not try to mimic Judt's matchless tone, of course, but his disapproval of Sartre's 1967 decision to sign the pro-Israeli petition is evident—and, overall, his narrative about the philosopher's “betrayal” of the Arab world surprisingly echoes Judt's tale of how Sartre turned his back on the peoples of the Soviet bloc. In the end, then, what besides geography (and a historiographical exhaustion with “the communist problem”) distinguishes these two stories of petitions signed and unsigned, speech acts offered and withheld? And what, precisely, does either tell us about Sartre as a philosopher? What is more, without pretending to a universal, timeless vantage point—there are obvious reasons, after all, why Judt chose to write about Eastern Europe in the early 1990s and Di-Capua about Palestine in the 2010s—how can we, as historians, articulate our own retrospective judgments of Sartre's political choices in either case? Such questions are not intended as sidelong criticisms of Di-Capua, whose achievement in No Exit is remarkable (and goes well beyond the treatment of Sartre himself). I aim only to suggest that moving decisively past a morality-play approach to postwar French intellectual history is a different matter than changing the scene or widening the scale: it is one of critically rethinking how historians can best treat philosophers, novelists, poets, and so on as fallible political actors in their own presents. In other words, illuminating how French intellectuals lived lives “embedded in the world” requires more than reconfiguring our sense of that world's spatial horizons. Also needed is a theory of embeddedness. And Sartre and Beauvoir will likely be central to it, not only because—like it or not—they are the incontournables of the period, but also because their ideas are so genealogically relevant to our own thinking about writers’ freedom, engagement, and responsibility.Footnote 7
Of course, making postwar French intellectual history less insular is a worthy goal entirely in and of itself. In their different ways, No Exit and Simone de Beauvoir both accomplish it beautifully, drawing undreamt-of connections between their protagonists and a cast of historical actors situated very far away from the Parisian Left Bank. Sanos's particularly impressive feat is to do this in a book for students, making Beauvoir accessible to such readers at the same time as she is subtly broadening the frame around her subject for fellow scholars—and all without thereby sacrificing Beauvoir's complexity as a writer and a feminist theorist. Di-Capua's is to achieve this effect from the outside in, reenvisioning Paris from the perspective of Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut. As multiple commentators have pointed out, the “globalization” of history does not necessarily deserve celebration any more than the globalization of the world economy. And, at the end of the day, Sartre, Beauvoir, and their friends remained largely an inward-gazing group whose interactions with non-Western writers tended more toward acts of paratextual patronage (at best) and romantic projection (at worst) than dialogic exchange. Thus there are undoubtedly limits to just how global we want our postwar French intellectual history to be.Footnote 8 But Di-Capua's discovery of a rich “alternative archive” of Sartrean engagement with the Arab world suggests that we have not yet reached those limits (21). One hopes that, perhaps, Sanos's account will inspire the next generation of readers to help us find them.
