QUAESTIO - Social Sciences Division - UCLA

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An Eye for An Eye: Simone de Beauvoir on Justice in Postwar France Beauvoir recounted his trial in her essay, along with events that took place the year following his death, such as the liberation of Nazi concentration camps and the initial proceedings of the Nuremberg trials, which introduced a new concept: crimes against humanity. In “Œil pour œil,” Beauvoir argued that Brasillach by way of his pen committed so severe a crime and that this suggested a premeditated criminality for which he should be held accountable. Brasillach was not a Vichy government leader. He held no executive, legislative, judicial, military or police office. Executor of no orders, he dropped no bombs, nor fired any rifle or pistol. Brasillach was a writer; his weapon: the pen. His crime: intellectual collaboration by way of his denunciations in the French fascist journal Je suis partout. Sentenced and executed even before the leaders of the Vichy regime had been tried, Brasillach is distinguished as the only prominent intellectual to be killed during the period known as the “Purge.” Other fascist sympathizers in literary circles, like Céline, had fled the country or, in the case of Drieu La Rochelle, committed suicide. Brasillach’s trial at the Palais de Justice was a controversial event for French journalists and writers. His execution was even more incendiary, igniting a veritable firestorm of reflections on the writer’s responsibility for their words. 33
Quaestio Beauvoir opened her “Œil pour œil” with a profound conclusion about the war: it had irrevocably changed the French people by intensifying their feelings about justice. She declared: “Since June 1940 we have learned rage and hate. We have wished humiliation and death on our enemies…Their crimes have struck at our own hearts. It is our values, our reasons to live that are affirmed by their punishment.” 5 The Fall of France and the subsequent Occupation left the French people demanding retribution from those who had betrayed them. But who should be punished? Beauvoir’s answer was that real, “authentic” criminals were those who objectified fellow human beings through a process of torture, humiliation, and assassination. What was outrageous about these crimes, Beauvoir argued, was that they stripped a man of his humanity and effectively turned a human being into an object. 6 The only punishment suitable for such an offense was one commensurate with the crime: death. The biblical principle of an eye for an eye was certainly not an original contribution to thoughts on justice; instead, what made the concepts in “Œil pour œil” unique was Beauvoir’s assertion that punishment restored a necessary equity between human beings: the reciprocity of human consciousness—a Hegelian idea 5 Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 246. 6 Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, 248. 34
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QUAESTIO - Social Sciences Division - UCLA

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