Sartre's second century

CHAPTER NINE
A SURREPTITIOUS ROMANTIC?
READING SARTRE WITH VICTOR HUGO
BRADLEY STEPHENS
"A seismographic and prophetic Sartre, the man of the century, organ
blasts a la Hugo, podiums, voice of the oriflamme and grand
commitments." 1 Bernard-Henri Levy's picture of Sartre in relation to
Victor Hugo flags a connection between these two cultural icons that is
widely acknowledged. The two become automatically linked as
practitioners of the traditional moral-political stance of French engagement
(commitment). Sartre indeed is held to be the most recent—maybe even
the last—member of a prestigious lineage comprising Voltaire, Hugo and
Zola. They are the tireless men of letters, the ecrivains engages, those
French writers who committed themselves to the Revolution's principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Hugo and Sartre, in particular, have
come to be seen as the foremost representatives of this tradition in their
respective times, with each of their energetic lives almost perfectly
spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centuries which came to
be known as theirs. 2
The historical similarities between the two are stark. Born in 1802,
Hugo would strike a chord with his time by demanding that art free not
only content, but also form, from the regimen of Classicism. Campaigning
for French Romanticism, he privileged the boundless human imagination
rather than a reasoned intellect. Only then could the artist truly become a
part of the century's quest for democracy, liberating both his world and his
work from constraint. Preferring exile to empire, he was the conscience of
a nation, ensuring that Emperor Louis-Napoleon would forever be known
as "Napoleon le Petit". He defied social convention, amassing one wife,
1 L6vy, Sartre, 32.
2 An earlier draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the Centenary Conference
of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Fran^ais, London, in March 2005.