11/26/2020 I Hate You, My Lovely France! | Issue 118 | Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/118/I_Hate_You_My_Lovely_France 1/3 Sétif, site of a massacre by the French in May 1945 Philosophy Now – Issue 118 https://philosophynow.org/issues/118/I_Hate_You_My_Lovely_France I Hate You, My Lovely France! Hamid Andishan tells us how Sartre, a philosopher of freedom, had problems with the politics of the land of liberté, and how this affected his view of human rights. Have you ever heard of someone loving and hating something at the same time? It can lead to madness, or at least, to profound anguish. The situation becomes worse if that thing is one’s motherland. Jean-Paul Sartre was in such a situation. He was a French philosopher against France. Philosophical offspring of René Descartes and admirer of Honoré de Balzac, he fought for France in WWII, and was a prisoner of war in Germany; but after the war he turned into a bitter critic of French policy. Why? Sartre had witnessed how France – the land of liberty, equality and fraternity – had acted as a colonial predator in Algeria, Cameroon, and Indochina. In the first editorial of his journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945, Sartre and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that members of the French Resistance who had fought to liberate France during WWII, and who were now in Indochina, were like the German soldiers fighting for fascism. Paris was to him the symbol of freedom against the machinery of fascism (see The Liberation of Paris, 1945), but barely a week after Hitler’s death, the same city of romance and freedom sent troops to commit a bloody massacre in the Algerian market town of Sétif, slaughtering thousands of Algerians. In the years that followed, civilized France continued to brutally repress the growing anti-colonialist movement, frequently sentencing people to death in military courts. This led Sartre to declare, “we are all murderers” in an article of that title published in Les Temps Modernes, No.145, 1958: “In November 1956 Fernand Yveton, a member of the Combattants de la Libération [a guerrilla group established by the Algerian Communist Party] planted a bomb at the Hamma power station, an attempted sabotage which can in no way equate with a terrorist action. Analysis proved that it was a time bomb precisely set so that the explosion could not occur before the personnel had left. To no avail: Yveton was arrested, sentenced to death, a reprieve was refused, he was executed. Not the slightest hesitation: this man declared and proved that he did not wish to kill anyone, but we wanted to kill him, and we did so without wavering.” According to Sartre, France was no longer a champion of freedom; on the contrary, it was against freedom. France was playing a double game, trying to take a leading role in the human rights discourse and at the same time repressing native people in its colonized territories. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre says that France should rid itself of France. That is, the ideal free France should separate itself from the colonial France. René Cassin, a French law professor, was the French representative on the committee drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and worked to revise its first draft in the years after the war. A wave of nausea would have engulfed Sartre if he had seen that draft, for it declared that human rights presuppose a high degree