Responsibility and freedom: the foundations of Sartre’s concept of intellectual engagement Gisèle Sapiro Abstract Sartre’s concept of responsibility is closely linked to his philosophy of freedom. It is the basis for a practical morality: that of engagement, and has a specific application for his theory of the responsibility of the writer and hence of politically committed literature. This article analyses this concept of responsibility and its sources, both intellectual and biographical, from a socio- historical point of view, which sheds a new light on the Sartrean theory of the engagement of the intellectual. Using Paul Fauconnet’s distinction, it first examines the tension between objective and subjective responsibility in L’Être et le néant. It then shows how the experience of war and the purge trials after the Liberation contributed to its elaboration and its embodiment in Sartre’s theory of committed literature. Keywords: responsibility; philosophy of freedom; committed literature; intellectuals; purge trials Sartre’s concept of responsibility is closely linked to his philosophy of freedom. It is the basis of a practical morality, that of engagement, and has a specific application to his theory of the responsibility of the writer and hence of politically committed literature, which has been studied in depth from both biographical and sociological standpoints (Boschetti 1985; Cohen-Solal 1985; Aronson 1992). A detailed examination, from a socio-historical point of view, of this concept of responsibility and of its sources, both intellectual and biographical, sheds new light on the Sartrean theory of the engagement of the intellectual. In his classic study of the question, the Durkheimian sociologist Paul Fauconnet (1920) analyses responsibility as a social fact, and more specifically a moral fact, irreducible to the notion of causality upon which philosophical theories have tried to base it. Inverting this tendency to deduce responsibility from causality, Fauconnet explains that responsibility is created by a threat to sacred moral values: at first it pertains to the whole of society and only later is it fixed upon one or more responsible individuals designated as such according to a set of rules and judgements of responsibility specific to each society. The definition of responsibility that he proposes Journal of Romance Studies Volume 6 Numbers 1 & 2 2006 ISSN 1473–3536