News round-up, Wednesday, December 14, 2022.
War in Ukraine: In Romania, France deploys 'high-intensity' Leclerc tanks
France and its allies are mobilizing forces to avoid any expansion of the conflict into NATO countries.
By Cédric Pietralunga
Published on December 14, 2022 at 05h04, updated at 07h29 on December 14, 2022
Le Monde
A French Leclerc tank of the 1st Regiment of Chasseurs from Thierville-sur-Meuse (Meuse) on the Cincu military training area, during an exercise in the framework of the NATO "Eagle" mission, in Romania, December 8, 2022. THOMAS SAMSON / AFP
On the plain, the fog was struggling to dissipate when, suddenly, a loud cannonade resounded on the heights. Four French Leclerc tanks, arranged in an arc on the side of a muddy hill, alongside a herd of roaming sheep, had just fired on an enemy position 1,800 meters below. The objective of the day for these 54-ton steel monsters: To slow down the advance of the enemy forces with 120 mm shells and to protect a counter-offensive led by a handful of French, Dutch and Romanian infantrymen and armored vehicles, under the eye of an American Reaper drone.
Welcome to Cincu, the largest military training center in Romania, situated at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains at an altitude of 700 meters. It is here that France, along with its allies, is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia. Contrived after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, in order to reinforce NATO's eastern flank, the "Aigle" mission is already mobilizing nearly 1,000 French soldiers and is expected to increase by a few hundred more in the coming months. "This is our largest foreign operation since the withdrawal from Mali," said Colonel Alexandre de Féligonde, commanding officer of the 1st Chasseur Regiment (1st RCh) from Verdun, who oversees the NATO battalion in Romania.
After the first few months which were devoted to logistics and the construction of a camp in Cincu, capable of accommodating some 1,200 soldiers for a planned period of four to five years, the French troops are now getting down to the hard work of training, with almost daily maneuvers in the clay and the cold. On November 16, they were reinforced by a squadron of 13 Leclerc tanks and the armored vehicles that accompanied them, for a total of 140 combat vehicles. Not since the Kosovo war, when France intervened under a UN mandate in the late 1990s to separate Serbs and Kosovars, has the French army deployed so many tanks outside its borders.
'Power message'
According to the military, this exceptional shipment is a "message of power" addressed to Russia, while Moscow regularly threatens NATO countries with reprisals for their support to Ukraine. "Without being directly involved in this war, our country is mobilizing its forces to avoid any expansion of the conflict into the borders of NATO countries," explained the Ministry of Defense. In total, nearly 1,500 French soldiers are currently deployed in Romania, with others deployed in Estonia and Lithuania, as part of NATO's so-called assurance measures. The cost of these missions for France is estimated to be €450 million for 2022.
In any case, the deployment of Leclerc tanks to Romania seems like a redemption for their crews. For two decades, the armored regiments, nicknamed "the big guys", had become accustomed to being left out of operations abroad. Too heavy, too powerful, too expensive, the Leclercs had no place in the Sahel or the Levant, where agility and reactivity were preferred in the fight against terrorist groups, and where the desert environment was more favorable to wheeled vehicles.
With the invasion of Ukraine, the "big guys" and their caterpillar tracks are back to what they were designed for: confronting armies from the former Warsaw Pact. "The battle tank is an essential asset on the terrain we encounter in central Europe," said Lieutenant Colonel Vincent, head of operations at Cincu and a member of the 1st RCh. "We're having a blast!" agreed a young tank commander, his face streaked with mud as he returned from an exercise in "the green," the military jargon for the terrain. In Cincu, the French have 50 square kilometers in which to maneuver and carry out live fire.
Tanks are one of the key elements of the war in Ukraine, where they are paying a heavy price in the fighting. Almost every day, videos posted on social media show tanks being targeted by artillery fire or portable anti-tank missiles. There are countless images of turrets on Russian T-72 or T-80 tanks being propelled into the air by the explosion of their shells, located under the feet of their crews. According to the Oryx website, which compiles the losses of each side based on visual evidence, the Russians have lost more than 1,550 tanks since February 24, or half their active fleet, compared to just under 450 for Ukraine.
'A consumable'
These seemingly spectacular figures do not impress specialists. "Losing half of one's tanks in a war is nothing exceptional. These are normal proportions, characteristic of high intensity," said Marc Chassillan, a former weapons engineer, now a military consultant. During the Yom Kippur War, in October 1973, Israel lost 2,500 tanks in three weeks. And some 5,000 tanks were destroyed during the conflict between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988. "In a war, tanks are consumable, like any other material. We have just forgotten that," said Mr. Chassillan.
The French army has understood this and does not intend to deprive itself of such tools. "Current events confirm that 'battle tank' capability remains indispensable for the toughest engagements, as it determines the ability to fight in encounters and to regain the initiative," said General Pierre Schill, chief of staff of the French army, during a hearing at the Assemblée Nationale on October 12. "The battle tank is the most powerful machine we have. It can destroy an armored vehicle at 4 kilometers, drive up to 80 kilometers per hour, shoot while moving..." "There is nothing better in terms of speed, protection and power," said Lieutenant Colonel Vincent, of the 1st RCh.
There's just one problem: The French army has only 222 of them left, compared with 354 in 2008, at their peak. Of these, less than 200 are operational. Designed in the 1980s, the Leclercs were to be replaced by 2035 by the MGCS (Main Ground Combat System). But this Franco-German project keeps experiencing delays. To avoid being left without armor, the French general staff has decided to renovate its venerable Leclercs. Two hundred modernized units are expected by 2030, with a first delivery of 18 units in 2023. As for the end-of-life date of the Leclerc, the French government is now considering extending it to 2050.
Cédric Pietralunga
U.S. Is Said to Near Sending Most Advanced Missile System to Ukraine
U.S. is poised to send a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine, officials say.
NYT
WASHINGTON — The United States is poised to approve sending its most advanced ground-based air defense system to Ukraine, responding to the country’s urgent request to help defend against an onslaught of Russian missile and drone attacks, two U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III could approve a directive as early as this week to transfer one Patriot battery already overseas to Ukraine, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Final approval would then rest with President Biden.
White House, Pentagon and State Department officials declined to comment on details of the transfer of a Patriot battery, which, if approved, would amount to one of the most sophisticated weapons the U.S. has provided Ukraine.
Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that the United States would continue to prioritize sending air defense systems to help “our Ukrainian partners defend themselves from the brutal Russian aggression that we’ve seen for the better part of a year now.”
Many questions remain about the potential transfer, which was reported earlier by CNN, including how long it would take to train Ukrainian soldiers on the system, presumably in Germany, and where the Patriots would be deployed inside Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have intensified their pleas for air defenses from the United States and other Western allies as Russia has conducted relentless attacks on power plants, heating systems and other energy infrastructure. The attacks, using missiles and Iranian-made drones, have left Ukrainians vulnerable and in the dark just as the coldest time of the year is beginning.
Over the weekend, Russian drone strikes on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa plunged more than 1.5 million people in the region into darkness. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the strikes by Russia, part of a nationwide assault on Ukraine’s energy grid, had left the region in a “very difficult” situation, warning that it would take days, not hours, to restore power to civilians.
In a speech to the Group of 7 nations on Monday, Mr. Zelensky thanked the countries for their continued support but listed financing for weapons first among his requests.
“Unfortunately, Russia still has the advantage in artillery and missiles,” he said. He requested additional artillery, as well as modern tanks — equipment that Ukraine has repeatedly asked for, along with fighter jets and longer range missiles.
The decision to send the Patriot system would be a powerful sign of the United States’ deepening military commitment to Ukraine.
The Pentagon’s active-duty Patriot units frequently deploy for missions around the world, and experts say there are not deep stockpiles of Patriot missiles available for transfer to Ukraine in the same way that the U.S. provided a large quantity of artillery shells and rockets to Kyiv for use in combat.
— Eric Schmitt and John Ismay
Kyiv is rocked by predawn explosions.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was rocked by a series of loud explosions early Wednesday.
The blasts occurred after air raid sirens had been blaring for about 30 minutes starting about 6 a.m. Two government buildings in Kyiv and a home in the region surrounding the capital had been damaged in a drone attack, Anton Gerashchenko, a deputy interior minister, said in a statement.
Oleksiy Kuleba, the head of the Kyiv region, said the air defense system had hit several targets in the region and urged residents to remain in shelters.
Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s mayor, said 10 Iranian-made Shahed drones had been shot down in the capital and surrounding areas. He said the explosions were in the Shevchenkivskyi district.
Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine have been subject to Russian missile attacks in recent weeks that have taken out power and other infrastructure as the country heads into the coldest winter months.
As the sun rose on Wednesday, residents were covering blown-out windows with sheets and blankets to protect against the bitter cold.
Yaroslav Vinokurov, 24, was inspecting his car, which he said was destroyed by Wednesday’s blasts. The roof was shorn off a building near his home, and windows throughout his neighborhood had shattered.
The Ukrainian Air Force has warned in recent days that the Russian military was launching more drone attacks under cover of night to deplete Ukraine’s limited stock of radar-based air defense missiles. In daylight, Ukrainian soldiers are able to use large-caliber machine guns or other small arms to target drones.
Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.
— Marc Santora and Victoria Kim
EU must seize the geopolitical moment in the Balkans
Credible accession prospect is vital to keep Putin, China at bay in Southeastern Europe.
POLITICO EU
BY PAUL TAYLOR
DECEMBER 14, 2022 4:00 AM CET
Paul Taylor is a contributing editor at POLITICO
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has finally awakened the European Union to the strategic importance of the Western Balkans and the potential for Moscow to exploit unresolved disputes in the region to undermine the West.
EU leaders must now seize the geopolitical moment to revamp the integration of the six small, economically fragile countries with a total population of fewer than 18 million into the Union, or risk seeing them used by Russia and China in their power games.
Despite deep disillusionment at the snail’s pace of progress since the EU officially gave them membership prospect back in 2003, EU accession remains the best imaginable outcome for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, and for the rest of Europe.
Commission’s Borrell on European Parliament corruption probe: ‘Very, very worrisome’
By Wilhelmine Preussen
If the EU continues to keep them at arm’s length, the alternatives could be closer alignment with Russia, the emergence of an illiberal, non-aligned zone that could stretch from Hungary to Turkey, or — worse still — a downward spiral into fresh armed conflict, involving a toxic mixture of organized crime and weaponized migration.
There is a complacent assumption in some western European capitals, notably Paris and The Hague, where EU enlargement fatigue is the most intense, that the status quo is manageable and poses no serious risk to European security. To be sure, people in the Western Balkans are war-weary after the horrors of the 1990s.
The situation may seem under control, but it is not sustainable indefinitely. There is no guarantee that unresolved conflicts within Bosnia or between Serbia and Kosovo will stay frozen with minor flare-ups, or that localized political violence will not escalate, drawing in outside players and fueling new flows of refugees, arms and drugs into the EU. Recent clashes over car license plates for Kosovo Serbs show how a tiny spark can ignite dry tinder.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine has put many people on edge in the region, fueling ultra-nationalism among hardline pro-Russian Serbs, and bringing back searing memories of death and destruction among those who lived through the 1990s Yugoslav Wars.
Moscow is trying to fan pan-Slavic Orthodox nationalism and exploit divisions wherever it can. It has lent support to Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik in his threats to secede from Bosnia and has spread disinformation to amplify Kosovo Serbs’ hostility to the Pristina government.
China, for its part, has mostly pursued economic investments, using the 14+1 framework under its Belt and Road Initiative to engage with local leaders looking for ambitious infrastructure and defense projects. It follows Russia’s lead on the Western Balkans in the UN Security Council and uses its financial muscle to dissuade Balkan states from backing critical resolutions on human rights violations in Xinjiang or Hong Kong.
Serbian pro-government media relay the Russian narrative about the war in Ukraine, and Russian-owned media contribute to anti-Kosovo war hysteria. Russia and China have both contributed to Serbia’s rearmament. Moscow also has a powerful energy lever since Serbia gets 80 percent of its gas from Russia while Bosnia is 100 percent dependent. Partly as a result, Serbia has refused to align with EU sanctions against Russia, causing irritation in Brussels.
The EU has the more powerful long-term levers, if it is willing to use them, given the widespread public aspiration to join the bloc across the region, except in Serbia. However, France and the Netherlands have led resistance to further enlargement ever since mainly over fears of migration and organized crime.
Moscow lent support to Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik in his threats to secede from Bosnia | Elvis Barukcic/AFP via Getty Images)
Neighboring EU members Greece and Bulgaria long obstructed the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s candidacy for the EU and NATO to demand that it change its name and accept Sofia’s narrative about its own history and its Bulgarian minority.
Even after it agreed to change its name to North Macedonia in 2018, France vetoed the opening of negotiations with Skopje and Albania to demand a reform of the accession process to include the principle of reversibility where there is backsliding. The talks finally began this July, but North Macedonia is still required to change its constitution next year to incorporate the terms agreed with Bulgaria, a potential political bear trap since the government lacks a super-majority.
When EU leaders rushed to grant Ukraine and Moldova candidate status in June in response to Russia’s aggression, Western Balkan elites understandably feared their countries were being pushed further back in the line for membership. Likewise, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz demanded that the EU reform its decision-making system to scrap national vetoes on sanctions and taxation policy before new members are admitted, that sounded like an even longer wait.
So, what should the EU do now? First, more visible political engagement.
The EU has made a better start this year at paying attention to the long-neglected region. There have been two EU-Western Balkan summits — one in the region for the first time — plus a revival of the Berlin Process to support regional economic integration in preparation for joining the EU’s single market. Western Balkan leaders attended the inaugural summit of a new European Political Community in Prague in October, dreamt up by French President Emmanuel Macron.
This engagement must continue.
Second, bring forward accession benefits and participation.
The EU needs to reshape its cumbersome accession process to distribute more of the financial and market access benefits of membership up-front as candidates progress with reform. At present, they receive only a trickle of pre-accession assistance until they join.
The EU should invite ministers from the region to attend informal council meetings on issues of common concern. It should encourage Western Balkan countries to elect observers to the European Parliament at the same time as the 2024 European elections, so they have a voice, if not a vote, in EU lawmaking.
Of course, the brunt of the hard work needs to be done in the candidate countries, most of which are far from meeting the basic conditions of democracy, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and the fight against corruption to qualify for membership.
As always, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would Balkan politicians make painful reforms that could loosen their hold on power and money for such a distant and uncertain prospect? The EU will need to work harder from below, supporting civil society, women’s organizations, and small businesses as drivers of change, while offering incentives and applying pressure from above.
At this geopolitical moment, the EU simply can’t afford to leave the region to fester.
Generators ‘as important as armour’ to Ukraine surviving winter, says Zelenskiy
Ukraine president calls for more infrastructure aid to counter Putin’s ‘blackout and energy terror’
The Guardian
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
Tue 13 Dec 2022 16.11 GMT
Generators are as important as armour in helping Ukraine survive Vladimir Putin’s energy terror this winter, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has told an emergency conference in Paris convened to coordinate infrastructure and humanitarian aid to the country over the next four months.
A total of €1.05bn (£900m) in financial and in-kind aid was pledged but the Ukrainian president said as well as surviving the winter the country needed an additional €1.5bn to restore the long-term damage to the energy grid.
The aim of the conference is to set up an international coordination mechanism to ensure Ukraine secures the right mix of generators, transformers, equipment for the restoration of high-voltage networks, and gas turbines.
“We will do everything to counter the blackout and the energy terror. Most of our power plants are damaged or destroyed by the bombings,” Zelenskiy said in an address to the conference by video link.
“Every day our engineers have to disconnect millions of Ukrainians for these repairs. Currently there are 12 million. And every day we expect new Russian strikes. That’s why the generators have become as important as armour to protect the population.”
Energy experts say the key task for Ukraine is not to avoid black-outs but to ensure that each day all neighbourhoods are receiving at least three hours of electricity, which requires a complicated distribution of the grid.
The French-inspired conference is designed to coordinate humanitarian aid to Ukraine and is being attended by more than 40 countries and 30 multilateral bodies.
Pledged aid included generators and power transformers plus assistance with food, water, health, transport and rebuilding. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, announced funding for the purchase of 30m energy-saving lightbulbs that Ukraine had requested to reduce pressure on its power grid.
The meeting will also put in place a system to coordinate international aid for the winter so donors do not double-up. A web-based platform will enable Ukraine to list its civilian aid needs and allow donors to show what they will supply in response.
Russia has repeatedly targeted the Ukrainian power grid and other critical infrastructure in missile and drone attacks since early October as it has faced battlefield setbacks but the bombardment has not so far led to a second mass wave of refugees, according to the latest figures from the EU’s Frontex agency cited by the Warsaw University migration expert Maciej Duszczyk.
He said there had been only a slight net increase of 10,000 Ukrainians crossing the border in the past week, with 65% of them going to Poland.
“The next two months are crucial, but the exodus may be lower than in April because Ukraine’s morale about winning the war is higher,” he said. He added that although the temperature was projected to drop below freezing at night it was due to be about 5C by day, relatively mild for a Ukrainian winter.
Olena Zelenska, the president’s wife, addressed the conference in person and asked Europeans to imagine being under the Russian bombardment.
“How do you feel what this war is doing to our country and our people?” she asked. “How do you feel what more than 4,000 missiles that hit Ukrainian cities mean? What does 50,000 missiles launched in a single day against our country mean? What are 2,719 educational establishments affected or destroyed? How do you feel over 1,100 medical establishments destroyed or affected? Can you imagine half of France without electricity?”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in a speech opening the conference that Moscow’s bombardments of civilian targets was a war crime. Often accused of trying to secure a premature peace, he said the 10-point peace plan proposed by Zelenskiy at the G20 in Bali “constitutes an excellent basis on which we will build together”, and “it is up to Ukraine, the victim of this aggression, to decide on the conditions for a just and lasting peace”.
The Kremlin on Tuesday rejected Ukrainian peace proposals that would involve a withdrawal of Russian troops, saying Kyiv needed to accept new territorial realities.
“The Ukrainian side needs to take into account the realities that have developed during this time,” said the spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “And these realities indicate that new subjects have appeared in the Russian Federation. They appeared as a result of referendums that took place in these territories. Without taking these new realities into account, no kind of progress is possible.”
Ukraine and its western allies have dismissed as sham referendums the votes used by Russia as a pretext to illegally annex four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls. Moscow has rejected charges that its talk of diplomacy is an attempt to buy time to allow its depleted forces to regroup after nearly 10 months of war and a series of defeats and retreats.
The UK Foreign Office, meanwhile, announced it was sanctioning 12 Russian commanders for their role in attacks on Ukrainian cities, including Maj Gen Robert Baranov, identified by the investigative website Bellingcat as the commander of programming and targeting Russian cruise missiles.
The Foreign Office views the dozen as the most senior officers involved directly in the assault on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, and the sanctioning makes them prime targets for possible future war crimes tribunals.
The UK said it was also sanctioning four Iranians, including the co-owner and managing director of Mado, an Iranian drone engine manufacturer.
The Foreign Office, citing UK defence intelligence reports, claimed “Russian armed forces are struggling to replenish their missile reserves, while they are increasingly forced to rely on second rate drones supplied by Iran to keep up their inhumane bombardments of the Ukrainian people”.
James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, said: “The Iranian regime is increasingly isolated in the face of deafening calls for change from its own people and is striking sordid deals with Putin in a desperate attempt to survive.”
The war according to Sartre
A review of The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, November 1939-March 1940 by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty-four years old when Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. By that time, he had already published important philosophical works, including The Transcendence of the Ego, and was beginning to develop a reputation for his fiction: La Nausée, which many consider his finest novel, had been published by the previous year, followed by Le Mur and a collection of critical essays. Having done his military service a decade before in the meteorological corps, Sartre suddenly found himself torn away from his self-possessed life as a teacher and writer and was engaged once again as an army weatherman. “I was quite comfortably ensconced in my situation as an individualist, anti-bourgeois writer,” he recalled later in “Self-Portrait at Seventy.”
What exploded all that was the fact that one fine day in September 1939 I received a call-up paper and was obliged to go off to the barracks at Nancy to meet fellows I didn’t know who’d been called up like me. That’s what introduced the social into my life . . .. Up till then I believed myself sovereign; I had to encounter the negation of my own freedom— through being mobilized—in order to become aware of the weight of the world . . ..
But as his first response to life was always to write about it, Sartre did not abandon literary activities in his new situation; the world had not become that weighty. Immediately after he was called up, he conceived the idea of keeping a journal. “Reflecting upon the world of war and its nature,” he wrote to Simone de Beauvoir, “I hatched the project of writing a journal. Please include in your parcel a stout black notebook —thick but not too tall or wide, cross-ruled of course.”
In fact, Sartre discovered that his new routine afforded him even more time to write than he had had in civilian life. The change of scene and the portentous atmosphere of the times seemed to act as a tonic to his imagination. Stationed just behind the front in a succession of small towns near Strasbourg, Sartre had the sense of being close to great happenings but endured very few actual distractions. His duties, which consisted mostly of taking weather readings, were neither taxing nor time-consuming, and he was usually left to his own devices.
In fact, Sartre discovered that his new routine afforded him even more time to write than he had had in civilian life.
Still, however propitious the situation, Sartre’s productivity in the five months that he was writing these notebooks was staggering. To begin with, he managed to fill fourteen notebooks and begin a fifteenth. Of these, it appears that only the five that are translated here—numbers iii, v, xi, xii, and xiv—have survived. Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, the philosopher’s mistress in the late Fifties and later his adopted daughter and heir, hints in her foreword that other volumes may exist but have yet to resurface. In any case, in addition to the fourteen notebooks —the equivalent of over a thousand printed pages—he wrote hundreds of letters, most of his novel, The Age of Reason, and tinkered with several other literary projects. In his translator’s introduction to The War Diaries, Quentin Hoare estimates that Sartre wrote a total of some one million words during this period.
Simply to have written a million words in five months is a remarkable feat; and it is all the more so in light of the generally high quality of Sartre’s writing here and the complexity of the ideas with which he was dealing. The whole episode reminds us that sheer abundant energy is one of the marks of genius. Admonished by a colleague that he was working too hard, spending sixteen hours a day reading and writing, Sartre confesses to his notebook that he is flattered by the thought but scrupulously calculates that his true average was considerably less—a mere ten or eleven hours a day. And unlike his infamous spasm of productivity in 1958, when he almost killed himself writing Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre’s accomplishments in 1939-40 would seem to have been unaided by ever-increasing doses of amphetamines.
As the original title of this book indicates (Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939-Mars 1940), what we have here are not really “war diaries” but notebooks of the “phoney war,” that strange interregnum after France declared war on Germany in which French and German troops sat ensconced in their respective positions along the Alsatian border, eyeing each other with hostility but not fighting. Sartre never saw combat, and while his notebooks occasionally discuss the phenomenon of war, his reflections on the subject tend to be saturated with the kind of abstract, Hegelian logic that dissolves the exigencies of lived experience into a battle of purely conceptual antagonists. “War, when all’s said and done,” Sartre mused in one typical passage, “is a concrete idea that contains within itself its own destruction and that accomplishes this by an equally concrete dialectic . . . . The essence of war will be realized concretely the day war becomes impossible.” How consoling would be the thought that war becomes what it really is only when it becomes impossible—if only the unfolding of its “concrete dialectic” weren’t such a messy affair.
One instance of such messiness occurred in May, 1940, when the Germans abruptly put an end to the phoney war; they outflanked the “impregnable” Maginot Line and, in a matter of weeks, had occupied France. Sartre, incidentally, was taken prisoner in June as his company retreated before the German onslaught. He used his time in captivity to study Heidegger and to compose a good portion of what would become his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). He was released the following year and returned to Paris, where he continued writing and was involved— tangentially, it seems—in the Resistance.
Mr. Hoare enthusiastically introduces these notebooks as a “masterpiece”—“without question . . . a marvellously successful work.” But despite their great historical interest and the many memorable passages they contain, I’m afraid that a reading of the notebooks forces us to conclude that there is indeed some question about their success as a “work.” For the whole is simply too desultory, sketchy, and uneven to merit Mr. Hoare’s praise. Yet they surely are an extraordinary set of documents. And it is worth noting, too, that Sartre always assumed that they would be published one day. “I am giving myself short shrift in my little black notebook,” he wrote to Simone de Beauvoir. “Whoever reads it after my death—for you will publish it only posthumously—will think I was a dreadful character, unless you accompany it with explanatory annotations of a kindly sort.” De Beauvoir did not, alas, provide the requisite annotations—fascinating though they would have been—but a glance through the present volume enables one to appreciate the point of Sartre’s veiled request.
Ostensibly the testimony of an “average” soldier caught up in the moment, these notebooks are in fact no more average than was Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Though they include something of an abridged chronicle of Sartre’s life at this time—his observations on daily events, relations with his new-found army colleagues, his sundry amours—their chief interest is as a diary of his prodigious intellectual obsessions and the motivating sensibility that occasioned them.
In this respect, they offer us a glimpse into the mental workshop of one of the most fertile and influential philosophical minds of the century as it labored at the threshold of intellectual maturity. We see Sartre discovering, elaborating, reformulating themes that we have come to identify as distinctively Sartrean. Anyone familiar with the basic tenets of his particularly austere brand of existentialism will at once recognize that these notebooks exhibit the entire range of its defining preoccupations: the agonized struggle for authenticity, the insistence on absolute freedom and responsibility, rejection of any transcendent measure for values or morals, minute analyses of one’s relations with other people, an ill-defined but powerful anti-conventional, anti-bourgeois stance (“You’re all bourgeois,” Sartre snaps at his colleagues near the beginning of the volume, “I wouldn’t put myself out for bourgeois people”)—in short, as Mr. Hoare rightly observes, they “both prefigure and map out the virtual entirety of the author’s subsequent oeuvre.”
Especially noteworthy from a philosophical point of view are the many passages that rehearse material that would come to occupy a central place in the argument of Being and Nothingness. For example, the notebooks contain lengthy and often quite technical discussions of the concept of Nothingness, the nature of the will, the problem of authenticity, the structure of consciousness, and other equally specialized matters. Some of these discussions recur almost verbatim in Being and Nothingness; often, though, we follow as Sartre gropes his way to a preliminary understanding and expression of his ideas. Given the level of abstraction at which Being and Nothingness proceeds, such drafts are welcome interpretive aids: their very hesitations and digressions often help to elucidate Sartre’s more finished—and more intricate—argument in Being and Nothingness.1
Also of philosophical interest is Sartre’s account of his debt to Husserl and Heidegger. Sartre had studied Husserl when he was in Berlin in 1931-33, and philosophically he is in many ways closer to Husserl’s phenomenology, with its obvious roots in the Cartesian tradition, than he is to Heidegger. But temperamentally, as it were, Sartre has much more in common with Heidegger, who can probably be regarded as his major philosophical inspiration. He did not read Heidegger’s major work, Being and Time, until a German soldier provided him with a copy when he was a prisoner of war. But by September, 1939, he was acquainted with What is Metaphysics? and other of Heidegger’s works, and the existential twist that characterizes Heidegger’s philosophy had already begun to exert a deep influence on his thinking.
In addition to indulging in such philosophical reflections, Sartre uses his notebooks to keep a running dialogue with his reading, quoting from and reflecting copiously on whatever he happens to be engaged with at the moment. Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Kierkegaard, Stendhal, Flaubert, Koestler, and Emil Ludwig’s biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II figure prominently in these pages, as do a host of lesser characters. Gide and Stendhal already emerge as among Sartre’s heroes, but Flaubert is severely criticized for inexact writing and stylistic poverty. “How clumsy and disagreeable it is,” Sartre writes of L’Education sentimentale. “How silly that constant hesitation between stylization and realism in the dialogues and portrayals.” He then devotes several pages to a detailed criticism of what he considers Flaubert’s ineffective and cliché-ridden use of verbs.
Sartre regarded this period of his life as a time of transition—at one point he compares himself to a snake that has sloughed off its old skin—and his notebooks abound in the kind of autobiographical recollections and self-analyses that such moments are wont to elicit. (Autobiography, of course, became a speciality of Sartre’s: The Words, his much admired exercise in the genre, won him the Nobel Prize in 1964—which, characteristically, he refused.) We learn, for example, that from an early age Sartre was convinced he would become a great writer, dowered with a “great writer’s life, as it appears from books.” And “as for the content of that life,” he writes,
it can be easily imagined: there were solitude and despair, passions, great undertakings, a long period of painful obscurity (though I slyly shortened it in my dreams, in order not to be too old when it ended), and then glory, with its retinue of admiration and love . . . . In a word, I’d have liked to be sure of becoming a great man later on, so as to be able to live my youth as a great man’s youth . . . . [T]hough I couldn’t be sure, I behaved as if I must become one—and was extremely conscious of being the young Sartre, in the same way that people speak of the young Berlioz or the young Goethe.
Various memoirs, especially those written by his friends, are at pains to declare Sartre’s modesty and unpretentiousness; no doubt he was possessed of these virtues, though it clearly cannot be said that he lacked self-confidence.
Sartre’s political enthusiasms, which later bulked so large in his work and personality, show themselves in these notebooks only obliquely. He cites a contemporary critic, one Emile Bouvier, who was dubious about the likelihood of Sartre’s becoming “a great novelist.” “It is to be feared,” Bouvier wrote, “lest . . . he may leave literature for philosophy, mysticism or social preaching.” Sartre responded that he was “flabbergasted” by Bouvier’s remark: “I’d never have believed that anyone would consign me to mysticism like that. And as for social preaching, M. Bouvier can set his mind at ease.”
Sartre was of course correct about mysticism; but as for philosophy and social preaching—well, here Bouvier would seem to have been closer to the mark. Concerning the latter, for example, one thinks of Sartre’s vigorous—indeed, preachy—denunciations of the United States after the war, his support of Soviet Russia during the last years of Stalin’s reign, or the steady stream of political manifestos, pamphlets, and pronouncer ments that he issued in the Sixties and Seventies. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of Sartre’s last years is replete with instances of his efforts in this direction. Typical is a quotation she took from a preface Sartre wrote in 1972 for a book about Maoism in France: “With their anti-authoritarian praxis the Maoists show themselves as the only revolutionary force capable of adapting itself to the new forms of class war in the period of organized capitalism.” Such passages are depressing not least because they reveal Sartre descending to the level of a callow street-corner polemicist.
The subject of Sartre’s politics is a complicated one, fraught with heated verbiage and ideological posturing. Any sustained consideration of his views must feature Critique of Dialectical Reason, in which Sartre took issue with the extreme individualism of Being and Nothingness and his other earlier works. But what always seemed to matter above all to Sartre was maintaining his position as spokesman for whatever group was recognized as being to the left of the entrenched, institutionalized power structure, whether it be democratic, socialist, or Communist. This is an aspect of his social thought that did not change with Critique of Dialectical Reason. And in the end, it is difficult to disagree with Leszek Kolakowski’s observation, in Main Currents of Marxism, that Sartre’s “whole political activity was vitiated by a fear of being in the typical situation of an intellectual condemning events that he has no power to influence; in short, his ideology was that of a politician manqué, cherishing unfulfilled ambitions to be on the ‘inside.’”
The subject of Sartre’s politics is a complicated one, fraught with heated verbiage and ideological posturing.
Perhaps the most telling contribution to our understanding of Sartre that these notebooks make is in the spectacle they provide of him transforming the fabric of his everyday life into material for philosophical reflection. For Sartre, life was essentially an agenda for reflection. No feeling, no sensitivity, no impression is left unencumbered by interpretation; no interpretation is left undisciplined by further scrutiny. Not even the humble struggle against corpulence is exempt from elaborate speculative embroidery. “Every four or five months,” Sartre writes, “I look at my stomach and get unhappy.” Yet having then resolved to abstain from bread and wine, he finds himself tempted by a carafe of wine one day at lunch:
But, precisely, if Nothingness is introduced into the world through man, anguish at Nothingness is simply anguish at freedom, or if you prefer, freedom’s anguish at itself. If, for example, I experienced a slight anguish yesterday before the wine which I could but should not drink, it’s because the “I shouldn’t” was already in the past . . . and nothing could prevent me from drinking. It was before that particular nothing I was so anguished; that nothingness of my past’s means of acting on my present. . . . [N]oohing allows me to foresee what I shall do and, even if I were able to foresee it, nothing could prevent me from doing it. So anguish is indeed the experience of Nothingness, hence it isn’t a psychological phenomenon. It’s an existential structure of human reality, it’s simply freedom becoming conscious of itself as being its own nothingness.
Sartre’s notebooks are full of such meditations. Taken together, they reveal a mind that does not so much practice philosophy as exude it; anything and everything, the whole range of his experience, is immediately taken up and digested by reflection. The smallest detail of his or his colleagues’ behavior, the most trivial news report: for Sartre they are “understood” only when translated out of their native element and subjected to systematic philosophical probing. In one revealing passage, Sartre wrote that “The truth is, I treat my feelings as ideas: with an idea, one pushes it till it cracks—or finally becomes ‘what it really was.’”
Sartre’s tremendous appetite for abstraction and his suspicion of the life of feeling is particularly evident in his uncompromising, absolutist approach to the cardinal existentialist virtues of authenticity and freedom. In Being and Nothingness, for example, Sartre defines freedom as a spontaneous “upsurge” that is “beyond causes, motives, ends.” Sartre’s discussion of freedom, both in the notebooks and in Being and Nothingness, is elusive to say the least; but it is worth noting that without “causes, motives, or ends” the idea of freedom must remain empty. For if it is to be more than mere accident or spontaneity, if it is not to be arbitrary, then freedom must be limited by particular choices that are based on intelligible criteria—criteria that are in some sense given, not (as Sartre would have it) “freely produced.” In default of such criteria, freedom can be little more than an invigorating slogan. Nevertheless, while he values it above all else, freedom for Sartre is more man’s fate and burden than choice; ineradicable, it is yet too absolute to be fully grasped or realized; hence one is not so much privileged as “condemned to be free.”
And while anything like a definition of authenticity is hard to come by in Sartre’s work, it is clear that (at least through Being and Nothingness) he understood it to be characterized chiefly by the individual’s defiant assertion of unqualified freedom in the face of an essentially absurd reality. And since unqualified freedom entails unqualified responsibility, authenticity, as Sartre insisted in the notebooks, meant being “totally responsible for one’s life.” “In short,” he wrote, “I was seeking the absolute, I wanted to be an absolute, and that’s what I called morality.”
Of course the problem is that the absolute, by nature completely abstract, is too empty to serve as a criterion for morals or a cue for authenticity. But as a rhetorical trope, allegiance to the absolute can exert a powerful appeal. And Sartre’s understanding of authenticity, tinged as it is with such Romantic longing, exploits that appeal to the hilt: “In relation to Gauguin, Van Gogh and Rimbaud,” he noted in an early notebook entry, “I have a distinct inferiority complex because they managed to destroy themselves . . . . I am more and more convinced that, in order to achieve authenticity, something has to snap.”
It follows that, in Sartre’s view, authenticity flourishes best in extreme situations. After a brief leave in Paris, for example, he remarked that “it’s much easier to live decently and authentically in wartime than in peacetime.” But like so much in Sartre’s notebooks—indeed, like so much in his work generally—this statement is at once arresting yet open to serious question. What gives it an air of plausibility is the truth that exceptional situations can call forth exceptional virtues. Plunged into crisis, men and women often experience moments of moral clarity that are rare in everyday life. And they sometimes respond to such situations with uncommon selflessness and valor.
But does this mean that it is easier to live “decently and authentically” during war than in peace? On the contrary, hasn’t war time and again been the occasion of profound moral degradation and anarchy? The notion that it is somehow easier to live “authentically” in war than in the “bourgeois” stability of peace will suggest itself seriously only to someone who discounts the importance of ordinary social life in forming our ideas of authenticity, someone for whom “the authentic” is paradigmatically a lonely battle of an aloof and isolated self. “I rather think I was authentic before my leave,” Sartre wrote. “Probably,” he explained, “because I was alone.”
Just how aloof and isolated Sartre conceives the self to be is exemplified in his contention that “the first value and first object of will is: to be its own foundation.” Or, as he put it—somewhat more bluntly—in Being and Nothingness, “the best way to conceive the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.” This is not of course to suggest that Sartre believes that God exists. On the contrary, he tells us in the notebooks that he has been an atheist since the age of twelve. And he proceeds, in a later passage, to describe God as an “impossible synthesis of in-itself and for-itself, of total opacity and total freedom, the causa sui . . .” (my emphasis). Yet according to Sartre, the idea of God, though self-contradictory, functions as the ineluctable (if usually unacknowledged) ideal to which we all aspire. Mankind, he writes in Being and Nothingness, is “perpetually haunted by a totality . . . without being able to be it.”
The thought that man’s “fundamental project” is to be his own foundation—that is, to be God—stands at the center of Sartre’s philosophy. And this is also to say that Sartre’s philosophy is saturated with what the tradition called pride. “For what is pride,” asked Augustine, “except a perverse kind of exaltation? For it is a perverse kind of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to become, as it were, based on itself.” It underlies, for example, the famous—and deeply Schopenhauerean—conclusion to the main text of Being and Nothingness, that “man is a useless passion”—“useless” because his every action is haunted by a desire that for a mortal, finite creature is essentially self-contradictory: the desire to be completely sovereign, autonomous, self-sufficient, the desire to be God. And it provides the philosophical conviction that justifies Sartre’s constitutional uneasiness with anything that threatens to compromise his sense of mastery and control. “I am nothing but pride and lucidity,” he confesses at one point in the notebooks; and whatever impinges on that pride or obscures that lucidity will be a source of anguish.
The situation that Sartre outlines takes on tragic dimensions when one realizes that the catalogue of threats to man’s pride basically includes the whole of existence: anything organic, mutable, uncertain, anything real that exists independently of man’s will and thought is immediately suspect. “The essential thing,” Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin explains in Nausea, “is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity.” Hence the “horrible ecstasy” that Roquentin experiences in the face of the roots of a chestnut tree:
The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather . . . . I realized that there was no halfway house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a yielding . . . .
Like Sartre himself, Roquentin finds the organic world—unwieldy and subject as it is to change and decay—a frightening and vertiginous affront to pride. What Roquentin craves is a pristine, necessary world of pure abstraction, a world where everything is subject to the dictates of thought; his “circles and bars of music,” rather like the stable inherent “beauty of figures” of “something straight or round” that Plato praises in the Philebus, answer to this desire: completely comprehensible, they do not challenge his demand for mastery and control.
Even language is a source of anguish. Roquentin dreams of a language that can “catch the secret smiles of things seen absolutely without men,” that can articulate “a discreet, tenacious meaning—very precise, but escaping from the words for ever.” But this means that he seeks a language without words, a language that would be fully commensurate with what it describes, a language beyond any merely human language, which never captures things just as they are; what he seeks, in short, is the language of God.
Plunged into crisis, men and women often experience moments of moral clarity that are rare in everyday life.
Sartre’s understanding of man’s fundamental project also has profound implications for his view of relations with other people. If one desires to be God, then the very existence of others will be felt as a threatening infringement of one’s sovereignty. Because man’s pride demands complete self-sufficiency, relations with other people are from the beginning cast into the essentially antagonistic mold of power relations, the mold of a Hobbesian “bellum omnium contra omnes.” It follows that, as Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, “conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.” Indeed, from this point of view, as Garcin exclaimed near the end of No Exit, “L’Enfer, c’set les Autres”: (Hell is other people.) Not without reason is this line so widely identified with the Sartrean philosophy. Sartre’s basic view of “Concrete Relations with Others,” as he put it in the title of one of the most influential chapters of Being and Nothingness, is evident in his rhetoric. He speaks throughout his work—even in the more or less private pages of his notebooks—not of “other people” or “human relations” but always of “the Other,” as if this strangely impersonal, dehumanizing locution named our most common experiences of other people.
Not surprisingly, sexuality, which continually reminds man of his lack of self-sufficiency and fundamental neediness, is especially problematic for Sartre. It offers an unparalleled field for the exercise of power but at the same time it constitutes a tremendous threat to autonomy. Hence Sartre’s notorious description of female sexuality in Being and Nothingness:
The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open.” It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution . . .. Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis—a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration.
Similar passages abound in the notebooks: “. . . the hole is often resistance. It must be forced, in order to pass through. Thereby it is already feminine. It is resistance by Nothingness, in other words modesty. This is obviously why it attracts sexuality (will to power, rape, etc.).” “Obviously”? Sartre offers these observations as rigorous descriptions of “one of the most fundamental tendencies of human reality—the tendency to fill.” But are they really anything more than symptoms of Sartre’s own psychopathology, based in the end on his obsession with autonomy and dressed up in the language of philosophy? Whatever insight into sexuality and human relations such meditations may provide, they surely give weight to Iris Murdoch’s description of Sartre as “a connoisseur of the abnormal.”
Sartre’s existentialist rhetoric bristles with condemnations of “reification” and treating people as objects—as “means” rather than “ends.” But as these notebooks abundantly reveal, both his temperament and underlying view of man incline him to do just that. “Nothing is dearer to me than the freedom of those I love,” Sartre writes in a passage in which he discusses seduction, “but the fact is this freedom is dear to me provided I don’t respect it at all. It’s a question not of suppressing it, but of actually violating it . . . . that’s what the desire to be loved means: to hit the Other in the Other’s absolute freedom.” He goes on to note the “impossibility ... of conceiving a happy love after the seduction. Once the woman had been conquered, I no longer had any idea what to do with her.” Sartre admits that this view of love is “utterly inauthentic,” but at the same time he insists that it is “the commonest and strongest form of love” and he fails, either in the notebooks or in Being and Nothingness, to provide a convincing description of what a more “authentic” version of love would look like.
Indeed, without the erotic charge that allows for seduction, Sartre finds that he is basically uninterested in people. Friendship “bores” him, he tells us, and his relations with men tend to be tenuous and superficial. “In short, there’s one half of humanity that hardly exists for me.” The ideal of self-sufficiency renders the pleasures of ordinary friendship superfluous. “I think I have no need of friends,” Sartre writes, “because, basically, I don’t need anybody . . .. I prefer to derive everything from myself.”
It is, I think, fair to describe Sartre’s view of human relations as somber. But interestingly, Sartre himself would have rejected the characterization. “Seriousness,” in fact, was his great enemy. Thus in the concluding pages of Being and Nothingness, in a section entitled “Existentialist Ethics,” Sartre attacks “the spirit of seriousness,” primarily because it compromises freedom by affirming values that are in some sense “transcendent”—that is, given independently of human subjectivity. And near the end of the notebooks Sartre reflects that he has “never wanted to live seriously. I’ve been able to put on a show-to know pathos, and anguish, and joy. But never, never have I known seriousness. My whole life has been just a game: sometimes long and tedious, sometimes in bad taste— but a game. And this war is just a game for me.” Sartre defines “game” as “the happy metamorphosis of the contingent into the gratuitous,” and alludes for support to Schiller’s celebrated contention that “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.” But it is important to note that Sartre ignores the caveat with which Schiller immediately precedes this passage: “Man shall only play with Beauty, and he shall play only with Beauty.” Though man is “serious with the agreeable, the good, the perfect,” writes Schiller, “with Beauty he plays.” Schiller’s task here is not to subvert “seriousness” tout court, but to insure that the realm of beauty and aesthetics remains free from the intrusion of moralistic imperatives. Sartre, however, refuses such distinctions. Instead, he embraces a deep, self-centered aestheticism that would regard the whole of existence—even his lovers, even war—as an untoward eruption of contingency that can be disarmed only by being mastered and transformed into a game of his own device.