“Republic of Silence,” by Jean-Paul Sartre
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights,
beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in
silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported
EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the
revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of
all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate
thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues,
every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every
one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they
often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and
impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which
we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our
concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior
dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our
reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase:
“Man is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic
choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed
in these terms: “Rather death than…” And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were
real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four
years, answered NO. But the very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this
condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace. All
those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew
any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be
able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to
the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not
his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his own liberty, his capacity for
resisting torture and death.
To those who were engaged in underground activities, the conditions of their struggle afforded a
new kind of experience. They did not fight openly like soldiers. In all circumstances they were
alone. They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude. It was completely forlorn and
unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers,
clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an
untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in
the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their
solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the
Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty? This
being stripped of all, this solitude, this tremendous danger, were the same for all. For the leaders
and for their men, for those who conveyed messages without knowing what their content was, as
for those who directed the entire Resistance, the punishment was the same – imprisonment,
deportation, death. There is no army in the world where there is such equality of risk for the
private and for the commander-in-chief. And this is why the Resistance was a true democracy: for
the soldier as for the commander, the same danger, the same forsakenness, the same total
responsibility, the same absolute liberty within discipline. Thus, in darkness and in blood, a
Republic was established, the strongest of Republics. Each of its citizens knew that he owed
himself to all and that he could count only on himself alone. Each of them, in complete isolation,
fulfilled his responsibility and his role in history. Each of them, standing against the oppressors,
undertook to be himself, freely and irrevocably. And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose
the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was
something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism. No one
failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be
set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.
ENDS
