Paul Nizan (1905-40), essayist and novelist, has become the stuff of a legend that can be made to serve dubious causes. A committed Communist, he left the Party after the notorious Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to become the victim of calumnies spread by his erstwhile comrades. Cut down in his prime during the fall of France in 1940, he was rescued from oblivion twenty years later. His resurrection in i960 and his apotheosis in 1968 are being sustained now by a constant stream of literary and political studies. Can the mood last? Probably it can, so long as there are people who think violent revolution is a good thing.
Familiarly known as Jean-Paul Sartre’s schoolboy friend and brilliant fellow student at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, Nizan owes the revival of his reputation to the self-flagellating author of Les Mots. It was Sartre who, while on a visit to Castro’s Cuba in i960, completed his resounding preface to Nizan’s angry anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist pamphlet, Aden Arabie (first published nearly thirty years earlier, in 1931), and set the ball rolling. A reviewer in 1960 echoed Sartre by hearing in Nizan’s words “the voice of our youth. Over our bent heads, Nizan speaks to the young people of today.” In his preface Sartre himself was addressing the disaffected younger generation, seeking to capture their waning attention through his portrait of his dead friend as an angry young man passionately in revolt against a dastardly bourgeois society.
Nizan and Sartre
