World War II engulfed Europe beginning in 1939. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and embarked on an aggressive military campaign as early as 1936. He began annexing European states by 1938. France declared war on Germany in 1939, and Hitler invaded and conquered France by 1940. The war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, and Paris was finally liberated.
Daily life was difficult in France during World War II. A large part of France was occupied by Nazi Germany, including Paris, where Sartre lived. Because France was an occupied country, life, in many ways, was at a standstill. In Sartre’s hell, too, life was very static. France’s occupation also led to shortages of everything, including heat and electricity. Sartre makes an ironic comment on this situation by having an overabundance of heat and light available in hell. German censors controlled the plays performed in the theater and the movies shown in the cinema.
During the occupation, France was ruled by the Vichy government. It was ostensibly semi-independent but still under Nazi control. French people who worked with the Nazis were called Collaborators. The prewar pacifists Garcin talks about were often considered Collaborators. Many French citizens fought the Nazi control by participating in the Resistance. The Resistance was an underground
1944: In occupied France, German censors must approve plays before they are allowed to be performed.
Today: A controversial rating system has been put in place on television programming in the United States. The labels are primarily for parents, to inform them of content that may not be appropriate for children.
1944: Many plays and movies are concerned with World War II and its effects on society, either explicitly or implicitly.
Today: World War II continues to be a popular theme in television, movies, and literature. One of the biggest box office successes in the United States in 1998 is Saving Private Ryan, which reenacts the D-Day invasion at Normandy, France.
1944: The philosophy of existentialism develops in France, which has been devastated by two world wars, as a way of dealing with the nature of good and evil and one’s responsibility in life and as an explanation of the nature of being in general.
Today: Existentialism continues to be influential in literature and the arts, mainly as its ideas have been co-opted by more recent movements, such as the Beats, who believe that one is responsible only to oneself.
Movement that began soon after the Nazis took over Paris. Charles de Gaulle, a government official in the French government before the occupation, organized a French government in exile in Great Britain. In 1940, he called for French citizens to resist the Germans via a radio broadcast. Though only a few people in France heard him speak, a Resistance was formed.
The Resistance was not formally organized, but it took on many forms. It worked to block delivery of supplies and men to Germany. French citizens were conscripted by the Germans when they needed people to work in factories and the like. Many such draftees took to the hills in France and worked against the Germans. Other French citizens passed military intelligence to Great Britain and other Allies, helped British pilots who were shot down by the Germans escape, and wrote and distributed anti-German pamphlets. Sartre was active in the Resistance. At the end of World War II, it was thought that the Resistance contributed to the liberation of Paris.
The wartime atmosphere also created a change in the intellectual climate. The reality of war forced intellectuals to make political choices. This was reflected in the literature of the day. A poetry of the Resistance was developed with a direct language, and Paul Valery was regarded as the best of these. Sartre was influential in the literary scene, and his philosophy of existentialism became the theory of the Resistance. Existentialists believed in the liberty of humankind and that everyone is endowed with a certain responsibility for their lives. No Exit, an existentialist play, is regarded as a symbol of the liberation of Paris.
When No Exit was first produced in Paris in 1944, the critical response was mixed, due in part to the political climate of the time. Much of France was occupied by Germany. Sartre was identified with the Resistance, the French underground movement that sought to overthrow the German occupation. No Exit was regarded by many as subversive, full of in-jokes and subtle wartime criticism. Critics might have been afraid to openly praise such a play for fear
Of repercussions, though No Exit was produced by permission of German censors. Those critics who favored the Germans or collaborated with them would not have wanted to praise something this controversial. Several critics, including Andrè Castelot, called for censoring the play.
Numerous French critics, regardless of their political views, agreed that the core idea of the play was brilliant. But there was controversy among critics and audiences alike over the brutality of the crimes committed by the characters as well as the character of Inez herself. Openly lesbian characters were unusual at the time.
No Exit was first produced in the United States on Broadway in December, 1946. American critics and audiences shared some of the French concerns over the characters, but many did not know what to make of the play as a whole. Wolcott Gibb, writing in The New Yorker, attributed the play’s success in Europe (the play was also a hit in London) to the Europeans’ “temperament.” Gibb dismissed No Exit as “little more than a one-act drama of unusual monotony and often quite remarkable foolishness.” The critic for Newsweek was not as negative, calling the play “weird and fascinating.” Like their European counterparts, many American critics were intrigued by Sartre’s concept of hell, but many Americans thought the play became repetitious near the end. Joseph Wood Krutch of The Nation took this view. He wrote, “Chief among the virtues is a genuinely macabre quality which makes itself felt most effectively during the first fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, like most plays based upon a conception which can be effectively stated in a few words, No Exitsuffers from the fact that the interest tends to decline steadily from the moment the conception has been grasped.”
One point that the American critics of the time debated was the nature of existentialism, since No Exit was regarded as an existentialist play. The philosophy was relatively new and not completely understood in the United States. Since its original productions, existentialism has become widely studied and discussed by scholars. The play has been debated in these terms. No Exit and its themes are now better understood, and the play is generally regarded as a classic. Unlike most of Sartre’s other plays, No Exit has retained an accessibility because it is not rooted in a specific time and place.
There has been an extensive critical debate over the meaning of the play’s most famous line, “Hell is other people.” Many believe it means that interpersonal relationships are inevitably hellish. Others, including Sartre, disagree, arguing that it means people are too dependent on other people’s opinions of them. Critics and scholars also have debated the meaning and nature of Sartre’s hell, comparing it to other literary depictions. In an essay Jacques Guicharnaud contributed to Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays, he wrote, “the play is not a metaphor of Hell but that the image of Hell is a metaphor of the hopeless suffering of individuals in search of their definitions in the eyes of others, yet constantly brought back to themselves.”