(Excerpted from ‘The Aftermath of War’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Chris Turner; with permission from Seagull Books)
The End of the War
People had been told to put out flags. They did not. The war ended in indifference and anxiety.
Nothing had changed in everyday life. The booming of the radio, the bold type of the newspapers were not able to persuade us. We would have liked some sort of marvel, a sign in the heavens, to prove to us that peace had written itself into things. A puny gun coughed on a boring summer라이브 바카라 afternoon. People went by on the bridges and in the streets with lifeless eyes, busy with their chronic hunger and their own concerns.
How are we, with our empty stomachs, to rejoice at the end of this war that just goes on ending and which, after ravaging our land, has gone off to die at the back of beyond, around those islands whose name reminds us of double almonds and family betting games. And what an abstract end. There may, it seems, be turmoil in Japan; the Japanese army is counter-attacking in Manchuria and the emperor and his captains speak of impending revenge; the Chinese are on the verge of civil war. And, in the background, immense emergent powers eye each other with some surprise and a formal coldness, weighing each other up and keeping a respectful distance, like those wrestlers who rapidly stroke each other라이브 바카라 forearms and shoulders before coming to grips.
Yet certain men in their offices have decided the war is over. One of them announces it, speaking at a microphone, a piece of paper in his hand. To believe him, we would have had not to have learned to disbelieve the words of men who come to microphones with pieces of paper in their hands. It is not that one dares imagine he is lying. One merely thinks this whole business of war and peace unfolds at a certain level of truth: the truth of historical declarations, military parades and commemorative ceremonies. People look at each other with a vague sense of disappointment: is this all that Peace is?
It isn’t Peace. Peace is a beginning. We are living through death throes. For a long time we thought War and Peace were two clearly distinct entities, like Black and White or Hot and Cold. It wasn’t true and today we know it. Between 1934 and 1939, we learned that Peace can end without war breaking out. We are familiar with the exquisite subtleties of armed neutrality, intervention and pre-belligerency. The movement from peace to war in our century is a matter of continuous gradations. On the most optimistic view, we are going to have to go through this process in the opposite direction. Today, 20 August 1945, in this deserted, starving Paris, the War has ended but Peace has not begun.
Peace seemed to us like a return. A return of the roaring twenties, a return of French prosperity and greatness. In wartime, people always look forward to the peace of their youth: they confuse youth and peace. It is always a different peace that comes. The one that is vaguely in the air now, beyond the final storms, is an enormous world peace, in which France has only a very small place.
The little gun that was coughing the other afternoon confirmed France라이브 바카라 slide—and that of Europe. A verdict delivered at the other end of the earth told us that the time of our shame and pain was at an end. All that remained was to say ‘thank you’. That meant we had to rebuild France, taking account of its new limitations. The veil of illusion that had masked its real level of importance for fifty years had been torn at the very moment of Japanese capitulation. We men of forty have been saying for some time that France has, above all, to resign itself to playing a minor role. But we are so used to seeing it in major ones that we speak of it not as an ageing actress, but as a star who, for some moral reason, would have to agree for a time to pass incognito. However, a more austere younger generation is coming up behind us, a generation better suited to the new tasks, because it has known only a humiliated France. These young people are the men of the Peace. We were the men of a lost battle, of a war that is fizzling out. Will we be stragglers in the coming years; will we be lost souls? This war라이브 바카라 end is also a little bit our own or, at least, it is the end of our youth.
We believed, on no evidential basis, that peace was the natural state and substance of the universe, that war was merely a temporary agitation of its surface. Today we recognize our error: the end of the war is quite sim- ply the end of this war. The future has not yet begun: we no longer believe in the end of wars; and we are so used to the sound of arms, so benumbed by our injuries and hunger, that we no longer even quite manage wholly to wish for it. If someone told us tomorrow that a new conflict had broken out, we would say, with a resigned shrug, ‘That라이브 바카라 only to be expected.’ Moreover, among the best of men, I find a silent consent to war, something like a commitment to the full tragedy of the human condition.
