Abstract

We open this issue with a translation of a scenario which Sartre wrote during the winter of 1943-44 entitled “Resistance.” It is not unlike several of Sartre’s plays in that it focuses on a weak hero who feels finally compelled to act in a difficult situation. It also displays some striking similarities with the outline provided by Simone de Beauvoir in The Force of Circumstance of “La derniére Chance” [“The Last Chance”]. It is set in occupied France and deals initially with captured soldiers in a POW camp, several of whom are eager to get back to Rouen in order to join the resistance. The conflict between collaborators—those who preached active participation or passive acquiescence in the Nazi power game—and the various forms of resistance— from printing clandestine papers to acts of sabotage—is subtly analyzed in the scenario. The multiple reversals of fortune and the ultimate peripeteia—so typical of Sartre’s plays and stories as well as of the nineteenth century tradition of the “well-made play and story,” do not seem out of place in the WWII setting of occupied France where one’s attitudes and actions could be fatal at any time.