The Roads to Freedom

• 1. Introduction

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  The Roads to Freedom began as a single word written in a letter. In July 1938, just three months after his debut novel Nausea appeared in print, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote to Simone de Beauvoir that he had found the subject of his next novel. "The subject is freedom," he told her. What followed was a literary project that would consume more than a decade of his life, produce three finished novels and a ghost of a fourth, and remain, in the end, unfinished.

  The series he imagined would eventually carry the French title Les chemins de la liberté. He had originally planned to call it "Lucifer," divided into two parts titled "La Revolte" and "Le Serment," or The Oath. The novels that emerged from that seed bore different names entirely, and the world they explored was shaped as much by historical catastrophe as by philosophical intention.

  Three complete volumes were published: The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Troubled Sleep, also known as Iron in the Soul. A fourth, La dernière chance, was left as a pile of unorganized manuscript pages. Two chapters appeared in Sartre's own magazine during his lifetime, and the rest was reconstructed and published only after his death. How did a writer so prolific, so celebrated, and so driven by the idea of freedom end up unable to bring his great novel of freedom to a close?

• 2. Writing Through War

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  In early September 1939, Sartre was called up into the French Army and assigned to a meteorological unit. The duties were not demanding. He took regular weather observations, and beyond that he had time to write prolifically, keeping war diaries and writing letters alongside his novel manuscript. At one stretch, he produced seventy-three pages in thirteen days.

  He had begun writing the novel that would become The Age of Reason in the autumn of 1938, working on it on and off through the following year. He completed it by the 31st of December 1939, and immediately began a sequel. That sequel, which he first wanted to call September in reference to the Munich Agreement of 1938, became The Reprieve. He finished writing it in November 1943, while German forces occupied Paris.

  All along, Simone de Beauvoir served as his critical reader, receiving the manuscripts and returning her judgments. Sartre described the period as one of sustained introspection. Separated from his usual Paris life, he found in the structure of military routine a strange kind of creative freedom. The result was a body of semi-autobiographical fiction written while the world it depicted was still unfolding around him.

• 3. People Behind the Characters

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  Mathieu, the philosophy professor at the center of the series, was Sartre himself, at least in character if not in biographical fact. Sartre acknowledged giving Mathieu everything of his own nature, with one crucial exception: he did not give him the defining fact that Sartre himself lived in order to write.

  The other characters were drawn with similar care from people Sartre and de Beauvoir actually knew. Ivich, Boris's sister, was based on Olga Kosakiewicz, a student of de Beauvoir and a friend to both of them. Boris was drawn from Sartre's friend Jacques-Laurent Bost. Gomez, the painter fighting with the Republicans in Spain, was based on Fernando Gerassi, a close friend of the couple. Sarah, Gomez's Jewish wife, was drawn from Stephania Avdykovych, equally close to both Sartre and de Beauvoir.

  Marcelle, Mathieu's pregnant mistress, was perhaps loosely modeled on de Beauvoir herself, though the source notes she was the character most removed from her real-life model. Daniel, a homosexual friend of both Mathieu and Marcelle, and Brunet, Mathieu's communist friend, round out the central cast. Each figure carries the weight of a philosophical position as much as a personality, particularly Brunet, whose chapters in the POW camp ask whether a class-struggle framework can survive the particular horror of captivity.

• 4. Three Novels, Three Scales

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  The Age of Reason unfolds over forty-eight hours, told from shifting perspectives chapter by chapter. Mathieu stands at its center, uncertain whether to commit to his pregnant mistress Marcelle or to his political convictions. The novel is set in the prewar Paris of the summer of 1938, and Gary Cox, writing in Sartre and Fiction, describes its characters as "largely pathetic, emotionally immature" people too absorbed in themselves to notice the war gathering around them.

  The Reprieve spans eight days, from the 23rd to the 30th of September, leading up to the Munich Agreement. Sartre credited the technique to writers like Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf, saying in 1945 that he had tried to take their experiments in simultaneity and push them further. Viewpoints shift within single phrases, moving between characters without warning, reproducing something of the collective anxiety of a nation on the edge of crisis.

  Troubled Sleep, set in June 1940, works at a slower pace. It opens on Mathieu making a fifteen-minute stand against German forces in a village, a moment that Cox describes as militarily futile but philosophically decisive. Mathieu appears to die, but the reader later learns he survived and spent two months in a hospital before arriving at a prisoner-of-war camp. The novel's final pages turn to Brunet, whose communist framework frames the entire POW situation as a symptom of capitalism and nationalism that will outlast the war itself.

• 5. Reception and Its Consequences

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  The Age of Reason and The Reprieve were published together in September 1945. Sartre was by then France's leading intellectual voice, and both books were received with great enthusiasm by much of the French public. Louis Parrot, writing for Les Lettres françaises, called Sartre's talent an affirmation of rare brilliance and placed him among the greatest French writers of the day. Gaéton Picon, in Confluences, wrote that Sartre had succeeded in forcing the doors of literary history and noted that he enjoyed the privilege of having a universe of his own.

  Not every critic agreed. Louis Beirnart in Etudes wrote that Sartre's objective was clearly to show life through its excrement and lower the value of existence to the level of the gutter. Orville Prescott, in The New York Times, called The Age of Reason a tedious disappointment and found its existentialist significance pitifully meager, criticizing Sartre's characters as both uninteresting and unbelievable.

  The third volume fared worse. Extracts of Troubled Sleep appeared in Les Temps Modernes in January and June 1949, and the full book came out that same year. Sartre scholar Michel Contat later observed that critics, morally disappointed in Sartre for reasons beyond the novel itself, transferred their dissatisfaction into an accusation that the book represented an exhaustion of his literary creativity. Sartre, who claimed not to care about reviewers, was nonetheless, as Contat put it, intimidated in the face of the fourth volume. He would write 223 pages of it and never finish.

• 6. The Unfinished Fourth

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  Sartre's biographer Ronald Hayman catalogued the wreckage of abandoned projects with some precision. Sartre completed nine original plays, seven short stories, and several screenplays, but nearly all his major long-form work in literature and philosophy was left unfinished. These included planned sequels to Nausea, to Being and Nothingness, and to Critique of Dialectical Reason, as well as an autobiography, an enormous biography of Flaubert, and planned books on Mallarmé and Tintoretto.

  Hayman theorized that Sartre "deeply disliked bringing anything to a conclusion." He argued that long-term projects were tarnished by ambivalence, that other work would demand Sartre's attention and he would feel guilty for enjoying words instead of taking political action. De Beauvoir, quoted directly by Hayman, put it plainly: "Without having abandoned the idea of a fourth volume, he always found work that needed his attention more."

  In a 1973 interview, Sartre offered his own diagnosis. He described the fundamental falseness of a novel built on the self: the differences placed between the author and the character, which seem minor at first, accumulate into something untrue. He said he had given Mathieu everything of his own character, except the essential fact that he, Sartre, lived in order to write. That omission, he concluded, made the whole autobiographical project straddle two forms without fully inhabiting either.

  Two chapters of the fourth volume, published under the title Drôle d'amitié in Les Temps Modernes in 1949, were all that appeared during Sartre's lifetime. After his death, George H. Bauer and Michel Contat reconstructed the rest from what they described as completely unorganized manuscript pages. Sartre had known about their work on his drafts and allowed it. The reconstructed text was published in the Pléiade edition in 1981. Craig Vasey translated and published it in English in 2009, and that edition was the first time both parts of the fourth volume were available together in English.

• 7. Television and Afterlife

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  David Turner adapted the trilogy for BBC Television in 1970 as a thirteen-part serial, with Michael Bryant playing Mathieu and James Cellan Jones directing. The adaptation was nominated for several BAFTA awards for 1970. It aired once more and then disappeared: after 1977 it was not broadcast again on television, and as of the time the source material was written it remained unavailable on any format.

  In May 2012, the British Film Institute screened the entire series over the weekend of the 12th and the 13th of May. The director and several surviving cast members attended. The event was one of those rare occasions when a work long buried by institutional neglect is briefly, carefully excavated and placed before a new audience. A decade later, in 2022, it was announced the series would be repeated on BBC4, returning a dramatization of Sartre's unfinished masterwork to the medium that first brought it to life.