ABSTRACT
Something less than admiration or esteem accompanied the official feelings, expressed un-memorably at the time by President Giscard d'Estaing and Prime Minister Raymond Barre; but Le Figaro, in which paper Jean-Paul Sartre had once published his dispatches from America, wanted to give vent to the Right's ideological feelings in no uncertain way and went so far as to offer a rather tasteless venereal pun. Sartre's name became a credential and his signature a label as he rushed valiantly to assume a “publisher's” responsibility for papers or magazines that might otherwise have been repressed. All this, and the petitions he signed and the international “courts of inquiry” he blessed, is almost forgotten and is no longer weighed in the balance when Sartre is given the “estimate” he expected, the “judgment of posterity.” In the spring Sartre had revealed himself as a late-Stalinist and defended against all critics the record of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
