Description
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy (The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Iron in the Soul) is perhaps the best known work of his fictional output. While the first book concentrates on personal interactions between the main characters (most of whom appear in the other two books to a greater or lesser degree), the last two are firmly rooted in external events: the war scare and Munich agreement of 1938 (The Reprieve), and the collapse of France in 1940 (Iron in the Soul). As a result, the trilogy has much to say on international relations, both in its specific historical context, and in the wider lessons of how its characters face these unfolding events.
In this paper I will use Roads to Freedom to tease out an existential approach to IR that is specifically rooted in the historical events of the late 1930s and the 1940 crisis sparked by the fall of France. Here, questions on the meaning of events, and the different ways that we can face them, even when the meanings are contested and unclear, come to the fore. While interpretations of Roads to Freedom often settle on the climactic final scene of the first part of Iron in the Soul – where Mathieu’s seemingly futile decision to help hold up the inevitable German advance by fifteen minutes brings a deferred meaning of sorts to his life – the trilogy is rich in different approaches chosen by its diverse range of characters.
