André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernism

FAIN: FEL-258056-18

Clementine Faure-Bellaiche
Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)

Completion of a book-length study on the influence of Protestantism on French literary modernism, particularly in the writings of André Gide (1869-1951), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), and Roland Barthes (1915-80).

This project is about three intellectual giants of the twentieth century, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes--three major voices of French literary modernity and three thinkers of international stature and prodigious influence. My project is centered upon an heretofore unexamined aspect of their trajectory--their Protestant difference, in a France deeply marked by Catholicism. However established those three intellectual figures appear today, their self-fashioning as writers and their theorization of literature were originally closely intertwined with their religious marginality. The project retraces how Gide, giving esthetic and ethical significance to his Protestant difference, elaborated a posture, an ethos of protestation, that Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, also marked by Protestantism, reinvested. We still owe to this overlooked filiation the figure of the French intellectual as a protester, and the conception of modern literature as a counter-authority.

Associated Products

"“Like a weed on the compost of catholicity….” – Jean-Paul Sartre’s Self-Division and France’s Religious Divide." (Article)
Title: "“Like a weed on the compost of catholicity….” – Jean-Paul Sartre’s Self-Division and France’s Religious Divide."
Author: Clémentine Fauré
Abstract: The article is a rereading of Sartre's autobiography, The Words, through the lens of France's long-lasting quarrel between Protestantism and Catholicism. Sartre, raised both as a Catholic and a Protestant, places this religious schism at the crux of his text, and at the center of his writer's posture. It shows that the dialectics between the individual and the community, solitude and communion, and pride and humility — between, in short, "protestanticity" and "catholicity" — which informs The Words and is crucial to Sartre's work, is in fact superimposed onto the religious divide.
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Publisher: Yale French Studies, volumes 135 & 136.

Sartre in Quarantine (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Sartre in Quarantine
Writer: François Noudelmann
Director: François Noudelmann
Producer: Maison Française at NYU
Abstract: A conversation about Sartre with Denis Hollier and François Noudelmann at the Maison Française at NYU.
Year: 2020
Access Model: available on Youtube
Format: Web

---