The Roads to Freedom

The Roads to Freedom (French: Les chemins de la liberté) is a series of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre. Intended as a tetralogy, it was left incomplete, with only three of the planned four volumes published.

The three published novels revolve around Mathieu, a Socialist teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends. The trilogy includes: L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason), Le sursis (generally translated as The Reprieve but which could cover a number of semantic fields from 'deferment' to 'amnesty'), and La mort dans l'âme (Troubled Sleep, originally translated by Gerard Hopkins as Iron in the Soul, Hamish Hamilton, 1950). The trilogy was to be followed by a fourth novel, La dernière chance (i.e. The Last Chance); however, Sartre would never finish it: two chapters were published in 1949 in Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes under the title Drôle d'amitié. The last part of The Last Chance was later reconstructed and published in 1981 (see section below).

The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre's philosophical position towards 'engagement' (commitment) in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Form of Humanism).

In April 1938, Sartre’s first novel Nausea was published. Three months later in July, he wrote to Simone de Beauvoir, “I have all at once found the subject of my [next] novel, its proportions and its title... The subject is freedom.” Originally it was to be titled “Lucifer,” and written in two parts - “La Revolte” and “Le Serment” (The Oath). In the autumn of 1938, Sartre began writing the novel that was to become The Age of Reason, and continued working on the novel on and off for the next year. In early September 1939, Sartre was called up into the French Army and was assigned to the meteorological unit. Except for some regular meteorological observations, this war work was not exacting, and Sartre had plenty of time to work on his novel, his war diaries, and numerous letters to friends. At one point Sartre produced seventy-three pages of the novel in thirteen days. By December 31, 1939, he had completed the novel, and immediately started a sequel, which he originally wanted to call September (referring to The Munich Agreement of September 1938), and which became titled The Reprieve. He finished writing The Reprieve in November 1943. However, he was constantly editing the manuscripts, and also turned them over to Simone de Beauvoir for critique.

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