Sartre’s keen sense of the maneuvering, opportunism, occasional heroism and frequent failure of nerve that marked European power politics toward the end of the 1930s was evident in his novelistic account. As we retrace these steps in “real life,” we encounter Sartre playing his own role in what he had reason to believe would be a published set of recollections of memorable events: his Carnets de la drôle de guerre (War Diaries). Mobilized and posted in Alsace, private Sartre filled fifteen good-sized notebooks with comments on his personal life, his mates, the state of the world along with reflections on literature and especially philosophy. In a letter to Beauvoir from a holding camp in Baccarat, Lorraine, on July 22, 1940, he announced: “I’ve begun to write a metaphysical treatise: L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness)” which will develop many of the thoughts expressed both in his War Diaries and in his letters from this period.

Unfortunately, only six of these fifteen notebooks seem to have survived the misfortunes of war. But if you supplement what they contain with the almost daily letters that he exchanged with Beauvoir and others, you obtain a detailed view of their thoughts and reactions to life in the military and on the home front for the months between Sartre’s mobilization in September of 1939 and his second leave for home on March 28, 1940. On his return to his post, the letters continue through to his capture a few hours before the armistice, on June 21, 1940, which was his birthday. They become less frequent during his temporary incarceration for two months in Baccarat and his transfer in mid August to a massive POW camp outside of Trier, in Germany, that housed 26,000 prisoners, just as he recounts in The Roads of Freedom. Most of the letters from Germany have been lost.