"Involution"

"We are chained, humiliated, sick with fear; we are at our lowest ebb." With these words, France's existentialist philosopher and left-wing propagandist, Jean-Paul Sartre, donned the mantle of doom for his countrymen.* Describing the much-discussed crisis of conscience confronting France as a result of the Algerian war, Sartre coined a new expression, "involution" --a tragic process by which the former colonizers adopt the savagery of the native lands they once colonized.

Tossing aside the vast services to mankind that enlightened colonialism has performed, Sartre suggested that France had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. He intoned: "While our former colonial subjects are discovering their humanity, we seem to be losing ours. We gained our manhood at their expense; now they are gaining their manhood at ours. The colonized peoples are rebuilding their lives while we -- ultras and liberals, French settlers in Algeria and Frenchmen at home -- find ourselves disintegrating. Fury and fear are naked everywhere."

Asks Sartre rhetorically: "On which side are the savages? On which side is barbarism?" His answer is that they are now on the French side. He hears the equivalent of the native tom-toms in the automobile horns with which the French ultras like to beat out the rhythm Al-ge-rie fran-c,aise. "The unification of the Algerian people is producing the disintegration of the French people. Terror has left Africa and established itself here in France. Violence thus comes full circle, going this way and that way until, step by step, we are going native.

"It is not good, my compatriots, that you should not breathe a word of it to anybody, not even to your own soul for fear of having to judge yourself. The years of silence have been degrading and futile, for today the blinding sun of tor ture lights the whole country. There is not a laugh which sounds right, not a face which does not use makeup to mask anger or fear, not an act which does not betray our disgust and our complicity."

De Gaulle, thinks Sartre, is a "Great Sorcerer" who will be swept away by civil war: "We'll have to fight or rot." Violence, Sartre suggests in a highly du bious prophecy, may cauterize and cleanse. In the meantime, he warns: "France in the past was the name of a country; let us take heed that it does not become the name of a neurosis."

* In a lengthy preface to another author's recent book about colonialism, Les Damnes de la Terre (Damned of the Earth).

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