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36 Historically Speaking September/October 2007 of Antoine Roquentin replicates in many ways the life of Jean-Paul Sartre. Thus we can fill in many of the gaps in Roquentin's life with what we know about his creator. Sartre was born and raised in Paris, he attended the Ecole normale supérieure, where he studied more literature than history, which explains his limitations as a historian. He did do his military service, it turns out. He taught high school in Le Havre, while living in hotels, which goes a long way toward explaining his depression. He benefited from an inheritance, which gave him his chance to travel. He learned about Husserl from reading about him, not from staring at chestnut trees. And he had a running relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, almost as sadomasochistic as Roquentin's relationship with Anny. But this is no excuse for what Sartre does not tell us in his novel. The universe may be disorderly, but this is no reason to take it out on us. Nature may be indifferent, but this is no reason to be insensitive. And, indeed, if we want to identify the most pungent odor seeping out from the pages of Sartre's Nausea, it is the odor of obliviousness. During the time that he was writing it, he had a chance to see the fascists and the Nazis first hand. During the time that he was completing it, Mussolini was invading Abyssinia and Hitler was remilitarizing the Rhineland. My mother, who never agonized over chestnut trees, took one look at Mussolini and decided that he was bad news, and that is one reason that I am here speaking to you today. But neither Antoine Roquentin nor Jean-Paul Sartre, in their absorption with themselves, had the sensitivity, nay the elementary common sense, to predict that the next time the trolley car parked at the Grands Bassins, it was not only heading for the slaughterhouse. It was moving right on to Dachau. Paul Sennino isprofessor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He haspublished widely on 17th-century Europe, including Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Gernika in Context Rob Stradling I ^^ uring the early weeks of ^B 1937 a controversial trial ^^ was proceeding at the Old Bailey. The case involved mass murder , and evoked widespread attention. Yet its details were hardly the usual gory diet of the popular press. Three men were in the dock, accused of damage to Crown property—an act described by the judge as "most dangerous and wicked." The unlikely terrorists were a university lecturer, a Nonconformist minister, and a schoolteacher. They were also, respectively , the president (Saunders Lewis) and two senior officials (Valentine and Williams) of the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. But the Crown—prosecuting agency as well as alleged victim— stood counter-accused by Lewis of a crime of unimaginably greater dimensions : no less than planning the massacre of noncombatant civilians by bombing action from the air in a future war. Even before September 1936, when the three saboteurs set fire to an RAF training school for pilots being built at Penyberth in north Wales, Lewis had accused the British government of pursuing a policy of defense rearmament which was tantamount to "baby-murdering." Certainly, when the bombing of Gernika occurred on April 26, 1937, the British government's response to the threat of massed bombing raids on British cities was already under way. A potential aggressor had to be deterred (as it were, Plan A); or failing that, retaliated against (Plan B). Because of Langston Hughes, Mikhail Koltsov, Ernest Hemingway, Nicolas Guillen, Madrid, 1937. Yale Collection ofAmerican Literature, Belnecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. the Penyberth trial—among other things—people were becoming aware of the practical and ethical implications of air warfare. As Orwell was soon to argue, the only way of winning a war in which the enemy dropped bombs on your mother was to drop bigger bombs on his mother. Plan B was exactly what the Allies were to carry out in World War II, and its existential logic underpins the whole policy of nuclear deterrence. Indeed, the...

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