Les Temps Modernes

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Les Temps Modernes

description literary-political journal
language French
publishing company Editions Gallimard (FR)
Headquarters Paris
First edition October 1945
founder Jean-Paul Sartre
Frequency of publication irregular
Sold edition 3000 copies
Web link gallimard.com
ISSN (print) 0040-3075

Les Temps modern was a literary-political magazine founded by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in October 1945 . It was last published in Paris by Gallimard at irregular intervals and was discontinued by the publisher in May 2019. The last and 700th edition was published in December 2018.

The title of the magazine is borrowed from Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936).

The magazine belongs to the left-wing political spectrum and has long had a strong influence on public political life in France . In the political conflicts of the Cold War , the Algerian War , the Cuban Missile Crisis , the 1968 movement and others, the magazine took a strong stand and showed solidarity with the positions and activities of Marxist parties, Marxist-inspired social movements and anti-colonialist independence movements. At the time of its greatest distribution during the 1960s, it had a circulation of over 20,000 copies.

Sartre and Les Temps modern

Prehistory and foundation

During the time of the occupation of parts of France in World War II , a number of illegal magazines had been founded in the German occupation zone, which, like Combat , headed by Albert Camus , had emerged from resistance groups of the Resistance . Even Jean-Paul Sartre had founded a small resistance group in 1941, which called itself "Socialisme et Liberté", but only for a short time was working (distribution of leaflets u. Ä.) And was dissolved in late 1941. As Simone de Beauvoir reports in her memoir, publications and activities for the time after the occupation were planned and discussed in the Freundeskreis:

“We only had to be together and we felt united and strong. We promised ourselves to forever make a covenant against the systems, the ideas, the people we condemned. The hour of their defeat would come. Then the future would be open again and it would be up to us to shape it politically, perhaps, but definitely spiritually. We should provide an ideology for the post-war period. We had clear ideas ... Sartre was determined to start a magazine that we would all run together. "

Les Temps moderne was able to fill part of the journalistic gap that arose from the 1944 to 1953 ban on the publication of the Nouvelle Revue Française , which was also published by Gallimard. Sartre acted as the founder and editor of the new magazine. Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were among the co-founders . In September 1944 the editorial committee was established. The first editorial team consisted of Raymond Aron , Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Leiris , Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier and Jean Paulhan .

Sartre's "Presentation of Les Temps modern"

In his presentation of Les Temps modern in the first issue of October 1, 1945, Sartre outlined his concept of committed literature , which he later described in the essay What is literature? , which was initially published in Les Temps moderne (No. 17-22, 1947), defended and formulated against its critics. He wanted to find the idea of ​​a literature “situated” in its epoch directed at its “social function” (liberation from economic exploitation and political oppression) to be realized in the new magazine. Sartre addressed all like-minded people with an appeal:

“We appeal to all of the good will; all manuscripts, wherever they come from, are accepted if they are guided only by lines of thought that coincide with ours and if they also have literary value. I remind you that engagement in “dedicated literature” must in no way ignore literature, and that it must be our job to serve literature by giving it fresh blood as well as serving the community by serving it try to give her the literature she needs. "

In the conception of Les Temps moderne, Sartre did not design any more specific content orientation or an editorial concept for the magazine. The text is more of a literary-philosophical assessment and outlines Sartre's personal work program for the coming years. From this Sartre derived very general objectives for the magazine in a few sentences. While this opened up a wide range of topics and articles for the magazine, the core themes of Sartre's text (the role of the writer in his era, Flaubert as the prototype of the “bourgeois” writer, development of a “synthetic” anthropology) can be found in his publications and public statements of the following years can easily be found again (e.g. What is literature? The idiot of the family , questions of method and criticism of dialectical reason ).

Editing and editing

Sartre saw himself in the role of a literary and philosophical writer, not a newspaper editor. The management of the magazine therefore had to be carried out by others from the start. In the first few years the agendas of the editor-in-chief were mainly carried out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, while Sartre was the author of numerous articles of his own. As with other magazines that had been founded during the time of the Resistance or immediately after the end of the war, disputes about the editorial line soon broke out in the editorial team of Les Temps modern in the wake of the beginning of the Cold War . This led to Aron and Ollivier leaving the editorial committee in 1946.

While the political part of the magazine was used by Sartre and his closest collaborators as a journalistic platform for philosophical and political existentialism , the magazine showed greater diversity in the human-scientific and artistic part. Here the contacts between the editorial team and wide circles of Parisian intellectuals were fruitful. Major editorial contributions were made in this area by, among others, Claude Lévi-Strauss , Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Jean Pouillon .

Maurice Merleau-Ponty disagreed with the development of Sartre's political and philosophical positions from 1949 and withdrew more and more as editor-in-chief of the magazine. This led to an editorial crisis between 1950 and 1953. Merleau-Ponty was no longer willing to share the "road cooperative" declared by Sartre in 1950 with the PCF, which resulted in a stalemate in terms of the management of the political section of the magazine. In 1953 Merleau-Ponty finally left the editorial team. The discussion in his book Die Abenteuer der Dialektik (1955) with Sartre's series of articles The Communists and Peace ( Les Temps modern. 1952–54) finally led to a break between the two long-time companions.

The turbulent events in the editorial office and the public political dispute among Parisian intellectuals during the post-war years were described by Simone de Beauvoir in her novel The Mandarins of Paris (1954), for which she received the "Prix Goncourt".

In later years, too, there were repeated changes in the editorial team and, as a result, changes in the weighting of the articles in the magazine. The basic political orientation, however, remained unchanged.

Subject areas

In his study of Les Temps moderne, Howard Davies identified five main subject areas and compared their percentage for the period from 1945 to 1985: The magazine published articles on political, literary, human sciences, artistic and mixed topics. Up to September 1963, political and literary topics accounted for around 30% each, human science topics 15 to 19% and artistic topics 12 to 16% each (with slight fluctuations). In the years that followed, the proportion of political articles grew to 61% until 1985, while the proportion of literary subjects fell to 10% and the proportion of artistic subjects to 4%.

Publishing house, editor and editing

The magazine changed publisher several times over the years: from October 1945 to December 1948 it was published by Gallimard, from January 1949 to September 1965 by Julliard, from October 1965 to March 1985 by Presses d'aujourd'hui and since 1985 it has appeared again at Gallimard.

Until his death in 2018, the magazine was edited by Claude Lanzmann , who had been a member of the editorial team since the early 1950s.

The editorial team included Claude Lanzmann, Juliette Simont, Adrien Barrot, Joseph Cohen, Michel Deguy, Liliane Kandel, Jean Khalfa, Patrice Maniglier, Jean Pouillon, Robert Redeker , Marc Sagnol, Gérard Wormser and Raphael Zagury-Orly. The magazine was last published in two or more months' issues with an edition of around 3000 copies.

In May 2019, the Gallimard publishing house announced that the magazine would no longer appear in its previous form, but would be replaced by a series of books with the same title, which the magazine's editorial committee was to oversee.

literature

  • Anna Boschetti: Sartre et "Les Temps modern". Une entreprise intellectuelle, Les Éd. de Minuit, Paris 1985.
  • Michel-Antoine Burnier: Les existentialistes et la politique. Ed. Gallimard, Paris 1966.
  • Annie Cohen-Solal: Sartre. 1905-1980. rororo, Reinbek 1991.
  • Howard Davies: Sartre and "Les Temps modern". Cambridge Univ. Pr., Cambridge [u. a.] 1987.
  • Simone de Beauvoir: The mandarins of Paris. rororo, Reinbek 1965.
  • Simone de Beauvoir: In the prime of life. rororo, Reinbek 1969.
  • Simone de Beauvoir: The way things are. rororo, Reinbek 1970.
  • Sunil Khilnani: Revolution thunder . The French Left after 1945. Rotbuch Verlag, Hamburg 1995.
  • Bernard-Henri Lévy: Sartre. The philosophy of the 20th century. dtv, Munich 2005.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Adventures of Dialectics. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1968.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre: Presentation of Les Temps modern. In: Man and things. rororo, Reinbek 1978.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre: What is literature? First complete edition. rororo, Reinbek 1981.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre: Merleau-Ponty. In: Portraits and Perspectives. rororo, Reinbek 1971.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre: The Communists and Peace. In: War in Peace 1. rororo, Reinbek 1982.
  • Bruno Schoch: Marxism in France since 1945. Campus, Frankfurt / M., New York 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Simone de Beauvoir: In the prime of life. P. 481.
  2. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre: Presentation of Les Temps modern. In: Man and things. P. 170.
  3. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre: Merleau-Ponty. In: Portraits and Perspectives. P. 152f.
  4. ↑ Howard Davies: Sartre and "Les Temps modern". P. 218f.
  5. ↑ A liberation of man. In: taz . May 31, 2019, accessed July 26, 2019 .