A sardonic reflection on the idealisms and absurdities of intellectual youth
Paul Nizan was born in Tours, France in 1905, the son of a railway
engineer. A close friend of Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV and at the
Ecole normale supérieure, he joined the Communist Party in the late
1920s and became one of its best-known journalists and
intellectuals. His works include Aden, Arabie; Les Chiens de Garde;
Antoine Bloyé; and Le Cheval de Troie. In 1939, following the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nizan left the party and was killed the
following year in the Battle of Dunkirk fighting against the German
army.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a prolific philosopher, novelist, public
intellectual, biographer, playwright and founder of the journal Les
Temps Modernes. Born in Paris in 1905 and died in 1980, Sartre was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 - and turned it
down. His books include Nausea, Intimacy, The Flies, No Exit,
Sartre's War Diaries, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the
monumental treatise Being and Nothingness.
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic,
essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated
with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of
Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic
Drama.
Quintin Hoare is the director of the Bosnian Institute and has
translated numerous works by Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, and other
French authors. He lives in the United Kingdom.
A complex mixture of history and analysis constitutes the great
value of Nizan's book ... A hard, true testimony at a time when
'the Young' are forming groups and congratulating themselves, when
the young man thinks he has rights because he is young.
*Jean-Paul Sartre*
It is a delicate, sometimes lyrical, evocation of the atmosphere
and attitudes of the late Twenties. It catches the tone of youthful
conversation and shows the interplay between intelligence and
absurdity, feeling and frivolity, without any of the propagandist
simplifications one might have expected from a Communist writer
dealing with the privileged denizens of the Ecole Normale
Supe?rieure ... The Conspiracy is a genuine piece of
literature.
*New York Review of Books*
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