[In the following essay, Smith discusses the relationships between the main characters in Sarte's "The Making of a Leader, " concluding that the story serves as propaganda against Zola's theories of Naturalism in literature.]

For a discerning public that propaganda is best which obtrudes itself least. There must be art in the making of it, and attractions external to the propaganda aim, if it is to be effective. It is best of all when the idea of its serving as a guide to social conduct has not even been in its author's mind. In the case we are about to examine, what is uppermost is the desire to individualize an observed trend in man's behavior, an instance of the course of human frailty. A writer who is always studying his fellow men, earnestly and sympathetically, here gives an extended example in response to his own commanding need to put across his ideas in concrete form, for Jean-Paul Sartre is above all a creative publicist. The result, however, will stand as a lesson in human relations and may therefore be called a good piece of propaganda.

The longest of the five sketches presented by Sartre in Le Mur, the last one, entitled "L'Enfance d'un chef," is in the nature of a social document. Inasmuch as it traces the early life of a fictional hero, Lucien Fleurier, in the manner of a case-history, it might be vulnerable to the same logic that breaks down the Zola fallacy. Zola proclaimed that he would take human material as he observed it—a passion, for example, at work in a man's heart—and follow it through like a laboratory project, using the findings of physiology to explain what should come of it, then report his results. The only thing he overlooked was that the original situation, and the stages that he might note in the passion's gradual development, were vitiated by the humble fact that they were not real but imaginary. The results (from which he aspired to work out a pathology for social evils whereby to control them and eventually to wipe them out, like smallpox or diphtheria) were therefore likewise invalid, however scientific might be his basic hypothesis and his method of isolating his variable factor from his constants. The "constants" might be real conditions, but the determining factor from beginning to end was not nature but his own mind. Therefore his progress notes could not be facts and his conclusions could never be laws. Writers have by now pretty well outgrown this naive zeal, however, and are not often guilty of Zola's fallacy. Sartre skirts it by not claiming any basis of philosophic necessity for the spiritual adventures of Lucien. His story does not lose but gains by the undogmatic approach. The reader may enjoy it as fiction, free from the oppressive sense of a thesis, and yet gain an appreciation of the deep-lying sources present in a character of intolerance. He will consider how this typical modern phenomenon, the stuffed-shirt bully, is probably not just any man who has been provoked by hostile elements aiming at his security, but is more likely the result of a long evolution within himself, and may therefore be prevented.

For Lucien Fleurier is our own contemporary. Although no dates are mentioned in "L'Enfance d'un chef," at least none associated with the hero at a particular age, certain indications point to 1910 as approximately the year of his birth. He would therefore have been twenty in 1930 and twenty-five in the heyday of Col. de la Roque. But the narrative concerns only the formative years of Lucien and leaves him on the threshold of what will be a safe, orthodox, Tory, adult existence, now "petrified," as Sartre would say, into a thoroughly predictable pattern and of no further interest. He has had a poor preparation for the decisions which will confront him in his career as one of the élite. What with his own clumsy groping for an egocentric good and the various worthless or vicious hawks that spot him as a likely prey, we see that it could hardly have been otherwise.

His history is told as a physiological thing, as we should expect from the author of La Nausée. His emerging personality is altogether bound up with the history of his bodily sensations. We learn how, in the random experimenting of his early years he delights, as children often do, in hurting creatures that will react, though there is no fun in hitting a tree and calling it names. For himself, however, he revels in the opposite sensations of being washed, caressed, tickled, and otherwise touched, by women. Being told over and over in his early childhood that he looks more like a cute little girl than a boy, he starts to wonder, as any child does, about appearances and reality, to doubt whether he exists, whether his parents really are his own mother and father, whether they have not exchanged clothing so as to seem each to be of the other sex.

The first part of "The Making of a Leader" is full of engaging anecdotal touches, that reveal a child's mind in action and stripped of any sentimentalizing. "From that day Lucien realized that he did not love his mother. He did not feel guilty about it, but he was twice as nice to her, because he had come to the conclusion that everybody must pretend all his life to love his parents, or else be a bad little boy." Or consider the nonchalance of this bit: "Lucien no longer bothered about God. At his first communion the curé said he was the most virtuous and pious little boy in the whole catechism-class."

As he is passing through stages of self-glorification—by tales of walking in his sleep (quite imaginary), by a spell of masturbation, by joining the others in jeering at the peewee proportions of a classmate only to be profoundly upset when the game turns on himself for his "asparagus" build (the awareness of a difference between himself and the gang gives him serious uneasiness), by a brief career of peeping at keyholes—his father, who is a Captain of Industry in a small way, gives him a casual indoctrination in the principles of being a "leader." He instills in Lucien a gentleman's scorn for thorough thinking. When he falls behind in his studies at the lyoée, his father says: "Students who attend school on scholarships make poor leaders: they have skipped an important part of life." The father shows him the proper shades of condescension to be used toward employees and the patronal ways of securing not only obedience but a distance-observing affection for the employer and his soil-rooted social group.

This deep security, imbued with the sense of the solidarity of the land and the unmixed heritage of the French racial strain in him, becomes Lucien's original choice and the unrecognized ideal toward which his adolescent years will see him craving and groping. In his desire to know what he is, whether he is, and above all where he belongs, this typical young French bourgeois, intelligent and mildly intellectual, is an easy mark for the zealots of various forms of baseness. He is saved from a romantic suicide and from his inner torments by his classmate Berliac, who has discovered Freud. "'Naturally, you too at one time desired to sleep with your mother. He wasn't asking, he was stating." Lucien finds it flattering to be labelled a "sadico-anal." But this doesn't last long. Berliac leads to Bergére, an older and sophisticated man, who pleases Lucien by telling him he is a second Rimbaud. He succeeds in seducing the boy, but—whether it is the "moral wholesomeness" of his family stock asserting itself, or merely timidity—Lucien soon ditches Bergére. After Freud and Rimbaud, the third prophet is Maurice Barrés. Another classmate, Lemordant, starts Lucien to reading Barrés's Les Déracinés, and the dénouement approaches. The heir to the Fleurier fortune sees that the answer to all his uncertainties will be in sinking his roots into the home-soil of France and sticking. Xenophobia, semitophobia, democratophobia are the natural and negative fruits of this positive isolationism.

This Action-Française phase of Lucien's history is of course developed at some length. A club-meeting scene, an incident of street violence, a couple of love-affairs, a sane friendship rejected, all lend interest to this last part of the story. The component elements of the nationalist complex are cleverly analyzed.

The author sees to it that some shred of reader-sympathy is left for his young protagonist. This is his creature; and besides, he has been showing Lucien to us as a victim, not as a villain. He has escaped the toils of Bergère and will have a normal sex life. He can afford to abandon the extreme fanaticism of the anti-semitic, anti-republican Action-Française, although by shunning the lunatic fringe he will only wield a more authoritative influence on the side of injustice. Lucien's human craving to be a joiner and a conformer is emphasized at the end. As he sinks into complacent adjustment to his privileged state, the Jews and foreigners circulating about him no longer irritate him, but give him on the contrary a faint sexual satisfaction. Thus Sartre reveals a subtleness in his art, making for plausibility and setting his work on a plane far above the writer whose dominating purpose blinds him to live values.

Although anti-semitism, like communism, is in some respects quite a different problem in our country from its counterpart in France, this narrative study nevertheless applies clearly to American situations as well as French, emphasizing, as it does, the human, fundamental urges that we all have to fight, in our neighbors, in ourselves, and in our children.