Sartre et l’Alsace en 1939-1940 L’identité à l’épreuve de l’évacuation

Jean-Paul Sartre, who was of Alsatian descent on his mother’s side, is stationed in Alsace from September 1939 to June 1940, at a moment when thousands of Alsatians were being evacuated to the center of France. In his Carnets de la drôle de guerre and his letters to Beauvoir, he precisely describes life in the unevacuated zone and that of the often unwelcome evacuees, two hitherto little-examined testimonies underlying a vision—partly idealized and partly historically truthful—of Alsatian identity.