Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason (1945), his first novel in the Roads to Freedom trilogy, is one of our favourite novels.
We read this when we were but 19 years of age whilst at university in Nottingham. It immediately helped us realise, along with George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, what a novel could be.
As in, moving beyond the standard equilibrium, equilibrium shattered, equilibrium restored narrative structure we’d read up until that point.
It also introduced us to Sartre’s existential philosophy, which runs in subtle fashion across this great work. One we also think is his most accessible work for more casual readers.
Exploring Personal Freedom and Youth in The Age of Reason
“The individual’s duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.”
The Age of Reason (L’âge de raison) was published in English for the first time in 1947. Its launch in France two years earlier coincided with the end of a period of immense unrest, launching in the year of his country’s liberation.
Alongside the events of WWII there was the Nazi occupation of France, with Paris overrun by far-right lunatics. It was not a nice time for anyone.
Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy examined one Mathiue Delarue, a mid-30s philosophy teacher living in Paris. The Age of Reason opens proceedings and is set in 1938, with concerns of Hitler’s activities in Germany bustling away (as addressed in The Reprieve as the second instalment of the trilogy).
We follow the life of Mathieu, who considers himself an unattractive man and one also a bit at odds in life.
A misfit, almost, but one pursuing a personal theory of being a free agent.
His ideals are challenged when he finds out his mistress, Marcelle, is pregnant. The only thing that occurs to him is to get an abortion, which means he must find 4,000 francs to fund it.
Depending on what type of reader you are, the book can be viewed in two core ways:
- Sartre’s literary pursuit of personal freedom being the goal of humanity, with complex psychological studies of the main characters and their life journeys.
- A subtle melodrama depicting the life of a man living in Paris as he bumbles about and makes a mess of things.
We do think The Age of Reason’s literary triumph is it’s Sartre’s most accessible work. The books following on from this, particularly The Reprieve and its often baffling simultaneous prose, are much more profound in their vision.
But here we have the most grounded book we think Sartre ever wrote.
But here in amongst the main characters you have a lively, thoroughly enjoyable work you don’t have to take too seriously (if you don’t want).
Or you can dig a little deeper for your philosophical kicks. Totally up to you!
Sartre’s Focus on the Fleeting Nature of Youth
As Delarue bumbles about, in hapless fashion, he meets up with his brother Jacques and gets batted around during an intellectual duel.
“‘All I want is’ – and [Delarue] muttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame – ‘to retain my freedom.’
‘I should myself have thought,’ said Jacques, ‘that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one’s responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.”
Mathieu is there to ask for financial support and his brother wastes no time in gloating over the situation.
Away from the wranglings of adult life, Delarue takes solace in his avuncular pursuits. That’s with the young characters Boris and Ivich Serguine (siblings), attractive and carefree as they are in their youthful endeavours.
At least Boris is, anyway, Ivich is actually a bit of a nervous, paranoid wreck.
Mathieu marvels at the pair of them, which highlights a major theme in The Age of Reason—youthfulness and its brief appearance in your life. In contrast, he notes of older people this.
“With older people, it’s quite different. They’re reliable, they show you what to do, and there’s solidity in their affection.”
“Youth is fantastic” is what he muses as he thinks about the siblings and their antics.
Ivich, beautiful but OCD, Boris charming yet fatalistic—a private monologue reveals he intends to blow his brains out at 25 so as not having to face the loss of his youth (a fit of hedonism many an early twenties person has latched on to).
This is all resonates with us, as we read this at 19.
We identified with Boris enormously and felt that we, too, could never grow old. Now here we are rewriting this piece on 20/01/2024 aged 39 and there we go. Two decades on and we now understand Mathieu’s contemplations on it all.
That’s just one of many things we love about this work.
Sartre does capture in empathetic, yearning fashion how we often fail to fully appreciate being that young.
We think we appreciated it (at least we hope), at 21 we remember dwelling on those moments of perfection, being thankful for them, but embracing the inevitability of getting older (even if it didn’t feel like it’d ever happen).
And we feel like we have Sartre’s novel to thank for helping us realise that.
Delarue’s Path to Freedom
“It’s just what people do when they’re getting old, when they’re sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.”
It’s possible to also view Mathieu’s time spent with younger people as living in denial. As if, at 34, he’s not willing to let go of that phase of his life yet.
His brother chides him over that.
And it’s if Marcelle’s pregnancy has brought the crushing reality of his life stage right down on him. Unhappy, he wants to blot it out.
But he is smart and has the capacity to self-reflect and recognise his foibles.
“I’ve lived the life of a man without teeth, he thought about it. A life of a man without teeth. I’ve never bitten, I’ve been waiting, keeping myself for later – and now I’ve just ascertained that I don’t have teeth anymore.”
There’s also the case of his Machiavellian friend Daniel Sereno. He’s an extremely good looking gay man, but one whose masing behaviour hints at a sociopathic nature.
Mathieu appears to envy Daniel, as the latter has his freedom. David Caute notes this in the introduction to our Penguin Classics edition.
“Daniel was created to illustrate the author’s phenomenology of consciousness, constantly evading responsible relationships by escaping into the passive ‘In-itself’ (En soi) conditions. ‘He wishes he were dead, and he exists, obstinately maintains his own existence.'”
And whilst it all seems to be sliding from his grasp, the narrative does work its way to some sort of satisfactory conclusion for Delarue.
Even if the subsequent novels firmly put his experiences here into irrelevance—WWII is a short distance away to challenge his personal philosophies in the most destructive, challenging means imaginable.
The Age of Reason as a Fantastic Starting Point in Sartre’s Canon
Some of our friends have classified Sartre’s writing as “boring”, which made it clear to us they haven’t read The Age of Reason.
Sure, wading through the existential heavy time of it Being and Nothingness (1943) won’t thrill everyone. But if you want an accessible Sartre with exciting prose and a magnificent, subtle story then The Age of Reason is just that.
Contemporary reviews were full of praise, too. In July 1947, Justin O’Brien wrote for The New York Times this.
“There is, indeed, something more in The Age of Reason than an exciting novel and a philosophical problem. As a somber background to Mathieu’s private dilemma, Sartre presents a picture of the war in Spain and of the eve of the war in Europe.”
Again, it’s a book that doesn’t demand you to contemplate existentialism or Sartre’s musings on politics.
There are bright and breezy exchanges between characters. Boris, in particular, is written with such amazing charm and grace, perfectly capturing a young man with a lot of charisma.
Then you’ve got Daniel with his devious scheming, which seems to hang over Delarue’s every move whilst he believes he has a genuine friend.
Through it all Mathieu is quite naïve, gradually more aware of it, and then pushing on into proper adulthood by the close of the story.
“If I didn’t try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.”
Then the rest of The Roads to Freedom trilogy continues, with The Reprieve and then Iron in the Soul (1949).
Sartre wrote much of a fourth entry in the series, but didn’t finish it.
If you only read one book from all of it, then we highly recommend starting right here. As The Age of Reason is a brilliant character study for the ages.
