Jean-Paul SARTRE. [D'une Chine à l'autre. Preface]. Undated - Lot 185

Jean-Paul SARTRE. [D'une Chine à l'autre. Preface]. Undated [1954]. Autograph manuscript of 20 ½ pages, on 22 sheets of squared paper, with a few strikethroughs and corrections (pagination by another hand as well as references to commented photos indicated at the bottom of some pages). Preface to Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic reportage, published by Éditions Delpire in 1954, under the title D'une Chine à l'autre, taken during the first weeks of the Communist regime in China. Divided into three parts, the text begins by evoking the commonplaces that abound about China and the Chinese, from rotten eggs to discordant music and ingenious tortures. Sartre admits that, like so many others, he was a victim of this picturesqueness, before reading Henri Michaux's Un Barbare en Asie (1933): Then came Michaux, who was the first to show the Chinese without soul or shell, China without lotuses or Loti. A quarter of a century later, Cartier-Bresson's album completed the demystification. [...] Cartier-Bresson's photos never babble. They are not ideas: they give us ideas. Describing some of the photographs in the book, Sartre emphasizes their universality: Images bring men together when they are materialistic, that is, when they begin at the beginning. Through bodies, through needs, through work. To hell with rotten eggs and shark fins. You say they're exotic foods, because almost 40 million French people don't know what they taste like. But these foods are even more exotic in China, where almost four hundred million Chinese have never eaten them. Four hundred million Chinese are hungry, like the Italian day-laborers who toil to exhaustion, like the French peasants who are exploited by the Chiang Kai Shek family, like three quarters of Westerners by the great feudal lords of capitalism. After that, of course, we don't speak their language. And we don't have their morals. But there will always be time to talk about differences. What separates must be learned, what joins can be seen in the blink of an eye. When a man comes to you, you need to know at a glance whether he's a German, a Chinese, a Jew or a man. And to decide what you are, by deciding what he is. Turn this coolie into a Chinese grasshopper, and you'll instantly become a French frog [...] Cartier-Bresson's snapshots catch man at full speed, without giving him time to be superficial. In a hundredth of a second, we are all the same, all at the heart of our human condition". And, again citing certain shots, Sartre describes Cartier-Bresson's album as a announcement: It heralds the end of tourism; it teaches us gently, without unnecessary pathos, that misery has lost its picturesqueness and will never find it again. It's there, yet unbearably discreet on every page. It manifests itself in three basic operations: carrying, rummaging and marauding. Finally, the last part of this preface evokes the victory of the Communist troops, which Cartier-Bresson witnessed by photographing young soldiers lost in Shanghai. The war was over, peace had to be won. The photos perfectly capture the loneliness and anguish of these peasants in the heart of a superb, rotten city. Behind their shutters, the gentlemen take courage: "We'll lead them by the nose". It didn't take long for the gentlemen to change their minds, but that's another story, and Cartier-Bresson doesn't tell it. Let's thank him for showing us the most human of victories, the only one we can, without reservation, love. In November 1948, Henri Cartier-Bresson was commissioned by Life magazine to report on the "last days of Peking" before the arrival of Maoist troops. After arriving for two weeks, he stayed in China for ten months, witnessing the fall of Nanking, being forced to stay in Communist-controlled Shanghai, and leaving the country just a few days before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The story of Sartre's preface is recounted by Pierre Assouline, in Cartier-Bresson, l'oeil du siècle (Plon, 1999): "Nine years after taking his famous portrait on the Pont des Arts, Cartier-Bresson went to see Sartre, mouth agape, to ask him to preface his next album. But I've never been to China!" was the philosopher's immediate reply. The photographer, undaunted by the response, says whatever comes into his head. So what? Priests aren't married, yet they know a lot about women. - In that case...'. This is