Camus and Sartre clashed over how to resist a Soviet occupation of France.

Evidence

Camus asked Sartre if he’d thought about what would happen to him personally if the Russians invaded. Perhaps the ‘hyena with a fountain pen’ would not be allowed to have the last laugh. Sartre turned the question back on the questioner: what would Camus do? Oh, said Camus, he would do what he did during the German Occupation — meaning he would join the Resistance. Sartre responded piously that he could never fight against the proletariat. Camus pressed his point: ‘You must leave. If you stay it won’t be only your life they’ll take, but your honour as well. They’ll cart you off to a camp and you’ll die. Then they’ll say you’re still alive, and they’ll use your name to preach resignation and submission and treason; and people will believe them.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 798

Categorization

• XREF: This anticipates the famous Camus-Sartre rupture over violence and communism, and Sartre’s refusal to renounce the proletariat even at the cost of personal integrity ties to his later Stalinist flirtations.
• DEEPTHINKING: Camus’s warning — that the regime will co-opt your name and use your honor against you after your death — is a chilling, still-resonant insight about how total systems appropriate the reputations of the dead. This is genuinely top-tier.