Novel Series: The Roads to Freedom

Overview
Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom is a trilogy of novels composed between 1945 and 1949 that follows a loose circle of Parisians from the prewar years through France’s collapse in 1940. At its center stands Mathieu Delarue, a thirty-something philosophy teacher who treats freedom as an abstract value until history and intimate entanglements make it concrete, burdensome, and inescapable. Through interwoven perspectives, friends, lovers, political militants, and bystanders, Sartre fuses private crises with public catastrophe, staging an existential education in which every postponement of choice is itself a choice.

The Age of Reason
Set in 1938 Paris, the opening novel compresses existential stakes into a domestic dilemma. Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, is pregnant; he scrambles to raise money for an abortion, not from conviction but to preserve his autonomy. He haunts cafés and apartments seeking funds, and in each encounter the language of freedom curdles into evasion. His friend Daniel, clever and corrosively self-hating, supplies the money yet also tells Marcelle of the scheme, pushing her to claim the pregnancy as hers rather than Mathieu’s problem. Around them drift other figures, Ivich, a volatile student whose adolescent revolt fascinates Mathieu; Boris, a naïve youth enthralled by the glamour of Lola, a nightclub singer; Brunet, a disciplined communist, each presenting a different posture toward commitment. By the close, Marcelle’s decision to keep the child exposes the emptiness of Mathieu’s neutrality. The philosophic spectator discovers that not choosing is simply bad faith in another key.

The Reprieve
The second volume spans the week of the Munich crisis in September 1938. War threatens, then recedes as statesmen choose appeasement, granting Europe a temporary stay of execution and the characters a deceptive breather from responsibility. Sartre fragments the narrative into a nervous montage, sliding without warning from one consciousness to another, lovers quarrel, militants calculate, Jews and refugees feel the trap tightening, so that personal anxieties echo the continent’s. Mathieu, Marcelle, Ivich, Daniel, Brunet, and others hover between relief and shame as the accord is announced. The reprieve is not peace but postponement; the characters’ suspended lives mirror a politics that refuses decision while manufacturing it by default.

Iron in the Soul
When war finally comes in 1940, delay collapses into defeat. Mobilization disperses the cast: some join the army, others flee, are interned, or improvise survival. Mathieu, stripped of alibis by the scale of events, seeks an action adequate to his professed values. Amid retreat and panic he participates in a doomed last stand at a farmhouse, choosing to fight when surrender is the prevailing logic, and is killed. Brunet is captured and begins the hard apprenticeship of imprisonment, grasping that solidarity has a cost beyond slogans. The young idealists face disillusionment; the cynics discover that history will not spare them. Sartre allows no heroics untouched by ambiguity, yet he grants that a lucid act, even at the wrong moment, can forge meaning.

Themes and Form
Across the trilogy Sartre dramatizes freedom as a condition of perpetual choice under pressure, where every effort to evade responsibility, through love, ideology, habit, or delay, returns as anguish. Bad faith is not merely lying to oneself but treating one’s situation as inert, as though history were happening elsewhere. The books’ style, present-tense immediacy, free indirect discourse, abrupt shifts of viewpoint, forces the reader into the same contingency the characters inhabit, a world without stable narrative guarantees. Political commitments, sexuality, shame, and friendship are tested against the demand to choose; the roads to freedom proliferate, but each is paid for. The trilogy ends amid defeat, not resolution, yet it claims that authenticity is a practice undertaken in the teeth of circumstance, not a doctrine sheltered from it.