The Roads to Freedom
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Roads to Freedom (in French, Les chemins de la liberté) is a trilogy of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.
The three novels L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason), Le sursis (generally translated as The Reprieve but which could cover a number of semantic fields from 'deferment' to 'amnesty'), and La mort dans l'âme (mysteriously translated as Iron in the Soul), revolve around Mathieu, a Socialist teacher, and a group of his friends.
The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre´s philosophical position towards 'engagement' (commitment) in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L'existentialisme c'est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Form of Humanism), which was criticized from both sides of the existentialist fence.
