The Press: Print, and Be Seized

Underground newspapers are notoriously under-read, under-circulated and over-persecuted. But the case of La Cause du Peuple, the organ of France's outlawed Maoist proletarian movement, is extreme. It is not printed to be read, but to be seized by the authorities.

Since it began two years ago, the bimonthly paper has had three editors. The first two are in jail for inciting public disorder. Their conviction last May touched off clashes reminiscent of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris. The third editor is Jean-Paul Sartre, 65.

The father of existentialism and refuser of the Nobel Prize explains that he did not accept the editorship so much "to defend La Cause du Peuple as to defend the liberty of the press." He does not align himself with the rabid left-wing advice blazed in La Cause's headlines to "Enlist everybody in the Guerrillas." Yet the paper does report with surprising accuracy riots, demonstrations and strikes. By becoming editor, he hoped to defend freedom of expression by following in his predecessors' footsteps and getting arrested. Indignant that the French government refuses to seize him, Sartre says: "If the government would prosecute me, it would not be able to prevent my trial from becoming a political one."

Cause Célèbre. The result is a grotesque charade. For the past six months, gendarmes have stormed a Montmartre printing plant once each fortnight. There they seize and confiscate every issue of La Cause they can find. But the sly old iconoclast long ago found a secret printing press to publish about 5,000 copies. On publication day, Sartre and a few friends (including Film Directors Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle, and his longtime companion, Simone de Beauvoir) pick up the papers, transport them to a side street near St.-Germain-des-Prés, and begin to peddle them. Then the police arrest everyone giving away, selling or reading the paper. Everyone, that is, except prominent people and, of course, Sartre and De Beauvoir, who stay on to deliver diatribes about the rape of press freedom.

The government's decision not to arrest him galls Sartre. "I am not convicted, nor am I interrogated," he says. "But the printer of the paper is apprehended." It was De Gaulle who once expressed the absurdity of arresting Sartre for his writings and actions. "One doesn't arrest Voltaire."

Last week Sartre took a new tack. Instead of bringing out La Cause on its usual Monday, he published the paper on Friday, and kept carefully out of sight. Instead, representatives of well-known left-wing Paris papers, publishers and owners of leading bookshops went to the printing plant and picked up La Cause. For once, the paper went on sale without being seized.