Le Diable et le Bon Dieu

Jouvet’s last production, this “war machine against God” achieved a success matched only by the scandal it provoked. In a cynical and scathing indictment, Sartre exposes the human folly of believing in a prophet, and questions how collective action can be undertaken other than through fear or lies. Sartre concludes that God does not exist: “For in this age of war, famine, despair and death, God is conspicuous by his absence: Do you see that void above our heads? That is God. Do you see that gap in the door? That is God. Do you see that hole in the ground? That too is God. Silence is God. Absence is God. God is the solitude of men.”

Sartre drew on Cervantes’s El Rufián dichoso to compose this play, set in Germany during the Lutheran Reformation, against a backdrop of peasant misery and rivalry among lords.