Le Diable et le Bon Dieu Reading Order

Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951) by Jean-Paul Sartre is the most ambitious and theatrically spectacular of Sartre's dramatic works: a three-act play set in sixteenth-century Germany during the Peasants' War, following Goetz von Berlichingen, a mercenary commander who has spent his life doing evil for its own sake. When a wager forces him to try doing pure good, he discovers that good and evil are equally arbitrary — that God is absent, that the universe is indifferent to moral categories, and that the only freedom is to commit oneself to a human project. The play covers an enormous canvas: peasant revolt, religious war, plague, massacre, sexual renunciation, and the emergence of revolutionary commitment. Goetz begins as a man who glorifies evil as a sign of individual force and ends as a man who understands that in a world without God, the only meaningful commitment is to humanity itself — not from love or piety but from the recognition that there is nothing else. The play is sometimes compared to Brecht's epic theatre (Sartre greatly admired Brecht) and sometimes to medieval mystery plays, but it is ultimately Sartrean: the philosophical argument about freedom, commitment, and the non-existence of God is carried by a dramatic action of great violence and energy.