Les Mains sales Reading Order

Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948) by Jean-Paul Sartre is a political thriller in the form of a play: Hugo, a young bourgeois idealist who has joined a Communist party in an unnamed Eastern European country, has been sent to assassinate Hoederer, the party's pragmatic leader, who is planning a compromise coalition with rival factions that the party's dogmatists consider a betrayal. When Hugo lives in Hoederer's house as his secretary, he comes to admire and even love the man he is supposed to kill; the assassination, when it finally happens, is triggered not by political conviction but by a moment of sexual jealousy. The play is structured around Hugo's retrospective attempt to make sense of what he did and why — and the central question is whether a political act can be meaningful if it is motivated by private feeling rather than ideological purity. Les Mains sales was received by the French Communist Party as an anti-Communist play and was immediately used by anti-Communist movements in Europe, which Sartre did not intend; he withdrew permission for productions in countries where it was being used as propaganda. The play is ultimately about the existentialist problem of 'dirty hands': the question of whether it is possible to act politically without compromise, and whether a man who has committed a genuine crime can retroactively give it political meaning.