Jean-Paul Sartre both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. "Socialisme et liberté" soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote "Being and Nothingness", "The Flies", and "No Exit", none of which were censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. In his essay "Paris under the Occupation", Sartre wrote about the "correct" behavior of the Germans had entrapped too many Parisians into complicity with the occupation, accepting what was unnatural as natural, writing: The Germans did
Jean-Paul Sartre liberal intellectual: "Now teaching at a lycée in Laon ... Sartre made his headquarters the Dome café at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined <nowiki>[with]</nowiki> women. He wrote. And he was published." Sartre and his lifelong companion, de Beauvoir, existed, in her words, where "the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out". Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in "The Age of Reason", which was completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War.