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 Genet convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never return to prison. By 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer), entitled "Saint Genet" (1952), which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the next five years.