He said, “It isn’t the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution.” He was, of course, already an “institution,” but he valued his personal autonomy. (How he reconciled that value with Maoism is not clear to me.) He didn’t let institutions own him, but he did join uprisings, and was arrested for civil disobedience in the street demos supporting the strikes of May 1968. President de Gaulle quickly pardoned him, with the magnificently Gallic observation that “you don’t arrest
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