Under the Empire how beautiful was the Republic!

“Under the Empire how beautiful was the Republic!” is an expression of retrospective political longing that Jean-Paul Sartre uses to illuminate a more general structure of disappointment: an anticipated future can make the present seem destined for completion, yet that future loses its force as soon as it is realized and becomes past.

The Expression in Context

The line appears in an account of the For-itself’s relation to its future. A person who says that they will be happy projects the present self, carrying its past, toward a future in which it hopes to become what it lacks. The future is therefore not simply a later point in time; it is the possibility through which the present gives its movements and circumstances a meaning.

The political contrast in the expression gives this structure a compact historical image. The Republic is looked back on from under the Empire as something that seems beautiful in retrospect. Its remembered appeal is inseparable from the later situation from which it is viewed, just as a personal future acquires its promised significance from the present project that reaches toward it.

The Future’s Promise and Failure

The future promises an ideal reunion of facticity, present existence, and possibility: the point at which the self might finally arise as a completed being. But, Sartre argues, this completion remains ideal. In the tennis-court example, an eventual position gives the player’s intermediate positions their projected meaning; once the position is reached, however, the supposed reunion is not an operative fusion of the self with what it had anticipated.

Instead, the future slides into the past as a bygone future. The present self may even match the anticipated future in content, but it is no longer that future as it was projected—as the hoped-for point of reunion and self-completion. The expression’s retrospective admiration thus echoes the disappointment of discovering that what has arrived cannot preserve the promise by which it was awaited.

Philosophical Significance

The line names a recurring disillusionment rather than a simple judgment about political history. Each emergence into the future leaves the For-itself facing a new lack: the future that once oriented the present is now past, while another possibility opens beyond it. The future can outline the meaning of the present, but it cannot predetermine what the For-itself will become, because freedom continually prevents possibility from hardening into a final, guaranteed identity.

In this argument, the Republic’s beauty under the Empire sharpens the distance between a possibility as projected and a reality as lived. The expression’s force lies in that reversal: what seemed to promise fulfillment becomes an object of retrospective longing, while the search for completion begins again.