during the second world war, the experience of sartre and others in the french resistance to the nazi occupation of france emphasized political activism as a form of personal commitment. this political dimension was developed in sartre's later trilogy of novels, "les chemins de la liberté" ("the roads to freedom") (1945–1949), which concern a vicious circle of failure on the part of a thinking individual to progress effectively from thought to action. finally, for sartre, political commitment became explicitly marxist.