Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer who died of typhoid fever before his son turned two. Raised by his mother and her father, the polymath Charles Schweitzer, Sartre grew up in a bourgeois Alsatian household saturated with books and music. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1924, failed his agrégation in philosophy on the first attempt in 1928, then passed first in his class in 1929 — the year he met Simone de Beauvoir, who came second. Their lifelong partnership, conducted without marriage or cohabitation, became inseparable from his philosophy and her own. After teaching at the Lycée du Havre and the Institut Français in Berlin — where he encountered Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Martin Heidegger's ontology in 1933 and 1934 — Sartre returned to France with the raw material for a new philosophy. His first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), appeared in 1938. The protagonist Roquentin's visceral horror at the sheer contingency of existing objects — the way tree roots become obscenely, meaninglessly there — dramatized what Sartre was working out philosophically. The breakthrough came during the German occupation of France. Drafted in 1939, Sartre served as a meteorologist and was captured at Padoux in June 1940. He spent nine months in Stalag XII-D at Trier, where he read Heidegger's Being and Time and wrote a Christmas play for fellow prisoners. Released in April 1941 on medical grounds, he returned to Paris, joined the Resistance cell Socialisme et Liberté, and began writing his masterwork. Being and Nothingness was published in June 1943. Its central argument — that consciousness (being-for-itself) is fundamentally distinct from things (being-in-itself) because it is defined by its freedom rather than by any fixed nature — overturned centuries of essentialist thinking. Existence precedes essence: there is no pre-given human nature, only the radical, anguishing freedom to choose oneself at every moment, and the bad faith that consists in denying this freedom. The play No Exit premiered in May 1943 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier with its famous line: 'Hell is other people.' The point was not that others are bad but that under their gaze we risk becoming objects, fixed, defined from outside. After Liberation in 1944, Sartre launched the journal Les Temps Modernes with Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His October 1945 lecture 'Existentialism Is a Humanism' at the Club Maintenant drew such crowds that women fainted in the crush. Suddenly existentialism — the movement, the brand — was everywhere in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Sartre wrote in the Café de Flore and the Brasserie Lipp because his apartment was too cold to heat during the post-war fuel shortage; the habit stuck. His four-volume study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–72, unfinished at four volumes), demonstrated that existentialism could encompass biography, sociology, and Marxism. Sartre's political engagement grew more complicated through the 1950s: he defended the Soviet Union long after Hungary in 1956, broke with Camus over the question of revolutionary violence in 1952, supported Algerian independence, and signed the 'Manifesto of the 121' in 1960 calling on French soldiers to desert rather than fight in Algeria. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1964, he declined — the first writer to refuse the prize voluntarily — on the grounds that a writer who allows himself to be turned into an institution has been neutralized. His eyesight deteriorated sharply through the 1970s; he dictated rather than wrote his last works. He died of pulmonary edema in Paris on 15 April 1980. Fifty thousand people followed his coffin to Montparnasse Cemetery.

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