Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, a cousin of the missionary physician Albert Schweitzer ^[1]. His father died of illness barely fifteen months after the boy's birth, and Anne-Marie returned with her son to the home of her parents in Meudon. The household was dominated by her father, Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who surrounded the child with books and encouraged his precocious reading ^[2].

Sartre later reconstructed this bookish, fatherless childhood in his autobiography The Words (Les Mots, 1963), describing how he decided very early that writing would be his vocation and his substitute for religious faith ^[2]. The comfortable arrangement ended in 1917 when his mother remarried and the family moved to La Rochelle, a period Sartre remembered as unhappy. He was sent back to Paris to complete his schooling at the Lycée Henri IV and then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he prepared for the entrance examination to the elite École Normale Supérieure ^[1].

He entered the École Normale in 1924 and made it his intellectual home for five years, reading philosophy alongside a remarkable generation that included Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan. After failing the agrégation in philosophy on his first attempt in 1928, he placed first in the country the following year. Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met during that examination season, placed second, and the encounter began the defining partnership of both their lives ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Jean-Paul Sartre before the war would have found a provincial philosophy teacher with unusual ambitions. After military service in the meteorological corps, he taught at lycées in Le Havre, Laon, and Paris during the 1930s ^[1]. A fellowship year in Berlin in 1933 and 1934 introduced him to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the thought of Martin Heidegger, and this German training reshaped his entire philosophical program ^[4].

The breakthrough came in 1938 with the novel Nausea (La Nausée), in which the diarist Antoine Roquentin confronts the brute, unjustifiable existence of things in a fictionalized Le Havre. The book established Sartre as a writer who could turn metaphysical anxiety into literature, and the story collection The Wall (1939) confirmed his reputation ^[2]. During the same years he published technical studies of the imagination and the emotions that worked out his phenomenological method ^[4].

War interrupted and then accelerated his career. Mobilized in 1939, he was captured by German forces in June 1940 and held as a prisoner of war at Stalag XII-D near Trier, where he read Heidegger closely and wrote and staged a Christmas play for fellow prisoners. Released in the spring of 1941, he returned to occupied Paris, resumed teaching, and helped found a short-lived resistance discussion group called Socialisme et Liberté ^[1]. In 1943 he published both the massive treatise Being and Nothingness and the play The Flies, whose story of Orestes defying tyranny carried an unmistakable message to audiences under occupation ^[3].

Any honest account of Jean-Paul Sartre achievements begins with Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943), his attempt at a complete phenomenological ontology. The book distinguishes being-in-itself, the inert existence of things, from being-for-itself, the conscious existence of human beings, and argues that consciousness is defined by its freedom. Because people cannot escape choosing, they are, in his famous formulation, condemned to be free, and they flee that responsibility through the self-deception he called bad faith (mauvaise foi) ^[4].

His theater carried these ideas to the general public. No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944) locked three characters in a drawing room for eternity and supplied the much-quoted line that hell is other people. Later plays, including Dirty Hands (1948) and The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), dramatized political commitment and its moral costs ^[2]. The 1945 public lecture published as Existentialism Is a Humanism, with its slogan that existence precedes essence, made him a celebrity and made existentialism a household word, though Sartre himself came to regard the lecture as oversimplified ^[4].

In October 1945 he founded the review Les Temps Modernes with Beauvoir, Aron, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and edited it for the rest of his life. Through it he developed the doctrine of committed literature, the claim that a writer is responsible for the social effects of every word, argued at length in What Is Literature? (1947) ^[1]. His later philosophical labor, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), tried to reconcile existentialist freedom with Marxist analysis of history, and his enormous unfinished study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot, ran to nearly three thousand pages ^[4]. In 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature; he declined it, explaining that a writer must not let himself be turned into an institution ^[5].

The central relationship of Sartre's life was his partnership with Simone de Beauvoir, which lasted from 1929 until his death. The two never married, never shared a household, and agreed from the start to an open arrangement that distinguished their essential bond from contingent affairs with others. They read and edited each other's manuscripts for half a century, and their pact became one of the most discussed experiments in modern intellectual life ^[3].

Sartre lived simply for a man of his fame, working in cafés such as the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and for years occupying hotel rooms or a small apartment near Montparnasse. He was short, walleyed from a childhood illness that left him nearly blind in his right eye, and famously indifferent to money, giving much of his income away ^[1]. His work habits were punishing: long days of writing sustained by tobacco, coffee, and, during the Critique years, heavy use of the stimulant corydrane, a dependence he acknowledged and which biographers link to his declining health ^[3].

In 1965 he legally adopted Arlette Elkaïm, a young Algerian-born former student, who became his literary executor. The adoption strained relations within his circle, particularly with Beauvoir, but the two writers remained inseparable companions to the end ^[3].

From the 1950s onward Sartre was as much a political actor as a philosopher. He never joined the French Communist Party, but he worked alongside it during the early Cold War, then broke publicly with Moscow after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising of 1956 ^[1]. The Algerian War made him a target: he signed the Manifesto of the 121 defending the right to refuse military service, and his apartment on the rue Bonaparte was bombed twice by supporters of French Algeria. President Charles de Gaulle refused calls to prosecute him, reportedly remarking that one does not arrest Voltaire ^[1].

He opposed the American war in Vietnam and served in 1966 and 1967 as executive president of the Russell Tribunal, the unofficial body organized by Bertrand Russell to examine allegations of war crimes ^[5]. During the student and worker revolt of May 1968 he sided openly with the students, addressed them at the occupied Sorbonne, and in the following years lent his name to banned Maoist newspapers, selling La Cause du Peuple in the streets to dare the government to arrest him ^[1].

His body failed before his pen did. Sartre was left almost completely blind by 1973, which ended his writing life, though he continued dictating and giving interviews, including the long conversations published as Hope Now shortly before his death. He died of pulmonary edema on April 15, 1980, at Broussais Hospital in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. An estimated fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession through Montparnasse, a crowd without parallel for a French writer since the death of Victor Hugo ^[5]. He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, where Beauvoir was laid beside him six years later ^[3].

Basic Jean-Paul Sartre facts only begin to measure his influence. For roughly two decades after 1945 he was the model of the engaged intellectual, and existentialism shaped novels, theater, film, and psychiatry far beyond France. His analyses of freedom, responsibility, bad faith, and the gaze of the other remain standard points of reference in philosophy courses, and Being and Nothingness continues to be read as a landmark of twentieth-century thought ^[4].

His reputation has been contested since his death. Critics fault his long indulgence toward Soviet communism and his polemics against former friends such as Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, while defenders point to his opposition to colonialism in Algeria and his consistent support for the oppressed as they saw themselves ^[1]. Structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers of the 1960s built their programs partly in reaction against his philosophy of the subject, which itself is a measure of his centrality ^[4].

The archive he left is vast: the posthumous Notebooks for an Ethics and War Diaries, thousands of pages of correspondence with Beauvoir, and a stream of biographies, most notably Annie Cohen-Solal's 1985 life, keep scholarship active ^[3]. Any Jean-Paul Sartre biography must finally reckon with a man who insisted that a human being is nothing other than the sum of his acts, and whose own acts, in print and in the street, defined what it meant to be an intellectual in his century ^[5].