Jean-Paul Sartre

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. The prize was announced on the 22nd of October 1964. Nine days earlier, on the 14th of October, Sartre had written to the Nobel Institute asking to be removed from the list of nominees. The letter went unread. He won anyway, becoming the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize.

  This is a man who built a philosophy on a single jarring idea. People are condemned to be free. Sartre held that there is no creator and no fixed human nature. He summed it up in three words: existence precedes essence. If that is true, no one can excuse their actions by pointing to who they are. They made themselves by acting.

  He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He had an open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir that lasted a lifetime. He ate rotting rabbits under German occupation. He courted Soviet labor camps and Maoist newspapers, escaped two bomb attacks, and was pardoned by a president who said you do not arrest Voltaire. The questions ahead are how one boy from Paris became all of this.

• 2. A Schooled Imagination

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  Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German, taught his grandson mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. Sartre lived in his grandfather's house in Meudon because his father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, had died of an illness when the boy was two. The theologian, organist, and physician Albert Schweitzer was Sartre's cousin.

  At twelve his mother, Anne-Marie, remarried and the family moved to La Rochelle, where Sartre was frequently bullied, in part because of the wandering of his blind right eye. As a teenager in the 1920s he read Henri Bergson's essay Time and Free Will and was drawn to philosophy. He attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris, and earned certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics.

  At the École Normale Supérieure he wrote a 1928 thesis on the image in psychological life, supervised by Henri Delacroix. There he began his lifelong, sometimes fractious friendship with Raymond Aron. He befriended Paul Nizan, whom he considered his alter ego, and attended Alexandre Kojève's seminars for years. When he first sat the agrégation, he failed. The second time he virtually tied for first place with Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had met at the school in 1929, and was eventually awarded the top spot.

• 3. The Pranksters Revolt

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  In 1927 Sartre co-wrote an antimilitarist satirical cartoon for the school revue with Georges Canguilhem, and it particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson. Sartre was, from his first years at the École normale, one of its fiercest pranksters. That same year he and his comrades Nizan, Larroutis, Baillou and Herland staged a far larger stunt.

  Charles Lindbergh had just completed his New York City to Paris flight. Sartre and his friends telephoned newspapers and told them Lindbergh would receive an honorary École degree. Many papers, including Le Petit Parisien, announced the event on the 25th of May. Thousands turned up, journalists and curious spectators among them, to watch a Lindbergh look-alike. The scandal led Lanson to resign.

  The young Sartre was also building the intellectual machinery that would define him. Around 1928 he was hired as a private French tutor by the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shūzō, who may have been the first to stimulate his interest in phenomenology. From 1933 to 1934 he succeeded Raymond Aron in Berlin, where he studied Edmund Husserl's work. In 1939 he published an article on Husserl's intentionality in André Gide's magazine La Nouvelle Revue française, which won him a following among philosophy teachers.

• 4. Hell Is Other People

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  Bariona, ou le fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas, was Sartre's first theatrical piece, written while he was a prisoner of war. Drafted in 1939 as a meteorologist, he was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux and spent nine months in captivity, in Nancy and finally in Trier. There he read Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Citing poor eyesight and exotropia that affected his balance, he was released in April 1941.

  Returning to Paris, Sartre helped found the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. In the spring of 1941 he suggested with what de Beauvoir called cheerful ferocity that the group assassinate collaborators like Marcel Déat. The idea was rejected because none of them felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades. The group soon dissolved, and Sartre chose to write instead.

  He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none of which the Germans censored. Under the occupation the French often called the Germans les autres, the others. That phrase inspired Sartre's aphorism in Huis clos, l'enfer, c'est les Autres, Hell is other people. He intended the line at least in part as a dig at the German occupiers.

• 5. Paris Peopled By The Absent

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  The Germans did not stride through the streets revolver in hand, Sartre wrote in his essay Paris under the Occupation. They offered seats to old ladies on the Metro and patted children on the cheek. Their very correctness, he argued, entrapped Parisians into complicity, making the unnatural feel natural. When a Wehrmacht soldier asked him for directions, Sartre felt embarrassed and ashamed, remarking, We could not be natural.

  Food shortages dominated daily life as the majority of French food went to Germany. Sartre lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by a friend of de Beauvoir living in Anjou. The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay, full of maggots. Once he threw one out as uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it than meat.

  Fear reshaped conversation at the Café de Flore, where intellectuals worried one of them might be a mouche, an informer, or write anonymous denunciatory letters. By September 1940 the Abwehr alone had recruited 32,000 French people as mouches. By 1942 the Paris Kommandantur received an average of 1,500 letters a day from anonymous denouncers. Sartre wrote that Paris had become a sham, peopled by the absent. People simply vanished, and their families were politely received and sent away with comforting words from the offices on the Rue des Saussaies, headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris.

• 6. The Committed Pen

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  Les Temps modernes was named after Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times. Sartre launched the quarterly review as editor-in-chief in October 1945, in part to popularize his own thought, and aligned it with the Left, calling for writers to express political commitment. He had been an active contributor to Combat, the newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus.

  After the liberation of Paris, Sartre joined the Commission for the Purification of Bookstores and Publishing. He was merciless toward those who had collaborated or stayed passive. During the trial of Robert Brasillach he was among the intellectuals advocating execution, and he later criticized Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer.

  Sartre wrote about neglected groups. In 1946 he published Anti-Semite and Jew, attacking French antisemitism at a time when Jews returning from concentration camps were quickly abandoned. In 1947 he wrote on the condition of African Americans in the United States. In 1948 he wrote Black Orpheus, a critique of colonialism and racism, for Léopold Sédar Senghor's anthology. The philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the occupation. As Camus put it, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote.

• 7. The Revolutionary Faith

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  Workers of Billancourt must not be deprived of their hopes, Sartre said, and the phrase became a catchphrase meaning communist activists should not tell workers the whole truth lest their revolutionary enthusiasm decline. He embraced Marxism but never joined the Communist Party. He held that the Soviet Union was a revolutionary state working for humanity that could be criticized only for failing its own ideals.

  In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartre visited the Soviet Union and claimed to find complete freedom of criticism, while condemning the United States for sinking into prefascism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an ultra-Bolshevik. In 1964 Sartre attacked Khrushchev's Secret Speech, arguing the masses were not ready to receive the truth. A number of people, starting with Frank Gibney in 1961, classified him as a useful idiot.

  His anticolonialism ran through everything. He took a prominent role against French rule in Algeria, supported the FLN, and signed the Manifeste des 121. He argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes of the Algerian war. He opposed the Vietnam War and organized the Russell Tribunal in 1967. He admired Mao Zedong and praised Che Guevara as the most complete human being of our age. Yet he condemned Castro's persecution of homosexuals, saying, In Cuba there are no Jews, but there are homosexuals.

• 8. Fifty Thousand Mourners

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  Les Mots, published in 1964, was Sartre's witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, and in it he renounced literature as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. Asked in 1975 how he wished to be remembered, he named Nausea, his plays No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and his philosophical work Critique of Dialectical Reason, along with his essay Saint Genet.

  His body gave out under a merciless pace of work. He drove himself with amphetamines through the Critique and a massive biography of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot, both left unfinished. He had hypertension, became almost completely blind in 1973, and was a notorious chain smoker. During the May 1968 strikes he was arrested for civil disobedience, and President Charles de Gaulle pardoned him, saying you do not arrest Voltaire.

  Sartre died on the 15th of April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary edema. At his funeral on Saturday the 19th of April, 50,000 Parisians descended onto the boulevard du Montparnasse to accompany his cortege. The procession filed through the fourteenth arrondissement, past all his haunts, before entering the cemetery. He was buried first in a temporary grave; four days later his body was disinterred for cremation, and his ashes were reburied at Montparnasse Cemetery, to the right of the cemetery gate.