French philosopher, novelist and playwright, co-founder of Les Temps modernes, life partner of Simone de Beauvoir, and the central figure of French existentialism whose 1952 dispute with Albert Camus over The Rebel ended their friendship.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist and playwright, and the leading figure of existentialism, the philosophy that says people have no fixed nature and must decide for themselves what to become. He was born in Paris on 21 June 1905 and died there on 15 April 1980. About fifty thousand people followed his coffin through the streets to Montparnasse cemetery.
His central claim was that people are not born with a fixed nature. A human being exists first and defines himself afterwards, through what he chooses to do, and there is no God, no human nature and no external authority to take the decision off him. Sartre called the resulting condition freedom, and said people find it unbearable.
He wrote the philosophy in Being and Nothingness in 1943, and then wrote the same ideas as fiction and theatre so that ordinary readers could get at them. His play No Exit produced a line that is still quoted: hell is other people.
He turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, on the grounds that a writer should not let himself be turned into an institution. For thirty years after the war he was the most famous intellectual in the world, and he used that position to campaign against colonial war in Algeria and Vietnam.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, died of a fever before Sartre was two. His mother, Anne-Marie, took him to live with her parents.
His grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, was a teacher of German who ran the household and dominated it. He was also the uncle of Albert Schweitzer, the doctor and organist. He put the boy in a house full of books and directed his reading.
Sartre described this childhood in Words, published in 1964: a small, cosseted, fatherless boy performing cleverness for adults, discovering that he existed for other people as a character rather than a person. He wrote that having no father was the making of him, because with no father in the house nobody told him what to become.
Sartre entered the École Normale Supérieure, the school that trains France's academic elite, and took his agrégation in philosophy in 1929, placing first. Simone de Beauvoir placed second. She was twenty-one and the youngest person ever to pass it.
Sartre and Beauvoir met in 1929 and remained together, in one form or another, for the next fifty-one years. They never married and never shared a home. Their arrangement, which they described openly, allowed each of them other lovers while treating the relationship between them as the one that could not be broken. It has been examined and criticised ever since. Both of them began relationships with their own students, and in 1943 Beauvoir was dismissed from teaching after the mother of one pupil complained to the authorities.[1]
Intellectually they worked as a pair: reading each other's drafts, arguing, and building overlapping philosophies. Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in 1949, applied the existentialist argument about freedom to the position of women. It has since been more widely read and cited than Sartre's own philosophical work.
Sartre taught philosophy in provincial lycées, first at Le Havre from 1931. In 1933 he went to Berlin for a year on a fellowship, to read Edmund Husserl.
Husserl's method — phenomenology — meant describing experience exactly as it presents itself, before any theory is laid over it. Sartre took the method and used it on ordinary things: nausea, shame, a waiter performing the role of a waiter, the sensation of being looked at. That combination of German philosophy and concrete French description is what made his work readable.
Nausea, published in 1938, is a novel in the form of a diary. Antoine Roquentin, a historian living in a provincial port town, finds that objects have begun to disturb him: a pebble, a glass of beer, the root of a chestnut tree in a public park.
Roquentin is discovering that things exist without reason or explanation. They are simply there, and so is he, and nothing accounts for any of it. Roquentin calls the feeling nausea.
Nausea was Sartre's first novel and it made his reputation. He had put a difficult philosophical claim — existence has no built-in meaning — into a novel that could be read for its own sake.
Sartre was drafted in 1939 and served as a meteorologist. In June 1940 he was captured by German troops and spent nine months as a prisoner of war, including time in Stalag XII-D at Trier.
The prisoner-of-war camp changed Sartre's thinking. He had been a solitary and rather contemptuous man. In the camp he lived at close quarters with other prisoners, wrote and staged a play for them at Christmas, and discovered what he later called being with others. After 1941 he wrote less about the isolated individual and more about how people act together.
He was released in April 1941 and returned to occupied Paris. Accounts differ on how: by medical discharge for poor eyesight, or by walking out with forged civilian papers.
In Paris Sartre and Beauvoir formed a small resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté, with other intellectuals. It achieved nothing, could not connect with the larger networks, and dissolved within months.
Sartre spent the rest of the occupation teaching and writing. His play The Flies, staged in 1943, retells the Greek myth of Orestes, who kills his mother, accepts what he did, and refuses to repent. It passed the German censor, and French audiences understood it as a call to resist. Being and Nothingness appeared the same year.
His war record was later attacked. He had published under occupation, when other writers refused to; his own resistance work was brief and ineffective; and after the Liberation he wrote as if he had been in the thick of it. Both Simone de Beauvoir and later biographers acknowledged the gap between what he did in the war and how he wrote about it afterwards.
Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, is Sartre's main philosophical work: a seven-hundred-page account of consciousness, freedom and other people.
Its central argument is that human beings have no given essence. We are, in his phrase, condemned to be free: every action is a choice made without a rulebook, and we cannot escape choosing, because refusing to choose is itself a choice. From this comes anguish, and from anguish comes bad faith — the everyday habit of pretending we had no choice, that we are only what our job or our nature or our circumstances made us.
Being and Nothingness also analyses what Sartre called the look: the experience of being seen by another person, which turns you from a free subject into an object in someone else's world.
No Exit was first staged in Paris in 1944, under the occupation. Three characters — a man who deserted in wartime, a woman who drowned her baby, and a woman in love with her — are locked in a room together and gradually understand that they are dead and this is hell. There is no torturer. Each is the other two's punishment.
The last lines contain the phrase that became the most quoted sentence in modern philosophy: hell is other people. Sartre spent the rest of his life explaining that he did not mean other people are horrible. He meant that we see ourselves through other people's judgement, and that if those judgements are fixed, as they are for the dead, there is no way to escape their version of you.
Sartre came out of the war famous. In 1945 he founded the review Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, and gave a public lecture, Existentialism Is a Humanism, to a crowd so large that people fainted in the hall.[2]
Existentialism became a fashion. Young people adopted the ideas, a style of talk and dress, and a neighbourhood: the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés filled with readers who had got through some of it, and the newspapers covered Sartre and Beauvoir as celebrities. He later disowned the lecture as a simplification.
The fashion rested on a serious claim. If there is no God and no fixed human nature, then people are responsible for what they make of themselves and of their societies, and the excuse of following orders is not available.
From the late 1940s Sartre moved steadily left. He was never a member of the Communist Party and quarrelled with it repeatedly, but he defended the Soviet Union for a period and broke with it publicly over the invasion of Hungary in 1956. His friendship with Albert Camus ended in 1952 in a public argument in the pages of Les Temps modernes, over communism and political violence.
Algeria was the cause that defined him. He opposed the French war there from the beginning and signed the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960, supporting the right of soldiers to refuse the draft. In 1961 he wrote a preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth endorsing the use of violence by colonised people against colonial rule, in language critics still cite against him. His apartment was bombed twice by pro-French-Algeria extremists.
In 1960 he published the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an attempt to join existentialism to Marxism by explaining how free individuals become groups, classes and institutions.
In October 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature. He refused it.[3]
His stated reason was that a writer must not allow himself to be turned into an institution, and that accepting an official honour would attach the weight of that institution to everything he wrote. He also objected that the prize went overwhelmingly to Western writers. He had tried to decline in advance, by letter, and the letter arrived too late.[3]
He did not collect the money either. He is one of two people to have declined a Nobel Prize voluntarily.[3]
In May 1968 students occupied the Sorbonne and ten million workers went on strike. Sartre, then sixty-two, supported the students, went into the occupied university to speak to them, and was interviewed by the movement's own press.
Afterwards he took up positions on the far left, becoming nominal editor of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple in 1970 when its real editors were being arrested. He sold it on the street himself, judging that the government would not risk arresting him. It never did.
Sartre's health broke down in the early 1970s under the strain of overwork, amphetamines, tobacco and alcohol. In 1973 he lost most of his sight and could no longer read or write. He continued to work by talking, dictating and being read to.
He died on 15 April 1980, aged seventy-four, of pulmonary edema. About fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession through Paris. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery; Simone de Beauvoir was buried in the same grave in 1986.
Sartre gave the twentieth century a vocabulary for a problem it could not avoid. Once God, nature and tradition stop supplying instructions, every person has to decide what to do and cannot blame anyone else for the answer. Terms he made ordinary — bad faith, authenticity, condemned to be free, hell is other people — are still used by people who have never read him.
He also demonstrated a way of being a writer in public. He wrote philosophy, novels, plays, criticism, biography and journalism, and he used the fame that came from them to take sides on Algeria, Vietnam, Hungary and 1968. He defended Soviet rule into the 1950s and endorsed political violence in Algeria. He revised both positions later, slowly and in print.
His influence runs through French thought after him, including Michel Foucault and the structuralists who built their work by rejecting his. It also runs through Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which took his account of freedom and turned it on the position of women.
Born in Paris on 21 June, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer.
His father dies of a fever. Sartre and his mother move in with her parents.
His mother remarries and the family moves to La Rochelle, where Sartre is bullied at school.
Enters the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Takes the agrégation in philosophy, placing first. Simone de Beauvoir places second. They meet that year and remain together for fifty-one years.
Begins teaching philosophy at the lycée in Le Havre.
Spends a year in Berlin on a fellowship, reading Edmund Husserl and learning phenomenology.
Publishes Transcendence of the Ego, his first philosophical work.
Publishes Nausea, a novel in diary form about a man who finds that things exist for no reason.
Publishes the story collection The Wall. Is drafted, and serves as a meteorologist.
Captured by German troops in June and held as a prisoner of war, including time at Stalag XII-D at Trier.
Released in April and returns to occupied Paris. Forms the short-lived resistance group Socialisme et Liberté with Simone de Beauvoir and others.
Publishes Being and Nothingness, his main philosophical work. His play The Flies is staged in Paris under the occupation.
No Exit is first staged in Paris. Its closing lines give the language the phrase "hell is other people".
Founds the review Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, and delivers the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism to an overflowing hall.
Publishes Anti-Semite and Jew, an analysis of prejudice against Jews in France.
Publishes What Is Literature?, arguing that prose writing is a form of political action.
The Catholic Church places his complete works on the Index of Forbidden Books.
Simone de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex, applying the existentialist account of freedom to the position of women.
His friendship with Albert Camus ends in a public quarrel in Les Temps modernes over communism and political violence.
Breaks publicly with the Soviet Union over the invasion of Hungary.
Publishes the Critique of Dialectical Reason, joining existentialism to Marxism. Signs the Manifesto of the 121 supporting draft refusal in Algeria.
Writes the preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. His apartment is bombed by pro-French-Algeria extremists.
His apartment is bombed a second time.
Publishes Words, his memoir of childhood. Refuses the Nobel Prize in Literature in October, saying a writer must not let himself be turned into an institution.
Presides over the Russell Tribunal on American conduct in Vietnam.
Supports the student occupations of May and speaks to the students at the occupied Sorbonne.
Becomes nominal editor of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple after its editors are arrested, and sells it in the street himself.
Publishes the first volumes of The Family Idiot, his enormous study of Gustave Flaubert.
Loses most of his sight and can no longer read or write. He continues working by dictation.
Visits the imprisoned Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader in Stuttgart and criticises his prison conditions.
Dies in Paris on 15 April, aged seventy-four, of pulmonary edema. About fifty thousand people follow the funeral procession to Montparnasse cemetery.
Simone de Beauvoir dies and is buried in the same grave.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Sartre first met in occupied Paris in 1943, at the June opening of Sartre's play The Flies. They became close through the Resistance and post-Liberation Left Bank years, appeared together in the founding circle around Les Temps modernes, and broke publicly in 1952 after a hostile review of The Rebel in the journal. The friendship ended and was never repaired; Camus died in 1960 with the break unresolved.
Clashed with · 1945–1948
The dispute begins with the passage in Sartre's essay in Les Temps modernes no. 3 (December 1945) asserting that Céline had supported Nazi political positions because he had been paid to do so. Céline learned of the passage in Denmark and replied in late 1947 with the short pamphlet À l'agité du bocal, published by Albert Paraz in 1948 in Le Gala des vaches and in Pierre Lanauve de Tartas's separate edition.
Clashed with · 1957
Sartre wrote both the scenario and the dialogue for Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), Raymond Rouleau's film of Miller's play The Crucible, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as the Proctors; the Cinémathèque française credits him as scénariste and dialoguiste. Sartre rewrote the Salem hysteria as a class conflict, making the accused poor and the accusers propertied, and cut the Reverend Hale's reasoned turn against the court. Miller rejected the reading in print: the screenplay, he wrote in Timebends, seemed to him to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities. The disagreement is public, documented, and about one film: no source records Miller and Sartre ever meeting.
Met · 1944
After Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir read his work, Genet approached Sartre at the Café de Flore and entered their Saint-Germain circle.
Met · 1979–1980
Sagan had admired Sartre since adolescence without meeting him. She published an open letter to him in 1979; Sartre, by then blind, had it read aloud and asked to meet her. They spent the last year of his life in each other's company until his death in April 1980.
Existence itself becomes physically disturbing to a solitary writer in a French town.
Sartre was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in 1980; Beauvoir was buried in the same grave six years later.
Visit the place
The Flore was Sartre and Beauvoir's working café for years — warm when their own rooms were not, and close enough to Saint-Germain-des-Prés to serve as an office.
Visit the place
One of the two cafés on the junction now named for Sartre and Beauvoir, and part of the pair's daily working geography in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Visit the place
The square beside Saint-Germain-des-Prés, renamed for Sartre and Beauvoir together in 2000 — the junction of the two cafés the pair used as offices for decades.
Visit the place
Sartre studied at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s and prepared for the agrégation in philosophy there — failing at the first attempt, then placing first in 1929.
Visit the placeJean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist and playwright, born in Paris in 1905 and died there in 1980. He was the best-known figure of existentialism and, for thirty years after the Second World War, the most famous intellectual in the world.
The claim that people are not born with a fixed nature or purpose. You exist first and become who you are through what you choose to do. Because there is no God and no human nature to consult, nobody can take the choice off you, and you cannot blame anything else for the result.
Not that other people are unpleasant. The line ends No Exit, in which three dead characters are locked in a room forever. He meant that we come to see ourselves through other people's judgement, and that when those judgements are fixed, as they are for the dead, you can never escape their version of you.
He turned down the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature because he believed a writer who accepts an official honour is turned into an institution, and that this attaches the weight of the institution to everything he writes. He also objected that the prize went overwhelmingly to Western writers. He took no money.
No. They met in 1929, when he placed first and she placed second in the philosophy agrégation, and they stayed together for fifty-one years without marrying or living in the same home. Their arrangement allowed each of them other lovers, and it has been criticised since, particularly over the treatment of the younger women involved.
He was drafted in 1939, captured in June 1940, and held as a prisoner of war for nine months. Back in occupied Paris he formed a resistance group that achieved nothing and dissolved within months, and he wrote and published, including Being and Nothingness and the play The Flies. His war record was later attacked for exactly that contrast.
Of pulmonary edema, in Paris, on 15 April 1980, aged seventy-four. His health had broken down through overwork, amphetamines, tobacco and drink, and he had lost most of his sight in 1973. About fifty thousand people followed his coffin to Montparnasse cemetery.
Buried at · 1980
Sartre was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in 1980; Beauvoir was buried in the same grave six years later.
Frequented
The Flore was Sartre and Beauvoir's working café for years — warm when their own rooms were not, and close enough to Saint-Germain-des-Prés to serve as an office.
Frequented
One of the two cafés on the junction now named for Sartre and Beauvoir, and part of the pair's daily working geography in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Frequented
The square beside Saint-Germain-des-Prés, renamed for Sartre and Beauvoir together in 2000 — the junction of the two cafés the pair used as offices for decades.
Studied at
Sartre studied at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s and prepared for the agrégation in philosophy there — failing at the first attempt, then placing first in 1929.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Sartre first met in occupied Paris in 1943, at the June opening of Sartre's play The Flies. They became close through the Resistance and post-Liberation Left Bank years, appeared together in the founding circle around Les Temps modernes, and broke publicly in 1952 after a hostile review of The Rebel in the journal. The friendship ended and was never repaired; Camus died in 1960 with the break unresolved.
Clashed with · 1945–1948
The dispute begins with the passage in Sartre's essay in Les Temps modernes no. 3 (December 1945) asserting that Céline had supported Nazi political positions because he had been paid to do so. Céline learned of the passage in Denmark and replied in late 1947 with the short pamphlet À l'agité du bocal, published by Albert Paraz in 1948 in Le Gala des vaches and in Pierre Lanauve de Tartas's separate edition.
Clashed with · 1957
Sartre wrote both the scenario and the dialogue for Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), Raymond Rouleau's film of Miller's play The Crucible, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as the Proctors; the Cinémathèque française credits him as scénariste and dialoguiste. Sartre rewrote the Salem hysteria as a class conflict, making the accused poor and the accusers propertied, and cut the Reverend Hale's reasoned turn against the court. Miller rejected the reading in print: the screenplay, he wrote in Timebends, seemed to him to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities. The disagreement is public, documented, and about one film: no source records Miller and Sartre ever meeting.
Met · 1944
After Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir read his work, Genet approached Sartre at the Café de Flore and entered their Saint-Germain circle.
Met · 1979–1980
Sagan had admired Sartre since adolescence without meeting him. She published an open letter to him in 1979; Sartre, by then blind, had it read aloud and asked to meet her. They spent the last year of his life in each other's company until his death in April 1980.
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The standard scholarly entry on his philosophy: Being and Nothingness, the 1945 Existentialism is a Humanism lecture, the novels and plays, Les Temps modernes, and the political engagement.
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