e was one of the most famous philosophers of his century, as well as an influential novelist, playwright and political activist; yet he was never satisfied with his own intellectual views.
A thorn in the side of the French government, he was so popular that, at his death, 50,000 people followed his funeral cortege through the streets of Paris.
ean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. His mother’s family was from Alsace-Lorraine, the section of eastern France whose natives speak both French and German, and over whose borders France and Germany had been quarreling for years.
Jean-Paul’s mother was a first cousin of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the German theologian, missionary, and musicologist.
Jean-Paul’s father died when Sartre was only a year old. His mother sought solace in her little son and concentrated all her attention on him. She moved back to her parent’s home, where Jean-Paul’s grandfather became a stern influence on him. When he was twelve years old his mother remarried. The spoiled “Poulou,” as she had nicknamed him, experienced her marriage as a loss and a betrayal.
mmediately afterward he decided that God did not exist—though his grandfather and his stepfather definitely did exist. (Sartre spent the next 63 years rebelling against them.)
Unfortunately he was not a very good-looking kid. He was pimply, had a strabismus (a wandering eye) due to an illness when he was four years old,
he was short—5 feet 3 inches tall. (Nevertheless, that made him a half-inch taller than his father had been.)
t seventeen, Jean-Paul received his “baccalaureate” (an elite high school diploma) and began a six-year study at the Sorbonne for his “agrégation,” the exam that would be a ticket to an academic career in philosophy.
Luckily, this delay in his academic career resulted in his meeting a young philosophy student named Simone de Beauvoir, who was smart, beautiful, nice to Sarter, and (important!) not taller than he.
They fell in love and developed a companionship that would last until he died—even though they never married, preferred not to live together, had other lovers, and addressed each other with the formal “vous” throughout their lives. They philosophized together and deeply influenced each other’s work. Scholars are still sorting out who was the more original thinker. Today their ashes are buried next to each other in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
Jean-Paul and Simone studied together for the “agrégation.” In the evenings they would go together to see cowboy films. Sartre got first place in the exam; de Beauvoir got second place.
n 1929, Sartre began eighteen months of obligatory military service. When he was discharged, he was offered a teaching job at a lycée (a type of state-run prep school for students selected to continue on to university) in Le Havre on the northwest coast of France. De Beauvoir took a teaching job at a lycée in Marseilles on the southern coast. They managed to meet each other whenever they could.
artre got very excited about the idea of being able to philosophize about his glass of beer, so in September of 1933 he went to Berlin to study the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of “phenomenology.” (We’ll talk about this philosophy shortly.) He returned to his teaching job the next year and began incorporating his newly-discovered phenomenological insights into his own writings. (In fact, in his novel Nausea, published in 1938, there is a phenomenological analysis of a glass of beer.)
But beer was not the only source of Jean-Paul’s “highs.” In February of 1935, he had his first experience with the drug mescaline.
These years just before the outbreak of World War II were productive ones for Sartre. In addition to his successful novel, Nausea, he also wrote two philosophy books: The Psychology of the Imagination (1936) and Transcendence of the Ego (1937).
But the peace ended on September 3, 1939, when France and Britain declared war on Germany. Sartre was reinducted into the army.
is division was sent to Eastern France, where he worked in the meteorological service sending up balloons, testing the direction of the wind. However, the war interfered little with his own productivity: he began a big novel, The Age of Reason (published in 1945), and read the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, S⊘ren Kierkegaard.
In the prisoner of war camp, he washed rarely, didn’t shave, and developed a reputation for being dirty. In these conditions he began writing a major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (published in 1943).
n March 1941, he escaped from the Stalag, sneaked back to Paris, and returned to a teaching job that he had started there just before the war. With some other intellectuals he formed a resistance group called “Socialism and Liberty,”
Sartre then contributed articles to underground newspapers, putting himself in some danger, and he wrote a play called The Flies, which contained a blatant anti-Nazi message. The play opened in June 1943 and ran for forty performances. Even though uniformed Nazis attended the play, it was not suppressed.
hen Sartre was not writing, he was spending time in Parisian cafés with de Beauvoir and other writers and artists such as Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso.
The ideas in his plays, novels, and philosophy books had struck a cord in Parisian intellectual life. Suddenly existentialism was in vogue and Sartre was famous. He was invited around the world to lecture. His ideas were also spread through his editorship of a new prestigious journal, Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), named after Charlie Chaplin’s movie.
He abandoned his promised sequel to Being and Nothingness because he had “converted” (his word) to Marxism, yet he refused to join the French Communist Party. Nevertheless, in the “Cold War” he aligned himself against the United States and with the Soviet Union, which he visited frequently.
y the late 1950s, a new intellectual style called “STRUCTURALISM” was stealing the thunder from existentialism, but Sartre was too deeply involved in his political projects to defend himself against structuralism, and, in any case, he had moved further away from existentialism by then. In 1960, he published Volume One of his Marxian work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. As we will see, even though in it he condemned his earlier ideas, he was still influenced by them enough to try to rescue the individual and freedom from the kind of monolithic Marxism represented by Stalinism and the French Communist Party. He promised Volume Two of the Critique in a year, and worked on a massive manuscript that he finally abandoned. (It was published in French in 1985, five years after his death.)
When in 1968 the streets of Paris were filled with students in rebellion, Sartre supported the students and, in fact, was blamed by the right-wing press for causing the revolt. He condemned the Conservative government of President de Gaulle for oppressing the young and attacked the French Communist Party for betraying what he thought was a true revolution.
During this decade, the abuse to which he had submitted himself during much of his life took its toll on his health. (He drank too much whisky, he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and he took drugs to “rev” himself up when he wrote philosophy.)
His doctor threatened to amputate first his toes, then his feet, then his legs, if Sartre would not give up smoking. Sartre said he would consider it. By the end of his life he was almost blind.