Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905, the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, a French Navy officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His father died of an illness when Sartre was just two years old, likely contracted while serving in Indochina. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' home in Meudon, and Sartre was raised largely by his mother and his maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a German teacher who introduced the boy to mathematics and classical literature at a very early age.

Sartre's famous cousin Albert Schweitzer, the theologian and physician, was part of this same family circle. When Sartre was twelve, his mother remarried and the family relocated to La Rochelle, where he endured frequent bullying, partly because of a condition called sensory exotropia that caused his right eye to wander. As a teenager he discovered philosophy through Henri Bergson's essay on time and consciousness, which set the course of his intellectual life. He went on to study at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, earning certificates across philosophy, psychology, logic, ethics, and physics, and completing a graduate thesis on the role of imagery in psychological life.

A turning point in Sartre's philosophical development came in 1932, when his friend Raymond Aron returned from Berlin brimming with enthusiasm for the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The conversation, held at the Bec de Gaz café in Montparnasse, reportedly overwhelmed Sartre with excitement. He subsequently secured a position at the Institut français d'Allemagne in Berlin for 1933 to 1934, where he studied Husserl's methods intensively. The encounter with Husserl, and later with Martin Heidegger's work, became the foundation for Sartre's own philosophical voice.

The result was Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, Sartre's principal philosophical work. Its central argument holds that human beings have no fixed nature handed down by a creator; instead, existence comes before essence, meaning people first exist and then define themselves through their choices. Sartre expressed this as being 'condemned to be free': freedom is not a gift but an inescapable condition, and with it comes total responsibility for one's actions. The opposing temptation he called mauvaise foi, or bad faith, the self-deception of pretending one has no choice. He later presented a more accessible version of these ideas in a 1946 lecture published as Existentialism Is a Humanism.

When France went to war in 1939, Sartre was drafted and assigned as a meteorologist. German forces captured him in 1940 near Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war, eventually held at Stalag XII-D in Trier. During that confinement he read Heidegger's Being and Time and wrote his first theatrical piece, a Christmas drama called Bariona. He was released in April 1941, reportedly on grounds of poor health related to his eyesight.

Back in Paris, Sartre helped found an underground resistance group called Socialisme et Liberté alongside Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. The group dissolved without significant action, and Sartre shifted his energy toward writing. During the occupation he produced Being and Nothingness, the play The Flies, and No Exit, none of which the German censors suppressed. He also contributed to both legal and clandestine literary publications. In an essay called 'Paris under the Occupation,' Sartre argued that the outwardly polite behavior of German soldiers had trapped many Parisians into a quiet complicity that was itself a moral failure.

After the war Sartre co-founded the influential literary and political journal Les Temps modernes and abandoned teaching to devote himself entirely to writing and activism. He embraced Marxism without ever joining the Communist Party, and for a period in the late 1940s and early 1950s he argued for the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc. His position became increasingly difficult to defend: he supported the Hungarian uprising of 1956 while simultaneously criticizing it, and even after Stalin's death he attacked Khrushchev's denunciations of Stalinist repression, arguing that ordinary people were not ready for the truth. Critics, including his sometime ally Maurice Merleau-Ponty, labeled him an ultra-Bolshevik.

Sartre's anticolonialism was more consistent and more personally costly. He became a prominent supporter of the Algerian independence movement, signed the Manifeste des 121, and condemned French use of torture and concentration camps in Algeria. The paramilitary Organisation armée secrète responded by bombing his apartment building twice in the early 1960s. He also opposed American military involvement in Vietnam and helped Bertrand Russell organize a tribunal to examine American conduct in that war. In Cuba he met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, though he publicly condemned Castro's persecution of homosexuals. In 1960 he published the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an attempt to give Marxism a more rigorous philosophical foundation, which ultimately concluded that Marx's concept of class as an objective entity was flawed.

In October 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had written to the Nobel Institute before the announcement asking to be removed from the list of nominees, but the letter went unread. After the prize was announced he publicly declined it, explaining that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution and that he did not wish to be drawn into the cultural rivalry between East and West. He became the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily refuse the prize. He had already declined the Légion d'honneur in 1945.

Sartre's health deteriorated sharply in his later years, accelerated by heavy smoking, amphetamine use during the writing of long philosophical and biographical works, and hypertension. By 1973 he was almost completely blind. He nonetheless remained publicly active, visiting Red Army Faction prisoner Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison in 1974 to protest conditions of detention, and supporting the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne and its newspaper in the early 1970s. He died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary edema. On 19 April, roughly 50,000 people followed his funeral cortege through the streets of the fourteenth arrondissement to Montparnasse Cemetery, where his ashes were eventually reburied after cremation at Père-Lachaise.