Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905 in Paris to Jean-Baptiste Sartre and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. He was the only child of his parents. His father was an officer of the French Navy, while his mother belonged to the Alsatian origin. When Sartre was just 15 months old, his father passed away suffering from fever and therefore, he and his mother shifted back to her parent’s house in Meudon. Sartre was brought up by his maternal grandfather, who was a German professor. Sartre was taught mathematics by his grandfather and got familiarized with the classical literature when he was quite young. When he was twelve years old, his mother married again and shifted to La Rochelle. In his new house, young Sartre was often nagged and bullied.      

In 1920s, Sartre developed interest in philosophy while reading essay of Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He got educated and acquired a doctorate in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris which was an institution of higher education and also alma mater for numerous eminent French thinkers and intellectuals. Being in this institution, he started his lifetime friendship with Raymond Aron. He was greatly inspired by several aspects of Western philosophy, undertaking ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger. In 1929, he acquainted with Simone de Beauvoir. From 1929-1931, Sartre worked as a conscript in the French Army and afterwards in 1959 stated that every French person was responsible for the overall crimes that took place during the Algerian War of Independence. 

Sartre, accompanied by de Beauvoir, questioned the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which according to them was bourgeois in terms of thoughts and lifestyle. The on-going strife between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity and an ‘authentic’ way of ‘being’, emerged out as a dominant theme in the initial work of Sartre. The theme was represented in his major philosophical work “L'Être et le Néant”, which reflected the duo’s ideologies and beliefs. It was also during this time that Sartre introduced his philosophical work called “Existentialism is a Humanism” in 1946, which was first presented through a lecture.

Sartre was selected in the French army in 1939, where he served as a meteorologist. In 1940, he was arrested by German troops in Padoux, where he stayed for nine months being a prisoner of war initially in Nancy and then in Stalag 12D, Trier. Residing in a prison, Sartre worked on his very first theatrical work titled “Barionà, fils du tonnerre”, which was a drama based on Christmas. Also during this time only, he started reading Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and afterwards the same showered a great influence on his own essay based on phenomenological ontology. In April, 1941, he was released because of his declining health. Sartre was given a status of a civilian and therefore, he resumed his post of a teacher at Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse, Paris. Later, he was presented a new post at Lycée Condorcet, in place of a teacher who was restricted to teach by Vichy law. In May 1941, he returned back to Paris. Sartre took part in the founding of the underground group named, ‘Socialisme et Liberté’, accompanied by several other writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and his wife Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa.

 

In August, Sartre and Beauvoir journeyed to the French Riviera to ask for the support of André Gide and André Malraux but both of them were irresolute. Shortly, the group broke down and Sartre decided to concentrate on his writings. He then completed his works like “Being and Nothingness”, “The Flies”, and “No Exit”. None of them was censored by the Germans, and instead, contributed to legal and illegal literary magazines. Post August 1944 and the liberation of Paris, Sartre finished his book “Anti-Semite and Jew”. He often used to contribute to the newspaper called ‘Combat’, which was developed during clandestine period by Albert Camus. But afterwards Sartre had to face criticism from several authors. The French philosopher and resistant, Vladimir Jankelevitch stated that Sartre did not have political commitment and that the attempts made by him were nothing but an endeavor to redeem himself. When the war came to an end, Sartre founded “Les Temps Modernes”, which was a quarterly literary and political review. Also he began writing full-time and continued with his political activism. During this time period only, he wrote his war experience in his trilogy of novels titled “Les Chemins de la Liberté”.

Sartre’s first work “Being and Nothingness”, suggested direction to his second career of a political activist and intellectual. Collecting the experiences of both, he even came out with “Les Mains Sales” in 1948, in which he described the problems of being an intellectual and political activist at the same time. Sartre believed in Marxism and played an important role in the battle against the rule of French in Algeria. He also became one of the chief supporters of a socialist political party, FLN in the Algerian War. Sartre also signed Manifeste des 121. He was also one of the opponents of the Vietnam War. Sartre’s great defining works after 1955 was the “Critique de la raison dialectique”, which was published in 1960. In this work, he gave Marxism a more powerful intellectual defense than before. In 1960s, he journeyed to Cuba in order to meet Fidel Castro. In Cuba, he talked to Ernesto Che Guevara. While 1974 collective hunger strike was going on, Sartre went to Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and greatly criticized the imprisonment’s worst conditions.

Sartre, in 1964, renounced literature in an account of the initial decade of his life, titled “Les mots”. He was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 22, 1964, but he denied accepting the same. Also, he became the first Nobel Laureate to willingly decline the award. Interestingly, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute dating October 14, 1964, requesting the deletion of his name from the list of nominees, and also that he would not accept the same if awarded but the letter remained unread. On 23 October, he published a statement in ‘Le Figaro’, giving an explanation of the denial. He stated that he did not wish to be “transformed” by such an award, and did not want to take sides in the East vs. West cultural struggle, by receiving an award from an eminent institution supporting the Western culture. Sartre previously too had declined the Légion d'honneur in 1945. He acquired a lot of publicity and became a word of everyone’s mouth; Sartre continued to lead a life of a simple man with some possessions and devoted his whole life to causes like the student revolution strikes in Paris in summer 1968. He even got arrested for civil disobedience, but President Charles de Gaulle came in between and forgave him, saying that “you don't arrest Voltaire”. The health of Sartre continued to decline mainly due to the stress he took while writing the Critique and a large analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert. Sadly, he could not complete both these works.

 

Sartre remained in a lifelong romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, but never married. In 1965, Sartre adopted a daughter, Arlette Elkaïm who was his Algerian mistress.

In 1973, Sartre to a great extent became almost completely blind. He died on 15^th April 1980 in Paris suffering from lungs edema. Sartre was interred in Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris. 

1905: Jean-Paul Sartre was born.

1906: His father died of fever; Moved to Meudon with his mother.

1917: Mother remarried and they both moved to La Rochelle.

1929: Met Simone de Beauvoir.

1929-1931: Worked as a conscript in the French Army.

1940: He was captured by German troops in Padoux.

1941: Was released due to sickness; Moved back to Paris.

1944: Sartre finished his book “Anti-Semite and Jew”

1945: Declined the Légion d'honneur

1946: Introduced “Existentialism is a Humanism”.

1948: Came out with “Les Mains Sales”.

1960: “Critique de la raison dialectique” was published.

1964: Awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature which he denied to accept.

1965: Adopted a daughter, Arlette Elkaïm.

1973: Was almost completely blind

1980: Died in Paris.