Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright and political activist, and the best-known figure of existentialism. His central claim was that human beings have no fixed nature given in advance: we are radically free, and we make ourselves through our choices, for which we bear full responsibility. In the decades after the Second World War he was the most famous intellectual in the world, a public voice on the left on almost every great issue from the Cold War to the Algerian War, and in 1964 he refused the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. His father, a naval officer, died when he was a baby, and he was raised in the house of his maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German and a relative of the doctor and theologian Albert Schweitzer. A small, cross-eyed and bookish child, he later dissected this upbringing, and his early sense of vocation as a writer, in his ironic memoir The Words (1963).

In 1924 he entered the École Normale Supérieure, the elite college in Paris. In 1929 he came first in the national agrégation examination in philosophy, having failed it the year before; second place went to Simone de Beauvoir, who became his lifelong companion. They never married or lived together, and agreed on an open relationship in which each was free to have other lovers. Through the 1930s Sartre taught philosophy at secondary schools, mostly in Le Havre.

In 1933–1934 Sartre spent a year at the French Institute in Berlin studying the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and then the work of Martin Heidegger. From these sources came his early essays on the self, the imagination and the emotions. His first novel, Nausea (1938), follows a solitary historian in a provincial town who is overcome by the sheer, pointless existence of things, such as the root of a chestnut tree, and who discovers that existence has no built-in meaning or justification. The book made his name, followed by the stories of The Wall (1939).

Called up in 1939, Sartre served as an army meteorologist and was captured by the Germans in June 1940. He spent nine months as a prisoner of war, mostly in a camp at Trier, before being released in 1941. Back in occupied Paris during the Second World War he founded a small resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté, which soon dissolved, and later wrote for clandestine publications, though his resistance role was more literary than military.

In 1943 he published his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. Sartre distinguished two kinds of being. Things are being-in-itself: solid, complete, simply what they are. Human consciousness is being-for-itself: never fixed, always directed beyond itself towards possibilities, and therefore a kind of nothingness at the heart of being. Because there is no God and no human essence decided in advance, we are, in his phrase, "condemned to be free". This freedom produces anguish, and most people flee it through bad faith, pretending that they are determined by their role, character or circumstances, like the waiter who acts the part of a waiter too perfectly. Relations with others are a further source of conflict, because under the gaze of another person I become an object in their world. Sartre's plays dramatised these ideas, above all No Exit (1944), in which three dead characters discover that "hell is other people".

After the liberation of Paris, existentialism became a fashion. A public lecture in October 1945, published as Existentialism Is a Humanism, gave the movement its slogan: existence precedes essence. People first exist, and only afterwards define themselves by what they do, so that each choice is also a picture of what we think a human being ought to be. The same year Sartre, Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty founded the journal Les Temps modernes. Sartre gave up teaching to live by his writing, producing the novel cycle The Roads to Freedom, plays such as Dirty Hands (1948), and essays arguing that writers must be committed to the political struggles of their time.

From the early 1950s Sartre moved closer to the French Communist Party and defended the Soviet Union, positions that ended his friendship with Albert Camus after a public quarrel in 1952 over Camus's book The Rebel. He broke with the communists after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. His Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) attempted to combine his philosophy of freedom with the historical materialism of Karl Marx, which he called the unsurpassable philosophy of his time.

He was a fierce opponent of French rule in Algeria, denounced the use of torture, signed the 1960 Manifesto of the 121 supporting draft refusal, and wrote the preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). His apartment building was bombed in 1961 and 1962, attacks attributed to supporters of French Algeria. He visited Cuba in 1960, met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and with Bertrand Russell served on the tribunal that judged American conduct in the Vietnam War. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize, saying a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution. In May 1968 he backed the student revolt, and in the 1970s he lent his name to Maoist newspapers to protect them from prosecution.

Sartre's health declined in the 1970s, and from 1973 he was almost blind, leaving his vast biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, unfinished. He died in Paris on 15 April 1980. Some 50,000 people followed his funeral procession to the Montparnasse cemetery, where Beauvoir was later buried beside him.

Sartre's reputation has risen and fallen. Critics have attacked his long indulgence of communist regimes and his support for revolutionary violence, and from the 1960s structuralists and later thinkers such as Michel Foucault rejected his focus on the free individual subject. Yet his account of freedom, bad faith and responsibility remains a core part of continental philosophy, his plays are still performed, and his model of the engaged intellectual shaped public life in France and well beyond it.