Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905 and died on 15 April 1980. He was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, and a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. He became one of the key voices of existentialism and phenomenology, and he was also a proponent of Libertarian Marxism. His work reached beyond philosophy into sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies.

Sartre’s early life left strong marks on his thinking. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, died when Sartre was two. His mother, Anne-Marie, moved back to her parents’ house in Meudon, where Sartre was raised with help from his grandfather Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who taught him mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at an early age. When Sartre was twelve, his mother remarried and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was often bullied, in part because of the wandering of his blind right eye.

As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre was drawn to philosophy after reading Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will. He studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, earning certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, along with a diplôme d'études supérieures. At ENS he formed a lifelong, sometimes difficult friendship with Raymond Aron, befriended Paul Nizan, and became known as a fierce prankster. His philosophical development was influenced by Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alexandre Kojève, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. Around 1928, he worked as a private French tutor for the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shūzō, who may have first stirred Sartre’s interest in phenomenology.

From 1931 to 1945, Sartre taught at lycées in Le Havre, Laon, and Paris. He studied Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy in Berlin in 1933 and 1934, and in 1939 published an article on Husserl’s intentionality in La Nouvelle Revue française, beginning his career as a literary critic under Jean Paulhan. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, appeared in 1943. In it, the conflict between oppressive conformity, or mauvaise foi, and an authentic way of being became central. He later introduced his philosophy to a wider audience in Existentialism Is a Humanism, first given as a lecture and published in 1946.

Sartre’s public life was inseparable from politics. During World War II he was drafted, captured, and later released. He co-founded the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté, contributed to underground literature in occupied France, and wrote plays including No Exit. After the war, he co-founded Les Temps modernes and used his platform to argue for political and social causes. He supported anti-colonial movements, condemned French policies in Algeria, opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and aligned himself at different times with Marxism and Maoism.

His open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher, also became part of his intellectual life. Together they challenged the bourgeois assumptions and expectations of their upbringings in both thought and lifestyle. In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature despite trying to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.” His funeral in 1980 drew 50,000 mourners, a sign of how strongly his arguments about freedom, responsibility, and bad faith still speak to readers.