Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism.
80 Facts About Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Sartre's work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so.
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Jean-Paul Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
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Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism, originally presented as a lecture.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie.
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When Jean-Paul Sartre was two years old, his father died of an illness, which he most likely contracted in Indochina.
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Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Jean-Paul Sartre with help from her father Charles Schweitzer, a teacher of German who taught Jean-Paul Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age.
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When he was twelve, Jean-Paul Sartre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied, in part due to the wandering of his blind right eye.
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Jean-Paul Sartre attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris.
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Jean-Paul Sartre studied and earned certificates in psychology, history of philosophy, logic, general philosophy, ethics and sociology, and physics, as well as his diplome d'etudes superieures in Paris at the Ecole Normale Superieure, an institution of higher education that was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals.
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From his first years in the Ecole normale, Jean-Paul Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters.
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Jean-Paul Sartre took it a second time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place, with Beauvoir second.
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From 1931 until 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre taught at various lycees of Le Havre, Laon, and, finally, Paris.
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In 1932, Jean-Paul Sartre read Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a book that had a remarkable influence on him.
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The neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
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In 1939 Jean-Paul Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.
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In spring of 1941, Jean-Paul Sartre suggested with "cheerful ferocity" at a meeting that the Socialisme et Liberte assassinate prominent war collaborators like Marcel Deat, but de Beauvoir noted his idea was rejected as "none of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades".
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Socialisme et liberte soon dissolved and Jean-Paul Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance.
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Jean-Paul Sartre then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies, and No Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans, and contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines.
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Jean-Paul Sartre noted when Wehrmacht soldiers asked Parisians politely in their German-accented French for directions, people usually felt embarrassed and ashamed as they tried their best to help out the Wehrmacht which led Jean-Paul Sartre to remark "We could not be natural".
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Jean-Paul Sartre himself lived on a diet of rabbits sent to him by a friend of de Beauvoir living in Anjou.
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The rabbits were usually in an advanced state of decay full of maggots, and despite being hungry, Jean-Paul Sartre once threw out one rabbit as uneatable, saying it had more maggots in it than meat.
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Jean-Paul Sartre remarked that conversations at the Cafe de Flore between intellectuals had changed, as the fear that one of them might be a mouche or a writer of the corbeau meant that no one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship.
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old Paris, but hollowed out, as what had made Paris special was gone.
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Jean-Paul Sartre noted that people began to disappear under the occupation, writing:.
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the feldgrau uniforms of the Wehrmacht and the green uniforms of the Order Police which had seemed so alien in 1940 had become accepted, as people were numbed into accepting what Jean-Paul Sartre called "a pale, dull green, unobtrusive strain, which the eye almost expected to find among the dark clothes of the civilians".
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Jean-Paul Sartre intended the line "l'enfer, c'est les Autres" at least in part to be a dig at the German occupiers.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs.
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote extensively post-war about neglected minority groups, namely French Jews and black people.
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Later, while Jean-Paul Sartre was labeled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Jean-Paul Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself.
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In 1945, after the war ended, Jean-Paul Sartre moved to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte, where he was to produce most of his subsequent work and where he lived until 1962.
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Jean-Paul Sartre ceased teaching and devoted his time to writing and political activism.
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Jean-Paul Sartre would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberte.
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Jean-Paul Sartre tended to glorify the Resistance after the war as the uncompromising expression of morality in action, and recalled that the resistants were a "band of brothers" who had enjoyed "real freedom" in a way that did not exist before nor after the war.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was "merciless" in attacking anyone who had collaborated or remained passive during the German occupation; for instance, criticizing Camus for signing an appeal to spare the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach from being executed.
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Jean-Paul Sartre embraced Marxism but did not join the Communist Party.
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In July 1950, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Les Temps Modernes about his and de Beauvoir's attitude to the Soviet Union:.
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Jean-Paul Sartre believed at this time in the moral superiority of the Eastern Bloc, arguing that this belief was necessary "to keep hope alive" and opposed any criticism of Soviet Union to the extent that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called him an "ultra-Bolshevik".
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In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Jean-Paul Sartre visited the Soviet Union, which he stated he found a "complete freedom of criticism" while condemning the United States for sinking into "prefascism".
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about those Soviet writers expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union "still had the opportunity of rehabilitating themselves by writing better books".
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On one hand, Jean-Paul Sartre saw in Hungary a true reunification between intellectuals and workers only to criticize it for "losing socialist base".
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In 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre attacked Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" which condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges.
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Jean-Paul Sartre argued that "the masses were not ready to receive the truth".
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Jean-Paul Sartre became an eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121.
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Consequently, Jean-Paul Sartre became a domestic target of the paramilitary Organisation armee secrete, escaping two bomb attacks in the early '60s.
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Jean-Paul Sartre later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence.
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Jean-Paul Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
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Towards the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre began to describe himself as a "special kind" of anarchist.
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In 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les Mots.
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Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world.
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In October 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, and remains one of only two laureates to do so.
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The Nobel prize was announced on 22 October 1964; on 14 October, Jean-Paul Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and warning that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread; on 23 October, Le Figaro published a statement by Jean-Paul Sartre explaining his refusal.
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Jean-Paul Sartre said he did not wish to be "transformed" by such an award, and did not want to take sides in an East vs West cultural struggle by accepting an award from a prominent Western cultural institution.
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Jean-Paul Sartre had hypertension, and became almost completely blind in 1973.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was a notorious chain smoker, which could have contributed to the deterioration of his health.
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Jean-Paul Sartre died on 15 April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary edema.
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Jean-Paul Sartre had not wanted to be buried at Pere-Lachaise Cemetery between his mother and stepfather, so it was arranged that he be buried at Montparnasse Cemetery.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was initially buried in a temporary grave to the left of the cemetery gate.
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Jean-Paul Sartre says that if one considered a paper cutter, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence.
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Jean-Paul Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator.
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Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned.
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Jean-Paul Sartre made his headquarters the Dome cafe at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards.
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Jean-Paul Sartre attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women.
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In 1943, after the group disbanded, Jean-Paul Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group, in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war.
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Jean-Paul Sartre continued to write ferociously, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature".
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The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Jean-Paul Sartre's work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a new journal, Les Temps modernes, in October 1945.
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Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy lent itself to his being a public intellectual.
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Jean-Paul Sartre did not dogmatically follow a cause other than the belief in human freedom, preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity.
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Jean-Paul Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world.
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Jean-Paul Sartre always sympathized with the Left, and supported the French Communist Party until the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
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From 1956 onwards Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the claims of the PCF to represent the French working classes, objecting to its "authoritarian tendencies".
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In Jean-Paul Sartre's opinion, the "traditional bourgeois literary forms remain innately superior", but there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media' forms must be embraced" if Jean-Paul Sartre's ethical and political goals as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of bourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class.
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The struggle for Jean-Paul Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take over the media and destroy the role of the intellectual.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was skilled enough to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media, advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa.
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However Jean-Paul Sartre's stances regarding post-colonial conflict have not been entirely without controversy on the left; Jean-Paul Sartre's preface is omitted from some editions of The Wretched of the Earth printed after 1967.
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote successfully in a number of literary modes and made major contributions to literary criticism and literary biography.
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Jean-Paul Sartre's plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy.
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However it was too long and Jean-Paul Sartre withdrew his name from the film's credits.
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Nevertheless, many key elements from Jean-Paul Sartre's script survive in the finished film.