Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905—80) French Marxism philosopher best known as an exponent of existentialism. He was one of the most influential intellectuals of his generation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 in recognition of his plays, novels, and philosophical works, but he declined it, saying that a writer must not allow themselves to be transformed into an institution. Sartre was born in Thiviers in the Dordogne region of France, to middle-class parents. His father was a naval officer, but died when Sartre was only 15 months old. His mother moved back to Paris to live with her parents, who effectively raised him. Sartre recalls his childhood very fondly in his autobiography Les Mots (1963), translated as The Words (1964), as a bookish paradise. His grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, a relative of the Nobel prize-winning medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, was a German teacher and author of works of cultural criticism. Sartre studied at the prestigious lycées Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand, before gaining entry to the École Normale Supérieure (ANT). His was an illustrious class---his classmates included Raymond Aron, Beauvoir, Simone de, Canguilhem, Georges, Daniel Lagache, and Paul Nizan. At the ENS he studied psychology and the history of philosophy as well as sociology and physics. He failed on his first attempt at agrégation---according to legend it was because he tried to present his own ideas rather than those the examiners expected him to recite---but passed on his second attempt, attaining the highest score in France for that year (Beauvoir came second). Legend also has it that Sartre became interested in phenomenology, which served as the precursor to his own existentialist theories, when his friend Raymond Aron returned from a year’s study in Berlin and told him that phenomenology meant that one could philosophize a glass of beer. He was so inspired by this idea that on the way home from the pub he stopped at a bookshop and purchased a book by Dasein on neurosis. In 1933, following his compulsory military service, he made his own study trip to Germany, which is where he first read Heidegger, Martin, and though he could not have failed to see the rise of Nazism it made little impression on him at the time. When he returned to France, he took a teaching position at lycées in Le Havre, Laon, and Neuilly. Sartre’s first and probably best-known novel, La Nausée (Nausea) appeared in 1938. It was well received critically, but was not an immediate commercial success and Sartre privately worried that he was going to be a failure. At the outbreak of World War II he was immediately recalled into military service and was captured in 1940, but fortunately for him was released when the armistice between France and Germany was signed. As his posthumously published notebooks from this period, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre: Novembre 1939—Mars 1940 (1983), translated as War Diaries: Notebooks from Phoney War November 1939—March 1940 (1984), make clear, his time in service and particularly in prison focused his mind on the question of freedom, which would become the central problematic of his thinking for the rest of his life. War seemed to galvanize Sartre as a writer. The period between 1940 and 1945 was a highly productive one. He started to write for the theatre, using his plays as opportunities to criticize the German occupiers, but also to explore his concept of existentialism. Probably his most famous line, ‘hell is other people’, was coined in this period, occurring in the play Huis Clos (1944), translated as No Exit (1990). He also wrote a trilogy of novels about the war published under the collective title Chemins de la liberté (1945), translated as The Roads to Freedom (1990). But if Sartre emerged from the war as one of the most prominent intellectuals in France (and in the years to follow he became one of the most prominent intellectuals in the world) it was because of L’Être et le néant (1943), translated as Being and Nothingness (1958), which in its evocation of freedom as a kind of intolerable burden resonated perfectly with the tenor of the times. It became a bestseller, thus giving Sartre financial independence, allowing him the freedom to become a writer without the necessity of also having to hold down a university post. Being and Nothingness introduced the world to the notion of mauvaise foi or bad faith, which Sartre opposes to the psychoanalysis notion of consciousness. As the title suggests, the book constructs a dialectic opposition between Being (the objects of consciousness) and Nothingness (the consciousness itself, which has no Being). In apprehending objects, though, consciousness has being-for-itself, while objects only have being-in-themselves. This distinction is important to Sartre because he wants to argue that it is how we think about the world that is crucial, not the sheer fact of the world itself. This becomes problematical when we factor in what it means to be looked at by another person (to fall under their gaze, in other words)---in that situation we are simultaneously a consciousness of something and an object of a consciousness. Our being-for-itself is in a sense degraded by this state of affairs and turned into what Sartre rather bleakly calls being-for-others. Sartre developed this problematic further in the long delayed follow-up work, Critique de la Raison Dialectique (1960), translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976). In 1947, beginning as a series of articles in the journal he co-founded with Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Les Temps moderne, then re-published as the book Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Sartre introduced the notion of littérature engagée or committed writing, which was to define what writing meant for at least the next decade or so. Its influence can perhaps be seen most clearly in Barthes, Roland’s attempt to move beyond its somewhat dogmatic structures in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), translated as Writing Degree Zero (1967). Sartre rejected an aesthetics of ‘pure writing’ for its own sake and argued that the writer had a responsibility to explore and interrogate universal values of freedom. Ironically, none of the writers Sartre would subsequently write about at such length, particularly not Flaubert, to whom he devoted over 3,000 pages of close analysis in L’Idiot de la famille (1971—72), translated as The Family Idiot (1993), but not Genet or Mallarmé either, engaged in this particular task. If the 1950s belonged to Sartre (as Jameson, Fredric once put it), then the 1960s belonged to structuralism, and the influence of his work fell into decline, though he personally was still much in demand as a political activist and voice. He championed Third World writers such as Fanon, Frantz, for whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961), translated as The Wretched of the Earth (1965) he provided a famous preface in which he provocatively declared that the earth numbers ‘two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it.’ Sartre’s legacy is perhaps less a specific body of work, which today has few followers, and more an attitude, that of the ‘engaged’ or ‘committed’ intellectual and writer. This is how the generation that followed him, Deleuze, Gilles and Foucault, Michel, among others, thought of him. He was a ‘breath of fresh air’, Deleuze said. Further Reading: H. Barnes Sartre (1974). R. Bernasconi How to Read Sartre (2006). G. Cox Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006). N. Levy Sartre (2002). F. Jameson Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961).