Jean-Paul Sartre

JEAN-PAUL CHARLES AYMARD SARTRE was a French philosopher, a representative of atheistic existentialism, writer, playwright, essayist, and teacher. He was the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate (he refused the prize).

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris and was the only child in the family. When Jean-Paul was only 15 months old, his father died. The family moved to his grandparents’ house in Meudon.

Sartre was educated at the Lycées of La Rochelle, graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris with a dissertation in philosophy, and trained at the French Institute in Berlin (1934). He taught philosophy at various lycées in France (1929–1939 and 1941–1944); from 1944 he devoted himself entirely to literary work. While still a student, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who became not only his life companion but also a like-minded author.

Together with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he founded the journal Les Temps Modernes. He выступал as a supporter of peace at the Vienna Congress of Peoples in Defense of Peace in 1952, and in 1953 he was elected a member of the World Peace Council. After repeated threats from French nationalists, they bombed his apartment in central Paris.

In 1956 Sartre and the magazine’s editorial board distanced themselves, unlike Camus, from accepting the idea of French Algeria and supported the Algerian people’s desire for independence. Sartre opposed torture, asserting the freedom of peoples to determine their own fate.

Defending his position was not safe: Sartre’s apartment was bombed twice, and the editorial office was seized five times by nationalist militants.

Sartre actively supported the Cuban Revolution of 1959, like many intellectuals from Third World countries. In June 1960 he wrote 16 articles in France entitled “Hurricane over Sugar.” At that time he collaborated with the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. But later there was a break with Castro in 1971 because of the “Padilla affair,” when the Cuban poet Padilla was imprisoned for criticizing the Castro regime.

Sartre took an active part in the Russell Tribunal