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In addition to being one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century,
Jean-Paul Sartre was also an essayist, novelist, playwright, and editor. His name
has become synonymous with existentialism, a movement that exploded beyond
the boundaries of the academy to enter virtually every area of Western culture.
Sartre himself became as famous as the philosophy he taught, and at his death in
1980, almost 50,000 people accompanied his casket to Paris’s Montparnasse
Cemetery.
Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard Sartre was born in Paris in 1905, the only child of
naval officer Jean-Baptiste Sartre and his wife Anne-Marie Schweitzer Sartre.
Barely a year after his birth, his father died. Jean-Paul and his mother moved in
with her parents. Sartre’s maternal grandfather, a German-language teacher, had a
study filled with books; this room fascinated the young Sartre. He taught himself
to read, and by the age of 8 he had read French classics such as Madame Bovary.
While still a boy, his devotion to books overwhelmed all other devotions—
including that to religion. From about the age of 12, Sartre said that he was a
confirmed atheist. He did exceptionally well in his studies, exhibiting a clear
independence of mind. One of his teachers noted on his report card: “Excellent
student: mind already lively, good at discussing questions, but needs to depend a
little less on himself.”
In 1924, Sartre enrolled at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Over the
next four years, he studied for the agrégationin philosophy (the highest degree
except for the doctorate in the French system), but surprisingly he failed the writ-
ten examination on his first attempt. He retook the examination a year later and
placed first.
The person who took second in that 1929 examination was his study part-
ner, Simone de Beauvoir. That same year, Sartre suggested to her that they takeJEAN-PAU L SARTRE
1905–1980