INTRODUCTION 1157
Guernica,1937, by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In 1937 the city of Guernica was destroyed by German bombers
simply for the purpose of testing their new weapons. Sartre’s friend Picasso created this painting to memorialize the
innocent sacrifice of the Spanish people. This representation of broken, fragmented pieces of humanity wrung by
pain and anxiety capture well the reality of death and violence. Sartre insisted that to live fully one must squarely
face such suffering. (© Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2015.)
“a two-year lease” on each other. Though neither believed in the bourgeois
institution of marriage, and each had a variety of lovers, the two remained
“companions” for life.
Over the next ten years, Sartre served briefly in the army, studied in Berlin,
taught at a number of lycées, and began writing. Among his early publications
were the philosophical novel Nausea(1938) and the collection of short stories
The Wall(1939).
In 1939, Sartre was called up for active duty by the French army. Within the
year, he was captured by the Germans. Released a few months later, he seemed
to return to a quiet life of teaching and writing. But Sartre was secretly a mem-
ber of the French resistance. He was never involved in the armed resistance but
worked with the intellectual resistance group Socialism and Liberty. Even during
the war, Sartre continued his writing, and in 1943 he published his most impor-
tant philosophical text,Being and Nothingness.Three years later,Existentialism
Is a Humanism,his most widely read philosophical work, was published.
After the war, Sartre retired from teaching and, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and de Beauvoir, founded the influential journal Les Temps modernes.He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 but refused to accept it. Together
with de Beauvoir, he spent the rest of his life writing and promoting revolution-
ary political causes. Frequently joining students or union workers in demonstra-
tions, Sartre even served as president of the International War Crimes Tribunal,
which condemned U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He was attracted to Marxist
thought—though he frequently criticized the French Communist Party for its
inadequacies. The discrepancies between the determinism of Marxist theory and
Sartre’s existentialist emphasis on radical freedom have been the subject of
many books. (See the suggested readings.)