(In 1960 , Sartre was one of the key authors of the Manifesto of
the 121 , a petition denouncing the French actions in Algeria,
and encouraging French soldiers to disobey orders in order to
destroy the war effort.) Sartre proved the axiom that the
French judge their philosophers by the political party they vote
for. In Sartre’s era, the Communist Party held sway among
the intellectuals. Stalinist rhetoric pervaded the classrooms
and hallways of the rue d’Ulm, often spilling out onto the
cobblestoned streets of the Latin Quarter.
Sartre had himself been a student at the École Normale
in the 1920 s. While studying at the École, Sartre also exercised
himself as a novelist and, of all things, a boxer. His short, ugly,
tenacious physique, the frog-like face with its walleye and ever-
present cigarette, were familiar to all at the ENS. Strange to say,
these physical peculiarities gave him an odd, powerful appeal
to women, and he became a champion seducer.
At the École, Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir, his match
as thinker and life partner, and later a central feminist intellec-
tual. Until Sartre’s death, he and de Beauvoir (called by Sartre
le castor,“the beaver,” for her assiduous nature) pursued an
open relationship in which they shared details of their roman-
tic encounters, often with the same young women.
In 1932 , Raymond Aron, who was later to become the
most important political philosopher of postwar France, told
Sartre about Edmund Husserl’s challenging approach to phi-
losophy, his new science of phenomenology. Sartre, immensely
excited, immediately read Emmanuel Lévinas’s pioneering
study of Husserl. For Sartre, phenomenology became the royal
road to understanding human consciousness.
Phenomenology suited Sartre’s already estranged view of
humanity. People were, to Sartre, foreign presences, lost in a
world of objects that remained indifferent to them. Husserl
26 From Algeria to the École Normale