Aside from rare reflections on the “might have been” if his father had
lived (cf.Words 55 ), there is little discussion of the Sartre side of the
family or of the town in southwest France where his father was raised
and died. Schweitzer is the dominant gene, and the imposing Alsatian
extended family, reinforced by regular visits to the homeland, certainly
left its mark on the child, whether by its musical proclivities, its intel-
lectual gifts, or its religious ambiguity. Until the age of 10 , Sartre was
largely home-schooled. And it was his grandfather more than his mother
who set the tone: “A man of the nineteenth century was foisting upon his
grandson ideas that had been current under Louis Philippe...I started
off with a handicap of eighty years” (Words 40 ).^30
Sartre’s original title for his autobiography was “Jean sans Terre”
(after the English king, Jean Lackland, who lost most of Aquitaine to
Philip II of France). A likely reason for that choice was Sartre’s descrip-
tion of his childhood phantasies of heroism: “I became a lonely adult,
without father and mother, without home or hearth, almost without a
name” (Words 72 – 73 ). But an equally plausible justification for the title
would be the prophetic nature of these remarks. Sartre will never own
his own home, either living in hotel rooms or renting apartments or
staying with his elderly mother, will never own an automobile or even
know how to drive, and will spend his royalties lavishly on friends and
travel, with little regard for bourgeois thrift or providence.^31
Sartre on film, 1972In February and March 1972 a crew filmed a set of interviews between
Sartre and several members of his “family” in the apartment of Simone
(^30) The Sartres were Catholic, the Schweitzers Protestant. Sartre’s maternal grandmother and
two uncles were Catholic as was his mother, who enrolled him in catechism classes. On
Sartre’s telling, though he sang in the choir for a time as a schoolboy, what kept the women
going to church was chiefly the organ music. He rather casually abandoned his faith at the
age of 12 while waiting for some companions in La Rochelle: he had “a tiny intuition that
God did not exist” (Simone de Beauvoir,La Ce ́remonie des adieux, suivi de entretiens avec
Jean-Paul Sartre, Aouˆt–Setembre 1974 [Paris: Gallimard, 1981 ], 545 ; hereafterCe ́r). Extin-
guishing the spirit of his belief, however, was less than casual: “My struggle with atheism was
long and difficult. I finally cornered the Holy Ghost in the basement and threw him out the
31 window” (Words^158 ), a remark that gives the “Death of God” a particularly graphic twist.
For the two extant chapters of “Jean Sans Terre” ( 1955 ), see Jean-Paul Sartre,Les Mots et
autres e ́crits autobiographiques, Bibliothe`que de la Ple ́iade (Paris: Gallimard, 2010 ), 965 – 1005 :
hereafterMAEAwith title of entry and page.
Four accounts of Sartre’s childhood 13