ing at an early age, the progressive intensification of emotional energy and
accumulation of cultural capital, building up to creative originality and domi-
nance of the intellectual attention space. Sartre, Nizan, and Canguilhem are
already close friends in the early 1920s, at the elite Paris Lycée Louis le Grand
and in the cram courses preparing for the entrance examination for the ENS.
They enter the ENS in the same class as Raymond Aron, who becomes Sartre’s
roommate; Aron takes first place in the agrégation in 1928, Sartre first place
the next year; this time around Sartre crams with Simone de Beauvoir, who
comes in second. Merleau-Ponty, entering the ENS slightly later, by 1929 is in
the same group of friends. De Beauvoir, Sartre’s longtime intimate, eventually
becomes famous in her own right, using the life story of the group as material
for her novels.^14
They mutually support one another’s career chances. Aron, who lectures
on French philosophy at the University of Cologne soon after Scheler’s death,
introduces Sartre to phenomenology and gets him a visiting scholarship in
Berlin to study the German philosophers. Nizan, who makes an early success
with his literary-political writings and his eminence in French Marxism, rec-
ommends Sartre to his own publisher, Gallimard. The way is facilitated by the
presence on staff there of some of Sartre’s own former lycée pupils. Later on,
at the end of the 1940s, Sartre would tout Genet and prepare the way for his
theatrical success. All of Sartre’s major works, literary and philosophical, are
published by Gallimard (from 1938 onward), as are the works of Camus (from
1942), Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir, and the key early works of Gabriel
Marcel and Aron. Gallimard is a network center in its own right. Camus comes
to work there as a reader in 1943. The intellectual director of the Gallimard
staff, Bernard Groethuysen, a friend of Scheler, had been instrumental in
introducing Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and Kafka into French intel-
lectual life in the 1920s and 1930s.^15 The firm makes a publishing break-
through not only in content, especially importing the German modernists, but
also in form: in the 1930s Gallimard pioneered cheap paperback editions, and
explicitly bills itself publisher of the modern canon in the literature of ideas.
In the case of existentialism, the confluence of networks and the mutual
support within a group that underlies all creativity is heavily documented and
easy to trace. Why then should it take the form of glorifying a single individual,
the literary-philosophical genius Sartre? In fact this is a bit exaggerated. Ca-
mus, who comes from outside the main group, though approaching along
intersecting pathways (Paris avant-garde theater, Gallimard publishing) and
then joining it at its moment of initial creativity, is for a few years a dual
figurehead with Sartre. Nevertheless, the estrangement that commences in
1946 (Cohen-Solal, 1987: 332), and the bitter and open break which takes
place in 1952, seem to have been fated by the structure. Sartre or Camus, one
commands most of the loyalty and is glorified as the totemic emblem. The
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^775