3

Teaching in the lyce ́e,

1931 – 1939

F

rom the timehe left the army to replace an ailing instructor in
the lyce ́e at Le Havre till September 2 , 1939 , when he was recalled
to active duty during the “phoney war” of 1939 – 1940 , Sartre made
his living as a high-school teacher, first in Le Havre, then in Laon, and
finally at the Lyce ́e Pasteur in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. His
reputation in the early years was that of a student-friendly, lax disciplin-
arian who didn’t wear the usual necktie, who would invite interested
pupils and two or three colleagues to share in amateur boxing practice
(he used to box while at the E ́cole), and so it was reported, would even
join some of the older students in visiting a local bordello. But his
students’ most memorable impression was of a brilliant mind, anxious
to get them to think for themselves as he had done to his own detriment
on the firstagre ́gationexam, rather than merely to “play the game” that
had won him victory in the second. One of these students and fellow
pugilists, Jacques Laurent Bost, would become a member of Sartre and
Beauvoir’s “family,” their inner circle of close friends.^1
Sartre was nothing if not unorthodox. Asked to deliver the lecture for
the prize day at the close of his first term in Le Havre, on July 12 , 1931 ,
he eschewed the standard praises of a liberal education in favor of an
exciting but shocking disquisition on the cinema as a liberal art. This was
not what the teachers or parents had expected, since the movies were

(^1) For members of the “family,” seeWDxiii, n. 8 ;L/S“Self-Portrait,” 64 ;Sitx: 196. The
“little” Bost was to distinguish him from his much older brother, who worked for Gallimard,
went on to have a long-standing affair with Simone de Beauvoir, the early stages of which are
recorded in Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost,Correspondance Croise ́e.
1937 – 1940 , ed. Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 2004 ).
47