Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. He taught philosophy in Le Havre in the 1930s, was held as a prisoner of war by the German army for nearly a year from 1940, and published Being and Nothingness in 1943. After the Liberation he became France's best known public intellectual, founding the journal Les Temps modernes. He was never a member of the French Communist Party, but in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) tried to reconcile existentialism with Marxism. He refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and died in Paris in 1980; estimates of the crowd at his funeral range from 50,000 to 100,000.

Sartre remains the central figure of existentialism, and his ideas on freedom, bad faith and responsibility shaped philosophy, literature and the politics of the postwar left. Admirers praise his commitment to anticolonial struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, his refusal of honors and his insistence that intellectuals take public stands. Critics, including his former friend Albert Camus, argue that he excused or downplayed Soviet repression; in 1950 he wrote that it was not his duty to write about Soviet labor camps. His preface to Fanon was attacked for appearing to celebrate killing, and his support for Maoist groups and shifting positions on Hungary in 1956 are often cited as political misjudgments.