Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) Centenary: With the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre next Tuesday, Lara Marlowe visited a major exhibition in his honour in Paris and looks at a figure who filled his century as Voltaire and Victor Hugo once did theirs
The archetypal French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre was lionised by generations of leftists around the world. The extreme right hated him so much that they blew up his office and apartment during the Algerian war.
Philosopher, novelist, playwright and political militant, Sartre embodied the foibles, passions and ideological wanderings of the 20th century. He lived through two world wars and transposed the ideas of German philosophers Heidegger and Husserl into the philosophy of existentialism.
Sartre took seriously his own admonition that writers should be engagés - committed to the great social causes of their time. The nouveaux philosophes who followed, Bernard Henri-Lévy and André Glucksmann, are pale imitations.
The Algerian war, Vietnam, Maoism and the student revolution of May 1968 were but a few of the myriad causes Sartre took up. He sometimes got it dreadfully wrong, as when he returned from Moscow in the early 1950s and declared: "The freedom to criticise is total in the USSR." Yet Sartre's adoring fans forgave him, crowding into his lectures because they couldn't read his voluminous treatises on L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) and Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason).
When Sartre died on April 15th 1980, Serge July, who had co-founded Libération newspaper with him, wrote: "The immense Sartre filled the century as Voltaire and Hugo did theirs . . . He was everywhere for 40 years, in all schools of writing, in every battle." To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sartre's birth on June 21st 1905, the Bibliothèque Nationale has dedicated an exhibition to him that is nearly as ambitious as the five-volume biography of Flaubert which Sartre took 30 years to write and left unfinished.
Curators have used hundreds of original photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, posters and letters to illustrate Sartre's life. You feel almost voyeuristic, reading his handwritten missives to "Mon charmant Castor . . ." Castor means "beaver" in French, and was Sartre's nickname for the love of his life, writer Simone de Beauvoir.
The exhibition includes works by the artists and photographers Sartre knew, including Picasso, Giacometti, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson. In half a dozen curtained rooms spread throughout the exhibition, you can watch films of Sartre's plays, including Huis clos (No Exit), considered his theatrical masterpiece. Three characters - Garcin the cowardly traitor, Estelle, who drove her lover to suicide, and Inès, a cruel lesbian - meet in hell after their death. "Hell is other people," Garcin says. It is the most quoted line of Sartre's oeuvre.
ANOTHER EFFECTIVE DEVICE is the television screens marking each stage of Sartre's life. Pick up a telephone receiver next to the constantly replayed images, and Sartre tells you, in television interviews of the 1960s and 1970s, his own life story.
Sartre's father, a naval officer, died of bronchitis when Jean-Paul was 15 months old. The boy's mother, Anne-Marie, took him to live with her parents, the Schweitzers, a Protestant family from Alsace who had produced eight generations of pastors and teachers. In 1952, Anne-Marie's first cousin, Albert, a missionary doctor, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Africa.
Sartre's young mother focused all her attention on Jean-Paul, who decided to become a writer when he was eight years old.
"My mother and I were the same age," he wrote in Les Mots (Words), the autobiography that is considered his finest work. "She called me her servant knight, her little man. I told her everything."
To Sartre's despair, Anne-Marie remarried when he was 12.
"My family broke," he wrote. "I found myself with a monsieur who pretended to be my father and who was totally foreign to me. He was the one against whom I constantly wrote; my whole life."
Much later, in her second widowhood, Sartre's mother would live with him in the rue Bonaparte, overlooking Saint- Germain-des-Prés. Sartre professed to hate the bourgeoisie, but his apartment was furnished with faux Louis XVI. His male secretary, Beauvoir (who kept her own apartment) and a gaggle of mistresses visited.
Sartre had met Beauvoir when they were students at the École Normale Supérieure. "I love you, but I am polygamous," he told her. For the rest of their lives, they addressed one another by the formal vous. They agreed to a two-year renewable contract for their relationship, which they based on total transparency. Both recounted their affairs in detail to the other. Beauvoir usually managed to overcome her own jealousy.
Actresses in Sartre's plays and the women who translated his books often became his mistresses. How did a short, ugly, cross-eyed philosopher attract so many beautiful women? Dolores Vanetti, the mistress who "gave America" explained his seductiveness.
"He poured himself into listening to you, understanding you, loving you," she said. "All his intelligence, all his talent, went into it, and he managed to create an irresistible magnet . . . when he wanted to seduce you . . . he asked you questions and listened to you like nobody else."
IN LA NAUSÉE (Nausea), his first novel, published in 1938, Sartre foregrounded his philosophy of existentialism.
"Me, I live alone, entirely alone," his narrator, Antoine Roquentin says. "I don't talk to anyone, ever. I receive nothing. I give nothing."
One winter day in the public park, Roquentin is seized by nausea, sitting "between the great black trunks, between the black and knotted hands that reach towards the sky . . . A tree scratches the earth beneath my feet with a black fingernail . . . existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, through the nose, through the mouth . . ."
Sartre claimed that existentialism was a modern form of humanism. Despite the absurdity of the world, man could create meaning through action or artistic endeavour. Man had to understand "that he can count on nothing other than himself, that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without succour, with no goal other than the one he gives himself, with no destiny other than that which he makes for himself on this earth".
But for the public, existentialism was a 1950s fad evoking the jazz clubs in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Sartre partied with singer Juliette Greco and trumpeter and writer Boris Vian.
In 1951, Sartre and de Beauvoir broke off their friendship with Albert Camus because he condemned Stalinism in L'Homme révolté (The Rebel). Sartre was in his pro-Soviet period, and published a nasty review of Camus's book, to which the ever lucid Camus responded in writing: "You cannot decide whether a thought is true according to whether it is on the right or on the left, and even less so according to what the right and left decide to do with it."
The Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956 ended Sartre's love affair with the USSR. He described himself as "a man who wakes up, cured of a long, bitter and gentle folly". But he and Beauvoir did not repair their friendship with Camus, who was killed in a car crash four years later.
In 1957, Camus accepted the Nobel Prize for literature with an eloquent speech in Stockholm. When Sartre won the Nobel in 1964, he refused it on the grounds that "the writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution".
Though Sartre loved the novels of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos and American jazz music, from his first visit to the US in 1946 - financed by the US state department - he became an unrelenting critic of the US government. His anger reached its apogee in the 1950s, with McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs, accused of spying for the USSR.
"Watch out! America has rabies," Sartre said. "Let us cut all ties that bind us to her, otherwise we shall in turn be bitten and come down with rabies."
Sartre was even more virulent against colonial powers. "At the beginning of a revolt, you have to kill," he wrote in the preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) in 1961. "Killing a European kills two birds with one stone. It gets rid of an oppressor and an oppressed: one dead man and one free man remain."
In the 1960s, Sartre became a roving ambassador for left-wing causes, calling on Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev, Tito and Mao. The Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, talked to him for three hours.
In 1973, Sartre went blind. The last seven years of his life would be a torment. "My profession as a writer is completely destroyed," he said on his 70th birthday. "The sole goal of my life was writing . . . I was, and I am no longer."
When Sartre died, Simone de Beauvoir led the huge funeral procession to Montparnasse cemetery. The story of a young man who was asked that night by his father how he'd spent his afternoon entered French legend.
"I went to the demonstration against Sartre's death," the young man replied.
Sartre is at the Bibliothèque Nationale, site Francois-Mitterrand, quai Francois-Mauriac, Paris 13e, until Aug 21, (Tue-Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, noon-7pm; closed Mon and bank holidays)