Jean-Paul Sartre

Confessions of a teenage existentialist: back in the early 1970s, when my mates and I were all revving up for A-levels, Jean-Paul Sartre was, simply, the most famous of all living philosophers, and just about the most famous of all proper, serious writers. He was inevitable, compulsory, ubiquitous. You didn't even have to be a swot to have a fairly good idea of who he was, since BBC2 had just devoted 13 solid hours of prime-time viewing to its dramatisation of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. (Thinkable nowadays?) The Monty Python gang performed a Sartre sketch and for weeks afterwards, schoolyards echoed to imitations of Mrs Premise's high-pitched telephone query to Sartre's (fictitious) wife: "Quand sera-t'il libre?" Pay-off: "She says he's spent the last 60 years trying to work that one out!" Oh, we did laugh.

If you did happen to be a swot and/or would-be intellectual, Sartre was even harder to avoid—he was one of the few modern gurus who could rival Kafka and Beckett in the bookish adolescent's pantheon of lugubrious heroes. Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) was among that year's set texts for my local examination board's French A-level syllabus, while my swotty contemporaries elsewhere were no doubt busy giving similarly respectful attention to Les Mouches (The Flies), or La Nausée (Nausea), or Huis Clos (aka No Exit or In Camera, a staple at the time of high-minded amateur dramatic companies, and the source of the one Sartrean line everyone could quote: "Hell is other people.") No self-respecting south London neo-existentialist lacked a copy of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Nausea, complete with garish Salvador Dali cover; and when, at the age of 16, I went off with my army cadet unit to the Hebrides, I found a small niche in my backpack for Words, the Penguin translation of Les Mots, Sartre's part-mordant, part-glacial account of his cosseted early years. "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it…" ran the words on the otherwise plain front cover. Irresistible.

I look back on all this adolescent Sartreanism with relatively slight embarrassment; everyone, after all, has to start the messy job of growing up with the fodder their culture is offering at the time, and at least I wasn't gorging my half-formed brain on Tolkien. Nevertheless, today, it very nearly goes without saying that my contemporaries and I were being hopelessly old-fashioned in what we mistook for our avant-gardism. We began reading Sartre at almost exactly the time he gave up writing: his last real book, the third volume of his monumental study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, was published in 1972, and he went completely blind in the summer of 1973. But in the upper sixth, we had barely heard of anything Sartre had written since about 1950. La Nausée was first published in 1938; Huis Clos was first performed in 1944; the Roads to Freedom trilogy appeared between 1945 and 1949; Les Mains Sales had its premier in 1948. L'Être et le Néant, aka Being and Nothingness, a 700-page philosophical monster, saw the bleak light of day in 1943. And L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (translated as Existentialism and Humanism)—the short book which, with its stress on "authenticity" and the "anguish" of existence, probably did more than any other to endear Sartre to generations of adolescents—was published in 1946. We were, in short, the better part of three decades behind the Parisian cutting edge.



Then the domestic culture began to shift, and most of us shifted with it. Once out of my teens, I barely browsed a book by Sartre for 20 years. University opened the doors to other, more spellbinding philosophers, from Wittgenstein to Hegel. At the same moment, in the mid-1970s, the British began to pay attention to more recent French thinkers, from Lévi-Strauss onwards. We picked up eagerly on what Barthes had been writing in the mid to late 1950s; on what Foucault had been hatching in the early 1960s; and on what Derrida was pondering in 1967, year of De la Grammatologie. Angry, scary blokes in donkey jackets were now reading Althusser, whose chilling Marxist fundamentalism made Sartre look like an old high Tory. Politicised film buffs renounced Leavis and Hitchcock and moved on to Godard and Lacan. By the time I graduated, I was only about ten years out of step with the left bank, and admiration for Sartre was inadmissible in the college bar.

Some of us were dimly aware that Sartre's star had also been plummeting in his native land. It was not a straightforward rejection: Barthes, for instance, had been extravagantly complimentary about Sartre's 1955 play Nekrassov when everyone else was calling it an incompetent, boring disgrace. But elsewhere it was open season on intellectual fathers. Foucault, for example, had violently mixed feelings about Sartre. Much of his early work is an implicit challenge to the older writer on both philosophical and political grounds, and the two men could be witheringly rude about each other. In later years, they arrived at a more comradely understanding, though Foucault still had to be talked into attending Sartre's funeral.

That funeral itself was a remarkable event: up to 50,000 people turned out to accompany Sartre's corpse to the Montparnasse cemetery on 19th April 1980. Not since Victor Hugo, it was said, had a French intellectual been given such a send-off; others described it as the last demonstration of May 1968. Tributes were published around the world, some of them routine "death of a giant" puffs, some of them mealy-mouthed ("His relationship with the Communist party was not an easy one," observed L'Humanité in a small gem of litotes), some of them genuinely moving. Sartre's enemies paid tribute in their own way. The story runs that one Oxford don greeted a colleague with the words: "Have you heard? Sartre is dead!" The two fellows broke into a spontaneous dance of pure glee.

Dissolve to the early 21st century, and the giant is… well, not altogether forgotten. In Britain, a slice of Sartre is still in print—any decent bookshop will sell you Nausea or Roads to Freedom, and a good one will also stock the reissue of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. To put it mildly, though, his name no longer seems to excite the intelligent young; mainstream British philosophers continue, as they did when he was alive, to contend that what Sartre wrote had little or nothing to do with philosophy, and for every one book published on Sartre and x, there are 60, 70, 100 on Foucault and y. A widely read crib entitled Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers (1994), by John Lechte, devotes whole chapters to fauna such as Le Doeuff and Pateman—Pateman?—but mentions Sartre only in asides.

It might be said that a good part of this decline in Sartre's standing is simply intellectual business as usual. Reputations often fall quite sharply in the first decade or so after a writer's death, and in the case of Sartre, who, particularly in the years after 1950, owed much of his celebrity to mouthing off in public, it is not surprising that being out of media sight has also eased him out of mind. (The Foucault industry shows little sign of going into recession, however, and he has been dead for almost as long as Sartre.)

Then there is the thorny question of Sartre and the Soviet Union: certain parts of the Sartrean record are pretty damning, as when he returned from his trip to Russia in 1954 and proclaimed that freedom of speech and the right to criticism were absolute in the People's state. Let the record also state that two years later, at the time of the USSR's invasion of Hungary, he did what most decent intellectuals did, and broke his ties, at best tentative, with the French Communist party. That marriage was always doomed. And it is hard to escape the conclusion that Sartre is taking the full rap for such ideological offences where others have been let off with a caution: Brecht, Neruda, Picasso—as well as all those quondam fans of Mao Zedong, from Philippe Sollers to André Glucksmann, whose faces still loom large in French culture.

In short, when I was sent by BBC Radio 3 to Paris with producer Kate Bolton to make a documentary for the Sartre centenary (he was born on 21st June 1905) I expected to meet with, at best, regret from his friends and contempt from his enemies. Word had filtered across the channel of some swingeing attacks on the man: "Must we Burn Sartre?" asked one reputable newspaper.

"They are picking lice from the beard of Socrates!" was the furious response to these Sartre critics of Annie Cohen Solal, author of a partial but first-rate biography, Sartre: A Life. She told me that though she only met Sartre a few times, when she was a student, she had been permanently inspired by his no-nonsense acceptance of her as his intellectual equal, and by his refusal to play the great man.

Cohen Solal's sentiments were soon corroborated on all sides. The first thing that both Michel Contat (a noted jazz critic, and Sartre's earliest bibliographer) and Olivier Todd (biographer) wanted to impress on me was Sartre's absolute lack of pomposity ("very rare in a French intellectual," murmured the urbane Todd in his patrician-accented English), his keen sense of humour (astonishing news for most of us anglophones) and his robust, earthy relish of food, wine, women… and, yes, he liked song, too, especially the kind of songs you heard in the caves of St Germain-des-Prés. This is an image of Sartre so greatly at variance with the received caricature—the myopic, strabismic hyper-cerebral toad—that I was inclined to wonder if my leg was being pulled. But no: the improbable fact is that Sartre could inspire heartfelt devotion in men as well as women.

And a good many of those who do not love Sartre are now willing to pay him due respect. Posters all over Paris advertise a grand, and perhaps excessively solemn, exhibition devoted to him at the Bibliothèque Nationale. (Sign of our times: Sartre's cigarette has been carefully airbrushed from the image, so that he looks as if he is about to make a rude gesture.) Bookshops are laden with his works, newspapers are publishing Sartre supplements, and when I switched on the television in my hotel room, the first thing I saw was Bernard-Henry Levy, the open-shirted media intellectual, recanting his youthful rejection of Sartre and claiming that everything valuable in the maîtres penseurs of the 1960s was already present in Sartre's thought. Is this sudden eruption of Sartreana, prompted by his centenary, just another bubble in the cultural stock market, or does it mark the beginnings of a permanent upward revaluation of the man and his work?

If the latter, it may prove to be exactly the kind of admiration he did not want. Supporters and critics alike seem at one in the belief that, however else he may have warranted our loyalty or our disparagement, he added at least two classics to French literature: La Nausée and Les Mots. In other words: never mind the politics, taste the prose. This is what, once upon a time, radical folk used to call "recuperation": nullify the revolutionary challenge of Sartre's work by calling it "literature," smothering it in respect and putting it up on the library shelf where it can do no harm. It can be seen as another version of the tactic that wily old General De Gaulle used when the French right, outraged by Sartre's call for troops in Algeria to desert, demanded that he be arrested. "One does not imprison Voltaire," said De Gaulle. Sartre's detractors will say that his reputation was always grossly inflated, and the chance product of postwar French cultural politics. He was a fad; let him rot. But now that the dust is settling it can be said that nobody else, not even Camus, defined and acted out the role of the public intellectual with such energetic fervour. And if the pro-Soviet remarks now seem shoddy, his observations on colonialism and the third world appear clear-sighted and prophetic.

As for the other aspects of his legacy, his philosophical views remain out of favour. In Being and Nothingness, which contains the core of his thinking, Sartre used the tools of Husserl's phenomenonology to provide an account of human freedom, consciousness and subjectivity. He emphasised the difference between the conscious, free being-for-itself, which acts independently, and the non-conscious being-in-itself, which is a fact of the physical world—and introduces the notion of "bad faith," a form of self-deception witnessed in those who attempt to deny or who cannot cope with the extent of their own freedom.

I interviewed Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, on Sartre the philosopher. To my surprise, since Blackburn works in a tradition that is alien or even hostile to Sartre's, he expressed sympathy for the early work, citing Nausea as a rare example of a philosophical novel which achieves a convincing union of fiction and ideas, and commended the moments in Being and Nothingness—the famous passage about the over-attentive waiter, which Sartre uses as a parable of bad faith, is a case in point—where Sartre's novelistic powers animate his train of thought and take imaginative flight. As a philosophical stylist, Blackburn suggested, Sartre might be compared to Kant: in both writers, pages of dry exposition suddenly give way to a flash of dazzling lyricism, wit or incongruity.

This remark reminded me of something to which Sartre had confessed to Michel Contat in 1975: he wrote his philosophical works pell-mell and without hesitation (in the case of the Critique, fuelled by amphetamines), but his literary works with agonising slowness and many revisions. Les Mots, which he described as his farewell to a bourgeois dream of literature à la Flaubert, is his most Flaubertian work: like the author of Madame Bovary, he tortured himself over every word, hoping to achieve a grand synthesis of lapidary plainness and semantic depth—he wanted every sentence to yield at least four levels of nuance, he said. And just as Flaubert declared "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," the Sartre of Les Mots and L'Idiot de la famille might well have said "Flaubert, c'est moi." Annie Cohen Solal has demonstrated how each of Sartre's biographical subjects—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, Flaubert, even Tintoretto—was a disguised self-portrait.

For decades, Sartre's reputation has often been more a matter of hearsay, allegation and cliché than of well-founded judgement, but, in France at least, his presence has triumphantly survived both hostility and indifference. In 2005, his name is dropped almost as often as it was in 1945, Sartre's annus mirabilis. It is time for us to start reading him properly, too: there may be a whole continent to be discovered.