Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre was born in Paris; his father, a naval officer, died when he was one, and he was raised by his grandfather Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), growing up in his study; the autobiography Words says he took writing for salvation from childhood. At the École Normale Supérieure he studied philosophy with Aron, Nizan and Merleau-Ponty, and in 1929 came first in the agrégation; second was Beauvoir, and the two formed a lifelong, non-exclusive partnership.

In 1933 he read Husserl in Berlin, then taught at a lycée in Le Havre and wrote The Imagination, The Transcendence of the Ego and the novel Nausea, which describes a man's vertigo before the sheer contingency of existence. Called up in 1939, he was captured in 1940, read Heidegger in a prison camp and lectured to fellow prisoners, was released in 1941, and returned to Paris to teach and join the Resistance. Being and Nothingness appeared in 1943, the play The Flies the same year, and No Exit in 1944 with its line 'hell is other people'.

Being and Nothingness distinguishes being-in-itself (things, full and meaningless) from being-for-itself (consciousness, which is what it is not and is not what it is). Consciousness is nothingness; it exists by negating, and is therefore absolutely free: we are 'condemned to be free', and every excuse for fleeing freedom is 'bad faith'. The look of the Other turns me into an object, and human relations are essentially conflict. In 1945 the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism declared that we first exist and then define ourselves by our choices, and that in choosing oneself one chooses for all humanity. Existentialism became the fashion of post-war Paris.

In 1945 he founded the journal Les Temps modernes and for thirty years was France's most influential public intellectual: opposing the Algerian war, supporting the Cuban revolution, refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, siding with the students in 1968, selling Maoist newspapers in the street in old age. The Critique of Dialectical Reason tried to give Marxism a foundation in individual praxis and was left unfinished. He wrote huge studies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert. Blind in his last years, he died in 1980 and fifty thousand people followed his coffin. He is buried with Beauvoir in Montparnasse.