Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) virtually held court
over French intellectual life for twenty years. He influenced writers,
artists, social scientists and political activists around the
world.
(Not to mention the thousands of university students and drop-outs in
scores of countries who sat around in coffee houses, dressed in black,
thinking melancholy thoughts in his name.)
He was one of the most famous philosophers of his century, as well as an
influential novelist, playwright and political activist; yet he was
never satisfied with his own intellectual views.
He put the name "existentialism" on the philosophical map, only to
abandon existentialism for Marxism.
Then, finally, he abandoned Marxism too.
A thorn in the side of the French Government, he was so popular that, at
his death, 50,000 people followed his funeral cortege through the
streets of Paris.
Who was this man?
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