Ronald Hayman
JEAN·PAUL SARTRE
When Jean-Paul Sartre was buried on April 19th, 1980,
a crowd of over fifty thousand converged on the procession and on
the cemetery of Montparnasse, while even more people watched on
television. No philosopher has ever had a bigger audience for his
funeral, though it was not his philosophy that had made him
famous. In France, a country where intellectuals are still honored,
he had for thirty-five years been the most celebrated intellectual. His
face was familiar to people who had never seen him; his sayings were
quoted by people who had never read his books. Witold Gom–
browicz called him the Eiffel Tower of French culture. As a philoso–
pher he was less original and less influential than Wittgenstein or
Heidegger, but Sartre's importance does not rest on any single area
of activity: we can say of him what he said of Proust - that his genius
lies in the totality of his work considered as "the totality of the
manifestation of the person."
As a playwright Sartre was highly successful but less innovative
and less significant than Beckett or Ionesco. As a novelist he com–
pleted only one work,
La Nausee (Nausea),
his other three novels
being parts of an unfinished tetralogy. The bulk of his writing time
was devoted to political journalism and biography, but he can hardly
be called a journalist, while his biographies of Baudelaire, Genet,
and Flaubert are not really biographies in the usual sense of the
term. "Writer" might look like the best one-word description of Sar–
tre, but it is inadequate. Quantitatively his output was prodigious–
his bibliographers have calculated that he averaged twenty pages a
day throughout his long life - but it was only when he was briefly in
the army that he wholeheartedly pitched most of his time into writing.
Before the war he would have liked to be a professional writer, but
he had to earn his living as a schoolteacher until 1944, when he was
almost forty. After the war his working life had two centers. He
never enjoyed himself more than when he was philosophizing in his
study, but his conscience was easier when he was functioning as a
partyless politician, agitating, using his influence to champion the
international underdog, fighting capitalism and imperialism, mak–
ing speeches, editing a review, demonstrating, attending meetings,
helping to organize political movements, traveling around the
