Jean-Paul Sartre - Paris, France
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Metro2
N 48° 50.404 E 002° 19.631
31U E 450631 N 5409895
Sartre won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964- but refused it.
Waymark Code: WMD2FN
Location: Île-de-France, France
Date Posted: 11/09/2011
Views: 19
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris with his lover of many years, Simone de Beauvoir. He and de Beauvoir were never married...but they often shared lovers.
Wikipedia (
visit link) further informs us:
"The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced Marxism (but did not join the Communist Party) and took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatories of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967.
His major defining work after 1955, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960 (a second volume appeared posthumously). In Critique, Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received up until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.
Sartre went to Cuba in the '60s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"[22] and the "era's most perfect man."[23] Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."[24]
During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment.[25]
Towards the end of his life, Sartre explicitly embraced anarchism."