The anguish of choice

In the shattered aftermath of war, Sartre delivered a formidable lecture on freedom and meaning. Its urgency remains

by Skye C Cleary  BIO

Jean-Paul Sartre in 1951. Photo by Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

is the author of How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (2022) and Existentialism and Romantic Love (2015), and co-editor of How to Live a Good Life (2020). Her lecture series Existentialism and the Authentic Life (2024) is available through the Great Courses. She teaches at Columbia University, and is a Thinking Partner with Philosophy at Work.

Edited byNigel Warburton

On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment.

While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left.

The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’.

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The morning after the lecture, Sartre met with Beigbeder at Sartre’s unofficial office, the Café de Flore. Beigbeder apologised for the chaos, and explained that, between advertising, space rental and the damage to club – including 30 broken chairs and a destroyed box office, meaning that they were unable to sell tickets – they were having trouble coming up with the payment they’d promised Sartre. Sartre had read the morning papers over coffee and croissants and interrupted: ‘As for my fee, forget it! Besides, it looks like we were a success!’

One headline read ‘Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist’. The papers reported ‘elbow fights’, ‘nonexistential angst’ and ‘a No Exit situation’ where the mob feared ‘dying of suffocation’. Critics accused Sartre of being ‘too scholarly’, but he was charismatic. His ‘cool’, his ‘courage’, his ‘grit’ and the force of his presence were striking.

By the autumn of 1945, the atrocities of the Second World War had been exposed: the gas chambers, the camps, the friend betrayals, and the avalanches of banal evils. Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, wrote that people ‘had discovered History in its most terrible form.’ Sartre was popular because, according to Beauvoir, ‘there existed, at least at first glance, a remarkable agreement between what he was offering the public and what the public wanted.’ In post-liberation Paris, people realised they needed to reconstruct both their buildings and their moral foundations.

Sartre challenged the idea that the only viable response to the Second World War was nihilism

Sartre’s lecture was so successful that the publisher wanted to release it for those who missed out. It went internationally viral. ‘And that bothered me,’ Sartre said in an interview almost 30 years later, while acknowledging the contradiction: ‘If I found what I said meaningful for 500 or 1,000 people, why wouldn’t I have found it equally meaningful for all the people who wanted to buy it?’ He said he was still working out the moral side of existentialism and the ideas weren’t as clear or finished as he would have liked. Plus, it tended to be read as a substitute for the harder work of Being and Nothingness (1943) and reduced his thinking into pullquotes.

Although the lecture was framed as a defence of existential philosophy, it was actually a lot more than that. ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ was a sincere attempt to address where our values come from. Sartre was challenging, in a serious way, the idea that the only viable response to the Second World War was nihilism. He was trying to construct a morality that avoids the ‘anything goes’ mentality. According to Beauvoir: ‘[Existentialism] seemed to offer the solution they had dreamed of. In fact, it did not.’ Although people were hungry for guidance and Sartre set himself up as a guru telling people how they should live, paradoxically, he was about to tell them to guide themselves.

The official purpose of the lecture was to promote ‘literary and intellectual discussion’, but Sartre worried that the media was distorting his ideas and fuelling his notoriety. He was also battling Communists who blamed him for young people’s suspicion of them, Christians who took issue with his atheism, and those who thought existentialists were people who swear a lot. Sartre felt his public image escaping him – a relatable modern anguish of watching a version of yourself circulate in the world, distorted and out of reach. He wanted to take back control and be better understood.

As Sartre notes in the post-lecture discussion, he didn’t want ‘merely to impose [his philosophy] on others in books’ and felt ‘an obligation to make it comprehensible to those who are discussing it on a political or moral plane.’ The lecture can get dismissed as ‘Sartre regretted it, therefore let’s ignore it,’........

© Aeon