The Second Coming Of Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre's grave is a modest affair, befitting a man who (so he claimed) hated monuments and cared nothing for his own legacy. Beside the plain, white marble tombstone in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris this week, well-wishers had left a vase of plastic flowers, a pot of geraniums, five roses, a pigeon feather, scores of pebbles and five unused Métro tickets.

Jean-Paul Sartre's grave is a modest affair, befitting a man who (so he claimed) hated monuments and cared nothing for his own legacy. Beside the plain, white marble tombstone in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris this week, well-wishers had left a vase of plastic flowers, a pot of geraniums, five roses, a pigeon feather, scores of pebbles and five unused Métro tickets.

On the grave - also the last resting place of Sartre's lifelong "companion" Simone de Beauvoir - there was an anonymous, scribbled note: "To JPS and SB, for your sincere writing and for the meaning you gave to life. Thank you for leaving your mark on history."

What the Métro tickets were for is unclear. Perhaps Le Petit Homme (the little man) and Castor (the beaver) might like to return to the Café de Flore to drink coffee, smoke Gauloises, discuss their many infidelities, mock their friends and ponder, from a new perspective, the difference between "being and nothingness".

Jean-Paul Sartre - philosopher, novelist, playwright, polemicist, political activist, the secular messiah of existentialism, the prototype of the "engaged" French intellectual - died 25 years ago this year. He was born 100 years ago next Tuesday.

His funeral in April 1980 provoked an outpouring of grief more usually associated with actors than with ugly, chain-smoking, foul-smelling, squint-eyed philosophers. More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Paris to follow his coffin and - in the phrase of one fan at the time - to "demonstrate against Sartre's death".

For the next two decades, Sartre's standing fell (and Beauvoir's, if anything, rose). Sartre's many mistakes and inconsistencies - his support for Stalinism in the early 1950s, for Maoism in the 1970s, his defence of civilian massacres in Algeria and at the 1972 Munich Olympics - obscured the range, versatility and ambition of his writing.

His reputation as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century is now rising again, not so much in France as - paradoxically - in high academic circles in the United States, a country that he detested.

Jean-Paul Sartre's many attempts to define what human "freedom" means are attractive to the black, female or radical academics who have formed the North American Sartre Society. Sartre provides them with an intellectual antidote to the glib and often self-serving use of words such as "freedom" and "liberty" by the dominant political and media culture of their own country.

In France, the centenary has provoked a flood of re-examinations of Sartre's intellectual and political legacy (which Sartre himself said that he disdained). It is also the occasion for an excellent exhibition (until 21 August) at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where you can see the great little man himself, in a series of perpetually rerun snatches from old TV interviews. In one of them, Sartre in his maiden-auntish voice, explains to a Canadian interviewer in 1976 why he refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. To have accepted it, he says, would have given him "a little badge of distinction, a little symbol of power" which would have separated him, a worker of the mind, from other members of the proletariat. Even a great talent like his, he says (with a coquettish flick of the head) does not justify a dangerous indulgence in such bourgeois vanities as the Nobel Prize.

It is easy, and very tempting, to caricature and mock Jean-Paul Sartre as a poseur and hypocrite. The profound thinker, who believed in the individual's duty to redefine constantly his own road to freedom, sold a Maoist newspaper on the streets of Paris in the 1970s which advocated the random assassination of policemen and bosses. The "war-hero", who was captured by the Germans while sending up weather balloons, became a "resistance hero", whose chief act of resistance was to write unpublished tracts and heavily coded plays. The man who never did a day of physical labour in his life stood on a box outside a Renault factory in 1971 lecturing car-workers on the Maoist paradise which awaited them.

The best description of Sartre, the man, comes in Ronald Hayman's biography: "Sartre felt most at home in cafés and restaurants where he could annex space by dominating the conversation and exhaling smoke... To reassure his mind that it had nothing to fear from sibling rivalry with his maltreated body he constantly ignored all messages (that his body) sent out... He resented the time he had to spend on washing, shaving, cleaning his teeth, taking a bath, excreting and he would economize by carrying on conversations through the bathroom door." (Sartre: a Biography, Carroll and Graf)

And what is one to make of his relationship with the feminist author and icon Simone de Beauvoir, the love of his life, with whom he did not sleep for his last 20 or so years? Both had serial love affairs, which they boasted about in letters which caused a scandal after their deaths.

Beauvoir, always known to Sartre as "Castor", seduced her young female students, mocked them in her letters to Sartre and - it is implied - sometimes passed them on to him. Sartre loved to be surrounded by beautiful women, made a hobby of seducing them but - he admits in his letters - had no more interest in the act of sex than he did in brushing his ruined teeth.

Judging by their letters, many of which are displayed in the Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition, there was enormous mutual tenderness and intellectual respect between Sartre and Beauvoir. She insisted on being buried with him, even though he cut her out of his will and bequeathed his money to his final mistress.

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on 21 June 1905. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was a first cousin of Albert Schweitzer, the Alsatian missionary. His father died the following year - an event which Sartre described as his "greatest piece of good fortune - I did not have to forget him". Sartre was coddled by his mother who dressed him like a girl. He was devastated when she remarried when he was 12 and he had to move to provincial La Rochelle. All in all, Sartre's early life provides a bundle of Freudian clues to his career - which probably explains why Sartre detested Freud and any suggestion that childhood determined character or the fate of the individual.

He was already on his way to making his reputation as a writer when the war began in 1939. In his wonderful trilogy The Roads to Freedom, Sartre gives his alter-ego, Mathieu, a rather existential heroic part in the war. Sartre was, in fact, in a meteorological unit which was overrun by the rapid German advance in June 1940. He was sent to a prison camp in Germany where his proximity to so many ordinary soldiers taught him, he claimed, to "believe in mankind". (Some suggest that prison camp life also generated the celebrated last line of his play Huis Clos: "Hell is other people".)

How original was Sartre as a writer and thinker? How influential has he been? Many of his ideas - even the word existentialism, which he popularised from 1946 and then abandoned - came from German near-contemporaries. It is difficult to say what Sartre "believed", because his thinking shifted all the time.

Oddly, perhaps, for a man regarded as a leftist, and the man most responsible for the persistent leftism of French intellectual life, the single, consistent strand in Sartrism is his glorification of the individual.

Sartre's existentialism began, in his early works such as his novel La Nausée (1938) and L'Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), as a discovery of man as a kind of tragic hero.

Nothing "explains" existence. Existence explains everything - and nothing. There are no absolute truths. Neither religion, nor psychology, nor social conditioning, nor the mechanical workings of history can provide universal truths nor explain how an individual should behave. Each individual must find his own path to "freedom" - freedom from handed-down values and "bad faith", or acceptance of a lazy, illusory, mediocre realisation of self.

Everything is therefore disgusting but also wonderful, because life is a permanent intellectual challenge, a permanent act of mental heroism. But if there is no true path and no morality, what is to prevent mankind from descending into barbarism?

This question is never resolved. Sartre takes refuge instead in Blakean aphorisms. "To be faithful is to be unfaithful to everything." "The absence of God is more divine than God."

Existentialism, in its pure form, is a hard philosophy to apply to the everyday life of supermarkets queues, missed trains and overdrawn bank accounts. It fits more easily with the existentialist lifestyle of the popular imagination - sitting in cafés, smoking cigarettes, with a portentous expression on your face. Sartre did much to influence the Beat generation in the US and Britain in the 1950s.

Sartre - true to his philosophy of never being true to anything - had, by that time, become frustrated with abstract existentialism. From the early 1950s, he plunged into a much more "politically engaged" version of his thinking. To the existentialist purists, this was - and is regarded by many to this day - as an apostasy.

The importance of the individual - the duty of each person to define, and live, his own version of liberty - remained. Sartre moved on, however, to believe that this could be achieved only through the political, sexual and economic liberation of all mankind. Instead of liberation theology, Sartre developed a kind of liberation philosophy.

The spiritually healthy individual had a duty to campaign against all forms of oppression. Since capitalist, bourgeois society was the chief oppressor, communism, even Stalinist communism, was for a while touted by Sartre as part of the road to freedom. Anti-colonial liberation movements in Algeria and Vietnam were easily justified; even massacres of civilians were applauded. Violence was regrettable, Sartre said, but there was also an unspoken, institutional violence that preserved capitalist and colonialist societies and oppressed mankind. Revolutionary violence was therefore needed to combat reactionary violence and clear the path to freedom. The problem with the French Revolution, Sartre said, was that the Terror of 1793 did not murder enough people. The old order survived and eventually returned.

The same logical problem recurred. If there were no universal truths, in whose name could you preach barbarous acts, without encouraging a descent into barbarism? This time, instead of aphorisms, Sartre resorted to dogmatism. "All anti-communists are dogs."

His extreme political allegiances discredited Sartre as a thinker in France, even before his death. The revival of academic interest in Sartre in recent years in France - and also in Germany - is mostly a revival of interest in the early Sartre.

La Nausée and L'Etre et le Néant may take you nowhere but who said there was a destination? As a poetic-philosophic examination of the human condition - the tail-chasing questions of the meaning of life - the books have few equals.

In America, young scholars have rediscovered the later Sartre, the politically engaged Sartre who detested the US. They are especially fascinated by his lifelong search for the meaning of "freedom" and his concept of "institutional violence".

Young female, black and radical academics see Sartre as one of the first people to pose the questions raised by the "war on terrorism", globalisation and the glib, conservative, American use of the word "liberty".

Can "freedom", in the normal US sense, have any meaning if it imposes misery on others, they ask. Is it not an act of "bad faith" if it is bought at the expense of global warming, oppression of women and racial minorities?

Scott Mclemee, who recently chaired an academic symposium on Sartre in the US, said: "If Sartre's legacy once seemed a casualty of the Cold War, it grows ever more pertinent to the way we live now. The arguments over systemic violence, emancipatory struggle, and terrorism that dominated much of his work have now come back into view as matters of interest well beyond the community of Sartre scholars."

Robert Stone, professor emeritus of philosophy at Long Island University, says that Sartre was committed "to the idea that all freedom is interdependent, that if I am really to choose my own freedom, I must choose ... a world in which basic needs are met - in which no one's freedom is subordinated to the 'systemic violence' of dehumanizing privation".

The veteran American writer Norman Mailer says that, au contraire, the late Sartre gets you into dark and sinister territory. By attempting to prescribe a political ideal, without the compass of morality or religion - "endemic nothingness installed upon eternal floorlessness" - Sartre heads down a dangerous blind alley.

When he was a very young man, Sartre said that he wanted to be both "Spinoza and Stendhal" - in other words, to be both a great philosopher and a great novelist or artist. Throughout his life, he alternated between political and philosophical writing and novel and theatrical writing. Ultimately, in his more modest moments, he seems to have regarded himself as a failure at both.

Sartre was obsessed with the great French 19th-century novelist Gustave Flaubert. He spent two decades studying the author of Madame Bovary. The incomplete results were published only after Sartre's death. In one of the interviews shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition, Sartre comes close to admitting that he was jealous. He began by regarding Flaubert as the worst example of a bourgeois writer, with no "political engagement". He later came to regard Flaubert's famously disengaged style as a sign of maddening artistry: an artistry that was beyond his own talents.

All the same, despite the Sartre revival in the radical US, it will probably be Sartre the artist-writer, rather than Sartre the political thinker, who survives. The core of his thought - the concept of extreme truth to oneself, of constant personal revolution, of infidelity as the ultimate act of faith - is an artistic anarchist impulse, not a practical political one.

Despite all his falsely modest talk of being "just another man" and a labourer of the intellect, Sartre's greatest creation was himself. He was a kind of Picasso of the written word. It is impossible to divide his work from the lingering, carefully crafted persona of the man: "the engaged intellectual" with rotting teeth, chain-smoking Gauloises in the Café de Flore.

Prophet Or Poseur? Jean-Paul Sartre on...

SOCIETY: 'People who live in society have learnt to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity... Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea'

EXISTENCE: 'The thing which was waiting was on alert, it pounced on me, it flows through me. I'm filled with it. It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist'

THINKING: 'It would be better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh'

GOD: 'I do not believe in God... But in the internment camp, I learnt to believe in men'

CRITICS: 'Critics are people who have had no luck in life, and at the point of despair, found a little quiet job as the caretaker of a cemetery...'

POMPIDOU'S DEATH: 'Pompidou was no one. A man is dead and many other people died that day, people who fell from roofs or into a machine. It is not more important than that...'

FREEDOM: 'Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does'

HELL: 'Hell is other people'

REVOLUTION: 'At the beginning of any revolt, you have to kill people. Murdering a European (for an Algerian) is killing two birds with one stone. He is getting rid of an oppressor and someone who was oppressed'

THE SOVIET UNION: 'Freedom of speech is complete in the USSR, and the Soviet citizen is constantly improving his way of life in the midst of a society that is making constant progress'