Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a lycée teacher who became, after the war, the most famous intellectual in the world, the voice of existentialism from the cafés of Saint-Germain. Nausea, his first novel, gives the discovery of contingency; Being and Nothingness, written partly as a prisoner of war, the philosophy of freedom and bad faith; No Exit the line that hell is other people. He edited Les Temps modernes with Beauvoir, moved toward Marxism, and refused the Nobel Prize in 1964. Fifty thousand people followed his coffin through Paris.