Jean-Paul Sartre: The Man Who Made Angst Fashionable

Jean-Paul Sartre didn’t want your medals, your prizes, or your bourgeois approval. He wanted freedom. Preferably while sipping a coffee in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, plotting the end of Western complacency, and maybe scribbling some notes for a play about nausea. The man was, after all, the patron saint of awkward questions, and the godfather of looking meaninglessness square in the eye and saying, “Yes, but what if we smoke about it?”

Born in 1905, Sartre had the kind of childhood that practically begs for overanalysis. His dad died early, his mum married his uncle, and little Jean-Paul buried himself in books. Not your cheerful Enid Blyton stuff either. He was hooked on Schopenhauer before puberty. No wonder the guy spent most of his adult life suspicious of happiness.

He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where students competed in being brilliant, insufferable, or both. Sartre excelled. He devoured Heidegger, taught philosophy in Le Havre, and at some point got seriously obsessed with the problem of existence. What does it mean to be? Are we really free? Is the waiter pretending to be a waiter actually more waiter than the concept of waitering itself? Sartre thought so.

He wrote Nausea, a novel where the main character, Roquentin, realises life has no inherent meaning and feels physically sick about it. The book made him a cult figure. Who else could make philosophical despair so gripping? Existentialism wasn’t just angst – it was performance art with a pack of Gauloises.

During World War II, Sartre got captured by the Germans. Not for long. He escaped, joined the French Resistance, and wrote plays and philosophy while ducking the Gestapo. It’s hard to imagine a more on-brand biography: freedom under threat, action over words, and a loathing of fascism with a side of dramatic flair.

He wasn’t doing it alone, of course. Simone de Beauvoir was there all along. Their relationship defied convention. They weren’t monogamous, they weren’t jealous (allegedly), and they saw each other as intellectual equals. Beauvoir described it as an “essential love” with room for the occasional, let’s say, existential detour.

Together they built a sort of Left Bank intellectual fortress, where ideas could run wild and taboos were routinely dismembered. Sartre was the guy with the ideas, Beauvoir often the one who sharpened them. He called her Beaver. She called him Little Being. Somewhere in that, modern philosophy happened.

Sartre believed in radical freedom. Not the lazy “do what you want” kind, but the terrifying “you are responsible for every choice you make and there is no script” kind. Hell is other people, sure, but it’s also the self, with all its squirmy contradictions and flimsy alibis. His play No Exit stages exactly this horror: three people stuck in a room, torturing each other with what they see in each other’s eyes. The door’s open. They don’t leave. Welcome to the human condition.

He wasn’t all theory. Sartre wrote novels, plays, and thousands of pages of philosophy. He gave public lectures, protested wars, criticised colonialism, and sided with causes ranging from the Algerian independence movement to Castro’s Cuba. He backed Mao for a while, which in hindsight wasn’t his best ideological decision. But consistency was never his thing. Freedom was.

Then came 1964. Sartre gets a phone call: the Nobel Committee wants to give him the prize for literature. Most people would’ve popped open the champagne. Sartre declined. He said it would turn him into an institution. The man who wrote about bad faith wasn’t about to let a gold medal define him. In true Sartrean fashion, he agonised over the decision in private and then rejected the honour in a perfectly wordy letter. He didn’t even ask for the cash.

He grew crankier with age. By the 1970s, he was nearly blind, dictating most of his work, and still refusing to admit that the revolution had gone a bit sideways. He gave interviews on park benches, criticised the Soviet Union while half-defending it, and confused friends and enemies alike. His friendship with Camus had already imploded decades earlier over politics. Sartre wanted engagement. Camus wanted nuance. The resulting feud was as French as red wine and arguing about it.

His magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, reads like a fever dream of someone who stayed up too late reading Heidegger and drinking absinthe. It tries to show that human beings are free whether they like it or not. We’re not fixed like objects. We define ourselves through our actions. Every moment is a chance to choose. That’s both exhilarating and awful. Sartre had the range to make it sound like a moral emergency.

You might not think of Sartre as a romantic. But he was, in the grand tragic sense. He believed that love was doomed to failure because we try to possess the freedom of another person. And once you do that, it’s no longer love. It’s control. That’s why all those doomed lovers in his plays end up in despair. Romantic comedies were not his genre.

He smoked like a chimney. He popped amphetamines like someone trying to win an imaginary productivity contest. And he wore oversized glasses and looked like a turtle with a manifesto. Yet somehow, he was cool. In a surly, neurotic, caffeinated way. Students adored him. Authorities didn’t.

His funeral in 1980 was massive. Fifty thousand people turned up. No flowers, no god, no peace. Just the final act of a man who spent his life trying to make sense of the world and reminding others that sense-making was their job too. He made being confused about life seem like a noble profession.

Even if you’ve never read a line of Being and Nothingness (and most people haven’t, including some who claim they have), Sartre’s fingerprints are everywhere. The idea that we are not born with a purpose but create it through living? That’s Sartre. The whole concept of being “authentic”? Sartre. The notion that you can walk away from a script you never agreed to? Also Sartre.

He’s been accused of everything: nihilism, hypocrisy, self-indulgence. But maybe the worst you can say about Sartre is that he took human freedom too seriously. And in a century where a lot of people tried to tell others who to be, that’s not a bad legacy to leave.

So the next time you feel the crushing absurdity of existence, or stare blankly at your reflection wondering what it all means, raise a crooked eyebrow and mutter something existential. You’re not alone. Sartre did it first. And he probably wrote a play about it before breakfast.