Jean-Paul Sartre Timeline

In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French Army, where he served as a meteorologist after the outbreak of World War II.

Sartre was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux and spent nine months as a prisoner of war—in Nancy and finally in Stalag XII-D, Trier—where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Bariona, ou le fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas.

Image source: German prisoner-of-war camps in World War II

Because of poor health—he claimed that his poor eyesight and exotropia affected his balance—Sartre was released from German captivity in April 1941.

In spring of 1941, Sartre suggested with 'cheerful ferocity' at a meeting that Socialisme et Liberté assassinate prominent war collaborators like Marcel Déat, but de Beauvoir noted the idea was rejected as none of them felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades.

After returning to Paris in May 1941, Sartre participated in founding the underground resistance group Socialisme et Liberté ('Socialism and Liberty'), a continuation of his 1940 group Sous la Botte, with writers including Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, and Jean Kanapa.

In October 1941, Sartre was given a position at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris previously held by a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach under Vichy law.

Image source: Lycée Condorcet

In 1943, after Socialisme et Liberté disbanded, Sartre joined a writers' Resistance group, in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war.

Image source: French Resistance

In late October 1944, Sartre met with Jean Bruller and Pierre Seghers and struck a deal that suppressed the collaborationist La Nouvelle Revue française in exchange for preserving its publisher Gallimard. That same month he assumed direction of a new Gallimard editorial project under the banner of 'committed literature', initially called La Condition humaine and renamed in December 1944 to Les Temps modernes.

In 1945, Sartre accepted an assignment by Camus's newspaper Combat to travel to America to write a series of articles, broadening his international profile as a journalist and intellectual.

Image source: Combat (newspaper)

From his rue Bonaparte apartment, Sartre launched the first issue of the quarterly literary and political review Les Temps modernes as editor-in-chief in October 1945, in part to popularize his own thought. This marked the symbolic initiation of his new phase of public political engagement.

In 1947, Sartre published several articles concerning the condition of African Americans in the United States—specifically the racism and discrimination against them—in his second Situations collection.

In 1948, for the introduction of Léopold Sédar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, Sartre wrote 'Black Orpheus', a critique of colonialism and racism in light of the philosophy he developed in Being and Nothingness.

Image source: Black Orpheus

In 1948, Sartre helped found the short-lived left-wing party known as the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR); the party disbanded a year later.

Image source: Jean-Paul Sartre

For a time in the late 1940s, Sartre described French nationalism as 'provincial', and in a 1949 essay called for a 'United States of Europe', reflecting his transnational political vision.

Image source: Federal Europe

Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, when Camus published The Rebel, expressing strong disdain for communism, political violence, and authoritarianism, which led to a famous public rupture between the two philosophers.

Image source: The Rebel (book)

In 1954, just after Stalin's death, Sartre visited the Soviet Union, where he stated he found a 'complete freedom of criticism' while condemning the United States for sinking into 'prefascism'. Frank Gibney classified him as a 'useful idiot' due to such uncritical positions.

Image source: Soviet Union

Sartre's newspaper Les Temps Modernes devoted special issues in 1957 and 1958 to Poland under Władysław Gomułka, praising him for his reforms—a representative example of Sartre's frequently contradictory and changing political views.

Image source: Władysław Gomułka

In 1959, Sartre argued that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes committed during the Algerian War of Independence, taking a strongly anti-colonial stance during the conflict.

Image source: Algerian War

In June 1961, a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of Sartre's apartment building, illustrating how his role as a public intellectual occasionally put him in physical danger amid tensions surrounding the Algerian War.

In 1964, Sartre attacked Nikita Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech', which had condemned the Stalinist repressions and purges—an example of the contradictions in his evolving views on communism.

Image source: On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences

In 1967, Sartre opposed U.S. war crimes through his participation in what became known as the Russell Tribunal, an international tribunal investigating American conduct in Vietnam.

Image source: Russell Tribunal

Sartre's preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth proved controversial on the left; it was omitted from some editions printed after 1967, reflecting debates over his endorsement of Fanon's revolutionary rhetoric.

During the May 1968 strikes in Paris, Sartre actively supported the student and worker movements and was arrested for civil disobedience during the summer of 1968, remaining committed to radical causes despite his household-name status.

Image source: May 68

In 1969, Sartre, along with 15 other prominent French writers including Louis Aragon and Michel Butor, signed a letter protesting the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—'already a victim of Stalinist repression'—from the Union of Soviet Writers.

Image source: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When the Maoist party Gauche prolétarienne was banned by the Gaullist state in 1970, promoting its newspaper La Cause du peuple and selling it on the street became a badge of honor for Sartre, demonstrating his solidarity with radical youth movements.

In 1973, Sartre controversially argued that 'revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and their death is the only way', exemplifying the provocative extremes of his political thought.

During a collective hunger strike in November 1974, Sartre visited Red Army Faction member Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment, continuing his lifelong commitment to political intervention.

Image source: Andreas Baader

In 1977, Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir signed petitions calling for reforms to age-of-consent laws in France, including decriminalization of consensual sexual relations between adults and minors—one of the most controversial acts of their careers.

In 1945, after the war ended, Sartre moved to an apartment on the rue Bonaparte, where he produced most of his subsequent work and lived until 1962.

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les Mots (The Words), reflecting on the illusions of his childhood ambition to become a writer.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was announced on 22 October 1964. On 14 October, Sartre had written to the Nobel Institute asking to be removed from the nominees and warning he would not accept, but the letter went unread. On 23 October, Le Figaro published his statement explaining his refusal, saying he always declined official honors and that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.' He had earlier refused the Légion d'honneur in 1945.

Image source: Nobel Prize in Literature

Arlette Elkaïm, Sartre's former mistress, was legally adopted by him in 1965, formalizing their personal bond within the unconventional arrangements that characterized his relationships.

Sartre suffered from hypertension and became almost completely blind in 1973, severely limiting his ability to read and write, though he remained engaged in activism and debate through other means.

Despite declining health in his later years, Sartre remained committed to activism and intellectual debate until his death on 15 April 1980 in Paris from pulmonary edema, closing the life of one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century.

In 1993, French author Bianca Lamblin wrote of her sexual exploitation by Sartre and Beauvoir in her book Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée, written in response to the posthumous 1990 publication of Sartre's Letters to Castor, in which she appeared under the pseudonym Louise Védrine.