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’.
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.’
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