Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 5
ingredient of human thought for many centuries, and it is
not unlikely that each of us has at one time or another
thought, as it were, “existentially” about his problems and
condition. It may very well be that moments of crisis, of
danger, of despair, tend to compel us to the existentialist
point of view, and surely this is one reason why the move-
ment became so popular in France at the moment in its
history of which I have been speaking. For it was then that
existentiahsm ceased to be a problem for professional phi-
losophers and became a force, a conviction, a climate. There
is no doubt that it will be identified with postwar intellectual
France in the same way that surrealism, for example, is identi-
fied with the span between the wars, symbolism with the
turn of the last century, and realism with the middle nineties.
Each of these doctrines—and there are many, for France is
the great progenitor of the world’s “isms”—must be explained
not only in its own terms, but in terms of the historic moment
that gave it urgency and vitality; and, finally, of the men
who lived that moment.
The man who is surely most directly responsible for what
some call the existentialist vogue is Jean-Paul Sartre. Born
in Paris of a middle-class family, Sartre received his earliest
education in the. provinces, returning to the capital for ad-
vanced studies in philosophy at the celebrated École Nor-
male. This was followed by sixteen months in the military
service and a short spell as a teacher in a lycée—the French
equivalent of our high school. At the outbreak of war, in 1939,
Sartre was thirty-four. He enlisted in the medical corps and
was taken prisoner in June of 1940. Returning to a defeated
France and to a Paris darkened by the shadow of the enemy,
he enrolled in the underground movement, later, it is said,
organizing his own group, and at the same time revealing a