ABSTRACT
Born into a prominent Parisian bourgeois family, Sartre became at an early age a strong critic of his class. Throughout his life he supported many causes on the left, and as a consciously committed intellectual he exercised an enormous impact on public events, often to the extreme dislike of the establishment. Voicing the interests of the latter, Paris-Match once carried an editorial with the title ‘Sartre, civil war machine’. In a similar vein in 1964, on the occasion when Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize, even the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel denounced him as the ‘gravedigger of the West’, in tune with the Vatican’s special decree which a few years earlier had placed the whole of Sartre’s work on the Index.
