ABSTRACT
Born in Paris on June 21, 1905, J. P. Sartre’s biological father dies 15 months later, at which point Sartre’s mother moves into her parents’ house in the Parisian suburbs. Sartre’s mother remarries in 1917 and the family moves out of Paris to La Rochelle, where Sartre attends a local lycee of considerably lower quality. Sartre describes the next four years as the worst of his life due to a complicated relationship with his stepfather, combined with constant bullying at school. The well-known story of Sartre’s discovery of Husserl through Raymond Aron, while drinking cocktails at a cafe, probably fails to appreciate the likelihood that Sartre was already familiar with, if not Husserl’s work, at least Husserl’s ideas. The group unsuccessfully attempts to form liaisons with other resistance groups, including the French Communist Party (PCF), but the PCF either genuinely feared or simply contrived a story that Sartre was collaborating and rejected the group’s offer.
