Une renaissance sartrienne

(A Sartrean Renaissance)

After Sartre’s funeral in April 1980, it felt as if France had just buried Victor Hugo for the second time. Then his work set off on a strange odyssey, encountering fortunes and failures according to the country and epoch. In this essay, Annie Cohen-Solal draws on her travels abroad and the lectures she has attended, to present us with a fresh look at this dynamic thought process. While the French indulged in nit-picking Socrates, intellectuals concurred in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia, North and South America to declare that Sartre’s message represented a baseline to understand their own epoch.