Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist, playwright, journalist and political activist, was born 100 years ago, and France is celebrating with a major retrospective in Paris, writes David Tresilian In an exhibition marking the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1905, the French National Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), has had the good idea of dusting off its collection of Sartre materials, adding them to materials gleaned from Sartre's publisher, Gallimard, and from items held in private collections, among them those of Sartre's adopted daughter, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, adopted daughter of Sartre's lifetime companion Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a powerful, somewhat literary, exhibition that takes in the whole of Sartre's long career and includes many rarely seen items, usually only available to researchers. Starting with items illustrating Sartre's childhood and family background and concluding with a video presentation of the crowds that followed his funeral cortège through Paris in 1980, the exhibition presents the events of Sartre's long life in the light of what turns out to be a voluminous quantity of commentary, provided by Sartre himself, by de Beauvoir in her volumes of autobiography, and by various associates and contemporaries of Sartre, such as journalist and novelist Albert Camus and philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with both of whom he had famously acrimonious fallings-out. All of this makes for great quantities of paper, much of it blackened and filled in by Sartre's uncannily even handwriting, though inevitably looking rather yellowed now. One of the last display cases in the exhibition contains a slab of manuscript from L'Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), Sartre's "total biography" of the French 19th century writer Gustave Flaubert, now part of the Sartre holdings of the BNF. Looking at this impressive heap of papers, part of an unfinished work running to 2,802 pages, the final volume of which was published in 1976, the visitor is reminded of the exhibition's starting point, a reconstruction of Sartre's own family and childhood years, illustrated through copious quotation from his 1963 autobiography Les Mots (Words) which was published in the journal that Sartre founded and edited, Les Temps Modernes. Was it the case, Sartre wondered there, that his sheer industriousness and productivity, insisted on by various contributors to the valuable catalogue accompanying this exhibition, was the result of some unguarded comments by his maternal grandfather that the young Jean-Paul, if he could be nothing else, could at least become a writer? Sartre never produced a total biography of himself, a total autobiography so to speak, along the lines of the mammoth work he produced on Flaubert, Les Mots, finishing with its subject's early secondary school years. In a sense, though, as this exhibition reveals, he did not need to, his life being lived out as a kind of vast experiment, or series of experiments, with Sartre, always attentive to the potentially identity-constituting regard of other people, attempting to fashion what for him would be an authentic existence and obsessively writing up the results in different forms along the way. Such thoughts, inevitable given the sheer quantity of words on display in this exhibition, are more or less those arrived at by Sartre's biographer Annie Cohen-Solal in a short summary of her views published in book form this month in Paris. Quoting from one of Sartre's essays, Cohen-Solal reminds us of Sartre's view that the biographical works he produced on Flaubert and others, as well as the autobiographical works he produced on himself, were all intended to answer the same question: "how does a man become someone who writes?" Perhaps this exhibition goes some way to answering that question in Sartre's case, while showing the interconnectedness of the materials he found to write about. However, comment in France thus far has concentrated on the photograph used for the exhibition poster, prominently displayed in Paris's famous underground system and elsewhere. Where the original would have featured a cigarette, Sartre rarely appearing without some form of tobacco, in the poster this has been airbrushed out. As many commentators have argued, sacrificing Sartre to the politically correct in this way, or at least to the anti- tobacco lobby, is especially ironic in the light of the philosopher's much-advertised commitment to self- constituting and responsible choice. Sartrs was closely involved in the decolonisation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, in which vast areas of Africa and Asia, hitherto under direct European control, achieved independence, and this area of the exhibition may be of special interest. He is particularly remembered for his support for the FLN, the National Liberation Front, in the Algerian war of independence against France, for his association with the intellectuals of the period, notably Fanon, and for his opening the pages of Les Temps Modernes to writers and thinkers from across what was then still the colonised world. These involvements are extensively documented here, the exhibition containing material the familiarity of which does not stop it from being a powerful aide-mémoire, acting as a spur sending one back to Sartre's texts with renewed interest and enthusiasm. Sartre's association with what was then dubbed the tiers-monde, the Third World, began immediately after the second world war, and it is traced, in an illuminating catalogue essay by Daniel Maximin, to a letter sent to Sartre in 1945 by Alioune Diop, founder of the review Présence Africaine. This letter, included in the exhibition, is now part of the BNF's Sartre holdings, and Maximin thinks it may have first interested Sartre in the complex relationship of self and other represented by European relations with the non-European world and the possibility of putting this relationship on new foundations through decolonisation. Such a possibility, energetically pursued by Fanon and others in the 1950s, would naturally have interested a philosopher professionally interested in expanding the boundaries of freedom, notably through escaping the imprisoning control of others. Diop, from Senegal but in 1945 a schoolteacher in Paris, wrote to Sartre about Europe and Africa in the hope that "you will comment in a way that will interest people in general and be of benefit to us all. I present my feelings of disarray faced with life, desiring only to be reassured about the problems that contact with Europe, which is so complicated, gives rise to in me." Rising to this appeal, Sartre sought, in Maximin's words, "to explain Europe and its contradictions to non-Europeans and above all to bring other voices to the centre of what at that time still took itself to be the centre of the world," giving support and encouragement not only to Diop, but also to Leopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and others, and writing introductions and other texts to introduce them to European and international audiences. Many of these texts are included in the present exhibition, well-known pieces Sartre produced at the time being displayed either in manuscript form or as first editions. These include Sartre's 1948 essay Orphée noir, a still fascinating introduction to Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, an anthology of African and other authors, and first editions of Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), a text that haunts Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), and of Fanon's own Les Damnés de la terre (1961), a classic of decolonising thought, with its famous introduction by Sartre. In the late 1950s, Sartre's engagement with Third- World decolonisation took a less bookish turn, notably through his support for the FLN and the dangers to which this exposed him. The exhibition devotes much space to this period, including notes that Sartre used in a 1957 court appearance on behalf of Ben Sadok, assassin of the vice-president of the Algerian assembly, now in the BNF, and a copy of the "Manifesto of the 121", a "declaration for the right to revolt against the war in Algeria" calling upon French soldiers to desert and signed by Sartre and others. There is also a copy of a letter written in support of French metropolitan sympathisers of the FLN, read out in court in 1960 to general consternation, in which Sartre declared himself a "porteur de valises" -- in other words, for supporters of French Algeria, a bomb-carrying terrorist. Sartre's apartment was itself bombed on two occasions, in 1961 and 1962, at the height of the troubles in France as a result of the Algerian war, and the exhibition contains photographs and newsreel materials on these events. By the late 1960s, Sartre's reputation as a kind of counter-ambassador and establishment gadfly was at its height: received by Nasser, Mao, Fidel Castro, Khrushchev and others on various visits abroad, he was also playing a prominent role on the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to investigate US actions in Vietnam. In addition, Sartre was playing a new role in French national life, particularly in its media, the exhibition including editions of the newspaper Libération, of which Sartre was a founder and for a time editor, as well as of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple, for which Sartre took legal responsibility following the arrest of its editors. Finally, it would take a career to pull together the various Sartres presented in this exhibition, from the vast ramblings of the philosophical and some of the literary-critical works, to the pointed economy of the essays and political interventions, as well as the novels and plays. The record of a life that touched on many of the most significant themes of the last century, it is hard to imagine that anyone could not benefit from visiting this exhibition, which also contains diverting material on Sartre's plays including production records and filmed extracts. Sartre, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 9 March to 21 August 2005.
