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This inadvertent guru had an opinion on everything, painfully considered, elaborately reasoned, often changed. But for most of his life he was convinced of the ineluctable corruption of the bourgeoisie, even though he was to the bourgeoisie born. His father was a naval officer who sickened and died when Jean-Paul was only two. The boy was brought up in the house of his grandfather, a linguistics professor who doted on him. His prim Roman Catholic mother he loved but did not respect, because nobody else in his free-thinking Lutheran grandfather's household did ("My mother and I were the same age," Sartre later recalled).
At the Ecole Normale Supérieure he studied philosophy and met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong love, mistress and intellectual alter ego. The war found him a secondary school teacher in Le Havre. In 1940, as a clerk in the army weather service at the front, he was captured by the Germans. After six months he got a release by passing himself off as a civilian too weak-eyed to be of military use. He returned to Paris and sweated out the Nazi Occupation.
He risked imprisonment by writing for the underground press. He also wrote a play, The Flies (1943). Ostensibly a reworking of Aeschylus' drama in which Orestes avenges the death of his father at the hands of his mother and her lover, it was actually a philosophical tract with a message: every man has a right to commit any crime (even matricide) if he will freely take responsibility for it. French audiences correctly took this to mean that any act of resistance was justified in the struggle for freedom. The Germans eventually got the message and banned the play.
Sartre was naturally drawn to the Communists, mainly because he was a revolutionary. But they also played a strong role in the French Resistance against the Germans, and they had come through the war relatively untainted by suspicions of collaboration. Reluctant to believe that the Communists could not tolerate dissent, he became the most conspicuous fellow traveler of his time. He wrote labored excuses for the Soviet purges and Siberian labor camps ("Communist violence is no more than the childhood disease of a new era"). Sartre denounced the Soviets for sending their tanks to suppress the Hungarian rebellion in 1956; three months later, though, he was defending the Party as a "necessary" reality.
In 1960 Sartre risked arrest in France for espousing the cause of the Algerian rebels and for denouncing the use of torture by the French in Algeria. He refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 because, he said, he did not want to be a tool in the cultural struggle between East and West. "If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' " he told one interviewer, "there is no longer any possibility of political action." He sometimes seemed ready to quit on the revolution ("There is no salvation anywhere"), but he finally took solace from the Maoists. Because they professed to take their leadership directly from the masses, he perceived them as the purest of revolutionaries.