ABSTRACT
Born in Paris on June 21, 1905, Sartre’s biological father dies 15 months later, at which point Sartre’s mother moves into her parents’ house in the Parisian suburbs. Largely homeschooled by his grandfather until the age of ten, Sartre claims to have believed that he would become famous from the age of nine—a belief that surely motivates him for much of his early life. Indeed, Sartre’s obsessive desire fuels a monomaniacal compulsion to write and, as we shall see, contributes to Sartre’s demise. While in many ways idyllic, Sartre’s early childhood is hampered by various illnesses, including an eye infection (age 3–4) that causes him to lose most of the use of his right eye for the rest of his life. In 1915, Sartre enrolls in Lycée Henri-IV, widely regarded as one of the most prestigious prep schools in the French public-school system, where Sartre meets his best childhood friend Paul Nizan. Sartre’s mother remarries in 1917 and the family moves out of Paris to La Rochelle, where Sartre attends a local lycée of considerably lower quality. Sartre describes the next four years as the worst of his life due to a complicated relationship with his stepfather (who pressured him away from literature toward math and science), combined with constant bullying at school. Sartre later interprets the bullying as class violence—which was not confined to the schoolyard itself and was spilled over into the streets, into skirmishes between working-class kids and those from the old aristocracy. This early experience of violence clearly left an important mark on Sartre (given his abiding interesting in insurrectionary violence from the late 1940s onwards). For fear of bad influence, Sartre’s parents move back to Paris and Sartre reunites with Nizan at Lycée Henri-IV. Sartre remains at Henri-IV until 1922, with the last two years spent taking classes (informally known as hypokhâgne and khâgne) specially designed to prepare students for the grueling and extremely competitive entrance exam to l’École normale supérieure (ENS). At that time, the ENS was the most prestigious of the Grandes Ecoles that not only trained many of France’s greatest intellectuals but also groomed future political elites.
