Celebrity Graveland

January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986
June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980

When French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre was asked how he would like to be remembered (keeping in mind, he HATED accolades and once refused the Nobel Prize for literature), he responded:

“I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet…. If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don’t ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,… how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself.”

He seems like a delight.

But, he was pretty smart and a pretty good writer. And fellow existential writer – and feminist social theorist – Simone de Beauvoir, fancied him some. The two had a long relationship and partnership that was anything but monogamous and oh-so French.

Simone de Beauvoir, herself, was best known as a novelist. She was very focused, as was Sartre, with themes of personal responsibility and liberty.

Sartre died exhausted and nearly blind in Paris in 1980. De Beauvoir died six years later – nearly to the day.

Burial

Montparnasse Cemetery – Paris, FRANCE

Photo circa 1997; a new, taller headstone is now there.

Specific Location

Division 20; At the northern end of the cemetery, north side of Ave. du Boulevard, just to the west of the main entrance

This entry was posted on February 25, 2014 at 11:15 am and is filed under Montparnasse Cemetery with tags Existentialism, Montparnasse Cemetery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.