A bizarre persecution incident triggered Sartre’s political conversion to Communism.

Evidence

This absurd affair seemed to Sartre the culmination of years of harassment and provocation of Communists in France. As he wrote later, ‘after ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point’. The pigeon plot drove him to make a commitment. As he wrote, ‘In the language of the Church, this was my conversion.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 806

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘pigeon plot’ — a paranoid or absurd trigger for an intellectual’s political conversion — is a vivid anecdote worth retelling in any essay on how commitments form.
• CANDY: The idea that a plot involving pigeons drove Sartre to his political conversion is a striking, tweetable anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s political conversion was a Kehre like Heidegger’s but toward engagement. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 807; Soviet brutality shook Western Communist sympathizers including Sartre and Beauvoir — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 852