About fifty thousand mourners attended Sartre’s 1980 funeral in Paris.

Evidence

Excerpts from the television coverage are still viewable online: you can watch as the hospital doors open and a small truck slowly emerges, piled high with a mountain of floral sprays that teeter and wave like soft coral as the vehicle creeps into the mass of people. Helpers walk in front to clear the way. Behind the truck comes the hearse, inside which you see the coffin, and Simone de Beauvoir with other chief mourners. The camera focuses on a single rose which someone has tucked into the hearse’s door handle. Then it picks out a corner of the black cloth draped over the coffin inside, decorated with a single letter ‘S’. The hushed commentator tells us that some 50,000 people are attending; about 30,000 of these line the three kilometres or so of streets between here and the Montparnasse cemetery, while another 20,000 wait at the cemetery itself. Just like the 1968 students, some people inside the cemetery have climbed onto the laps or heads of memorial figures. Minor mishaps have occurred; one man reportedly fell into the open grave and had to be hauled out.

The vehicles arrive and halt; we see bearers extract the coffin and convey it to the graveside, struggling to push through while maintaining their dignified demeanour. One bearer removes his hat, then realises the others have not, and replaces it: a tiny awkward moment. At the graveside, they lower the coffin in, and the mourners are handed forward. Someone passes a chair for Simone de Beauvoir to sit on. She looks dazed and exhausted, a headscarf tied over her hair; she has been dosing herself with sedatives. She drops a single flower into the grave, and many more flowers are thrown in on top of it.

The film footage shows only the first of two ceremonies. In a quieter event the following week, the coffin was dug up and the smaller coffin inside it removed so that Sartre could be cremated. His ashes went to their permanent spot, in the same cemetery but less accessible to a large procession. The funeral was for the public Sartre; the second burial was attended only by those close to him. The grave, with Beauvoir’s ashes interred next to him when she died six years later, is still there, kept well tidied and occasionally flowered.

— Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 78

Categorization

• SHARE: A literary-minded friend fascinated by Sartre or Beauvoir would enjoy this concrete detail of the public funeral and the dual-burial ceremony.
• ADDENDUM: The layered decorum toward Sartre’s corpse—public funeral then private exhumation for cremation—mirrors the small acts of decorum toward corpses theme.
• FICTION: The two-ceremony structure—public coffin burial, then private exhumation and cremation—offers a resonant device for a story about a public figure whose real farewell happens unseen.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre received a public funeral and a separate private cremation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 80; Sartre’s funeral drew a cross-generational crowd linking philosophy to political causes — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 81

Broader Connections

• Sartre received a public funeral and a separate private cremation #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 80
• Sartre’s funeral drew a cross-generational crowd linking philosophy to political causes #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 81