Sartre’s funeral drew a cross-generational crowd linking philosophy to political causes

Evidence

With these ceremonies, an era ended, and so did the personal story that wove Sartre and Beauvoir into the lives of so many other people. In the filmed crowd, you see a diversity of faces, old and young, black and white, male and female. They included students, writers, people who remembered his wartime Resistance activities, trade-union members whose strikes he had supported, and independence activists from Indochina, Algeria and elsewhere, honouring his contribution to their campaigns. For some, the funeral verged on being a protest march: Claude Lanzmann later described it as the last of the great 1968 demonstrations. But many attended only out of curiosity or a sense of occasion, or because Sartre had made some small difference in some aspect of their lives — or because the ending of such an outsized life simply demanded some gesture of participation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 81

Categorization

• QUESTION: Useful anchor for the movement’s political entanglements with anti-colonial and labor struggles.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre and Beauvoir stayed politically active into old age after their peers retired — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 74; About fifty thousand mourners attended Sartre’s 1980 funeral in Paris. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 78; Sartre bridged generations of students back to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 75

Broader Connections

• Sartre bridged generations of students back to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. #exemplifies (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 75