Sartre and Beauvoir deliberately refused institutional honors to preserve their independence

Evidence

As their status grew and everything conspired to tempt them into the Establishment, Sartre and Beauvoir remained fierce in their insistence on remaining intellectual outsiders. Neither became academics in the conventional sense. They lived by schoolteaching or freelancing. Their friends did likewise: they were playwrights, publishers, reporters, editors or essayists, but only a handful were university insiders. When Sartre was offered the Légion d’honneur for his Resistance activities in 1945, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he rejected them both, citing a writer’s need to stay independent of interests and influences. Beauvoir rejected the Légion d’honneur in 1982 for the same reason. In 1949, François Mauriac put Sartre forward for election to the Académie française, but Sartre refused it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern of intellectuals remaining outsiders, similar to figures in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and discussions of intellectual nonconformity. — connects to: Sartre refused the Nobel to preserve independence and protest Western bias — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 876; Sartre declined state honors during his life. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1147; Sartre and Beauvoir refused institutional honors to protect intellectual autonomy — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 52

Broader Connections

• Sartre refused the Nobel to preserve independence and protest Western bias #expands (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 876
• Sartre declined state honors during his life. #expands (0.90) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1147