Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris. His father, Jean-Baptiste, was a naval officer, and his mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was of the professional middle-classes and a first cousin of the world-famous missionary Albert Schweitzer. The death of his father when “Poulou” (as he was known in his family) was still a baby was later described by Sartre as the most significant event of his life; it obliged his mother to take her child back to live with her parents in Meudon and, later, Paris. Sartre’s sheltered childhood – he was largely educated at home by his mother and grandfather – came to a jolting end with the remarriage of his mother in 1917 to an engineer named Joseph Mancy. The threesome moved to provincial La Rochelle where Mancy took up the directorship of a…
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Citation: Leak, Andrew. "Jean-Paul Sartre". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 October 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3940, accessed 21 November 2024.]
