Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre was among eighty signatories calling for revision and relaxation of criminal provisions governing certain sexual relationships between adults and minors and publicly questioning children's and adolescents' capacity to consent.

State of the evidence

Documented

Sartre visited Andreas Baader in prison and described the isolation conditions of Red Army Faction members as 'intolerable', calling on German intellectuals to defend their rights.

State of the evidence

Reported by the press

After the previous editors of the Maoist newspaper La Cause du peuple were arrested, Sartre formally became its publication director and declared that he personally assumed the legal and criminal responsibilities attached to that role.

State of the evidence

Documented

Several issues of La Cause du peuple were seized under judicial warrants in investigations concerning, among other matters, incitement to violence, looting, crimes against state security and the glorification of theft or murder; almost all the articles in one issue were signed by Sartre.

State of the evidence

Reported by the press

Sartre was arrested with seventeen others while distributing a seized issue of La Cause du peuple, the publication of a dissolved Maoist movement, on Paris's main boulevards.

State of the evidence

Documented

The Swedish Academy awarded Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he refused, prompting major international controversy and depriving the institution of the laureate's acceptance.

State of the evidence

Documented

In his foreword to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre used particularly radical rhetoric about violence by colonised people against colonisers, frequently interpreted as morally legitimising revolutionary violence.

State of the evidence

Documented

Sartre signed the Manifesto of the 121, which recognised the right to refuse military service and assist Algerians in their struggle against French colonial rule. Its publication triggered a judicial investigation, and he was questioned by police along with Simone de Beauvoir.

State of the evidence

Documented

Following the Soviet tanks' intervention in Hungary, Sartre broke off his rapprochement with the French Communist Party and denounced Stalinism, Soviet domination and the French communists' support for the repression.

State of the evidence

Documented

After an organised visit to the Soviet Union, Sartre gave interviews highly favourable to the regime, notably asserting that freedom of criticism was complete there, a statement that became emblematic of his temporary blindness towards the Soviet system.

State of the evidence

Documented