Existentialism coalesced out of the fog of smoke in a bar on the Rue du Montparnasse. In "At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails," British writer Sarah Bakewell profiles many of the movement's stars, including Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (seen here in 1970) were intellectual soulmates. They met most days at a bar or café like this one in Paris, where they'd debate ideas and discuss their work. (Getty Images)
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Sunday Edition24:13Cocktails at The Existentialist Café:
Sarah Bakewell (Pietro Ficai-Veltronifd)In her book, At the Existentialist Café; Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails, the British writer Sarah Bakewell paints a picture of many of the characters in this 20th century movement, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus.
She writes that existentialism was born in the early 1930s in Paris, in a bar on the Rue du Montparnasse. Three friends, Sartre, de Beauvoir and one of Sartre's old chums, Raymond Aron, were smoking, playing with ideas, sharing gossip and drinking apricot cocktails.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the superstar but according to Sarah Bakewell, "The most transformative existentialist work of all was Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering feminist study, The Second Sex, published in 1949." (Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
Rachel Bakewell's observation about Martin Heidegger, German philosopher, phenomenologist and Nazi sympathiser: "You can never say of Heidegger what Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre: 'he is good'." (AFP/Getty Images)
It was the beginning of a philosophical movement that valued personal freedom and responsibility. It was radical stuff at the time. In 1948, the Catholic Church put all of Sartre's works on its Index of Prohibited Books.
At the Existentialist Café is Sarah Bakewell's fourth book. Her book on Michel de Montaigne, How to Live, won numerous awards and became a runaway bestseller in the UK. Ms. Bakewell lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.
