Jean-Paul Sartre

Born in Paris in 1905, Sartre lost his father at two and grew up steeped in books, guided by a grandfather who treated literature like oxygen. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, drawn to Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger - thinkers mapping consciousness and dread. The war interrupted: drafted, captured, released, he co-founded the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté, and when it dissolved he wrote for the underground and staged plays like No Exit in occupied France. His 1943 work Being and Nothingness laid out the central problem - the clash between self-deception and an authentic way of being - and made existentialism the vocabulary of a generation. After the war he co-founded Les Temps modernes and turned philosophy into a weapon: he backed anti-colonial movements, condemned French policy in Algeria, opposed Vietnam, flirted with Marxism and Maoism, and lived in open partnership with Simone de Beauvoir, the two of them dismantling every bourgeois assumption they'd inherited. When he died in 1980, fifty thousand people followed the casket through Paris.