Sartre par Lui-Même plot
"The life of Jean-Paul Sartre, told by himself."
The film opens with an extract from a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre about the apparent contradiction between his political commitment to the values of society and his own bourgeois origin. Then we are at his office, where Sartre speaks in front of some relatives about his childhood, his meeting with Paul Nizan and with Simone de Beauvoir. He talks about his first contacts with philosophy and his aversion to psychoanalysis and surrealism. His attitude during his youth pushes him to ignore the political facts of his era - Nazism, the Popular Front, the war of Spain, Munich - to devote himself to a fundamental and theoretical approach to philosophy. He also publishes his first novel, 'The Nausea', which has a large circulation. Next comes the war. Sartre is mobilized and later captured, then freed again. Then he starts writing a number of plays in which he symbolically indicates the compromises of the Vichy regime and his work is increasingly known for its existentialist tendency.