It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre,
the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accep
ted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris.
The unstated objective of his lecture ("Existentialism Is a Humanism") was to e
xpound his philosophy as a form of "existentialism," a term much bandied about a
t the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for p
hilosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general
audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of
existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity.
