Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the Paris jazz scene

Abstract

There is a substantial amount of common, if relatively unexplored, ground between the emergence of existentialist philosophy in France and the growth of a French jazz culture. Both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir play significant roles at the interface of these phenomena. This study investigates those roles and attempts to clarify the relationship between the 'home-grown' French philosophies and the cultural import. There are in fact two quite separate stories which have different outcomes, though there are important points of convergence. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre appropriate jazz, and for both of them the music is associated with fundamental freedoms, but where he uses it to inform and illustrate his philosophy, she derives from it a programme of action, or at least the basis for developing such a programme. Interestingly, the critical period for revealing the nexus between jazz and existentialism is not so much the post-Liberation era, but the time between the wars.