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Human Rights

I Hate You, My Lovely France!

Hamid Andishan tells us how Sartre, a philosopher of freedom, had problems with the politics of the land of liberté, and how this affected his view of human rights.

Have you ever heard of someone loving and hating something at the same time? It can lead to madness, or at least, to profound anguish. The situation becomes worse if that thing is one’s motherland. Jean-Paul Sartre was in such a situation. He was a French philosopher against France. Philosophical offspring of René Descartes and admirer of Honoré de Balzac, he fought for France in WWII, and was a prisoner of war in Germany; but after the war he turned into a bitter critic of French policy.

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