That is one of the most deliciously ironic, and hilarious, statements that I've seen in a while.
If nothing really matters and all societies are relative in their moral values, then we are truly lost. Christ lived a life that denied Satre's life of surrender. If Satre was right then, truly, anything is possible because it's no longer possible to call an act "evil". Eichmann (the real one, not Ward Churchill's) is the result.
L'Etre at Neant reads like a bad rehash of Heidegger by a college student who has not read Heidegger particularly well.
Sarte's "literature" is unreadable, politicized garbage, his "philosophy" is unreadable, derivative garbage, and his politics are execrable garbage.
The less said about his economic ideas, the better.
The fact is, Camus was a far more talented writer and philosopher than Sartre ever was or could be, and the neglect of Camus is far worse for France than the imagined neglect (Sartre is still celebrated in France and he was lionized while alive, despite the ridiculous comments in the article) of the cheerleader of the 1972 Munich terrorists.
Ecrasez le mediocrite!
A short drop to the bottom if there ever was one.
This makes me nauseous.
Sure. France is in trouble, civilization is collapsing, the barbarians are at the gate, so let's all sit around feeling our existentialist angst. Marxist nihilism will really help pull us out of this mess!
I vaguely remember some of his works from college . . .
Sartre was a jackass. His reputation will sink into oblivion, no matter what anybody, including the above author, says.
Sartre sold very well in France, and had plenty of disciples. And Levy has certainly made a splash in Europe with his book. What BHL is probably saying is that Sartre weren't as influential in France as he would have wanted them to be. Sartre -- and BHL himself -- probably weren't as popular as BHL wanted them to be, either.
Since they were both men of large egos, that's not surprising. Sartre's "homeland," though, wasn't so much a country as a class or stratum of society worldwide. What he lost in influence at home among most people, he picked up abroad among his foreign followers.
But many American writers would give his eye teeth to be as "hated" and "shunned" in his native land as Jean-Paul Sartre was in France. He came pretty close to being a household word for a time. That could be because he wasn't just a writer, but a political figure and something like the "brand name" attached to a small but vocal part of society.
It might have been preferable for Sartre to go on writing fiction and drama, than to turn out theoretical tomes, political tracts, and existentialist literary criticism. His writing in the 1940s wasn't bad, and it got people thinking. There may have been more for him to say in novels or stories or on the stage.
It's likely that Sartre got spooked. Scared by that whole "existential aloneness" thing, and scared by the demands of an artistic career and literary reputation, he retreated from art into ideology and became a priest in a Marxist-Existentialist cult of his own devising.
There's a thin line between using words to recapture and explain the world and using words to explain away the world and give oneself a privileged and protected status apart from it. Sartre crossed over that line and created a theoretical corpus as personal armor to protect him from the outside world.
But perhaps Sartre hit a wall in his creative work. His life largely was books and reading, and his "real life" was lived amongst people for whom ideologies and political stances were more important than "real world" perceptions and relationships. In this he wasn't so different from American novelists who have their big hit and then find that fame and the literary millieu cut them off from the environment and situation that engendered their successful early work.
In his later years Sartre turned his back on some of his earlier ideas. He didn't officially recant but seemed to look on the earlier JPS as someone else, whose stances and poses and slogans didn't have much to do with his own understanding of the world.
When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, seen here in 1967, died in 1980, some 50,000 people attended his funeral in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery, but the hundredth anniversary of his birth passed off with little comment in France(AFP/File) 
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, right, and his companion Simone de Beauvoir attend a reception in Paris in 1974. Sartre, the 20th century philoshopher whose influence has been on the wane, may be getting the last laugh from the grave as France battles a new existentialist crisis. (AP Photo)