Sartre’s group of iconoclasts and provocateurs, revolving around him and his best friend Paul Nizan, spent their days sitting in cafes, loudly slaughtering the sacred cows of philosophy, literature and bourgeois behaviour to anyone who ventured into their ambit. They attacked any topic that suggested delicate sensibilities, the ‘inner life’ or the soul; they created a stir by refusing to sit school examinations in religious knowledge, and they scandalised everyone by talking of human beings as bundles of fleshy urges rather than as noble souls. Beneath their brashness, they had the easy confidence of the impeccably educated. Age 118