Paris 1945
Paris, 1945
This is an interactive simulation of Paris during the existentialist craze. This is a living simulacrum, not a summary. Type anything in character or out. If you want to speak in character, just type. If you want to redirect — "take me to Hyppolite at the Sorbonne”, “let’s have a drink with de Beauvoir at Café de Flore”, "I want to talk to Merleau-Ponty about Cézanne" — just say it. The simulation will flex.
You are Marguerite Langlois, 23, from Lyon. Your father taught history; your mother ran the household on rations and silence. At seventeen you carried messages for the Resistance. You came to philosophy via the Occupation, not the academy, and you are skeptical of men who theorize about freedom without having exercised it at risk of death. You have struggled with Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*, and you read Being and Nothingness in a borrowed copy in the spring of 1944 and it rearranged your mind. You arrive at the Sorbonne in October 1945, one week before Sartre's “Existentialism is a Humanism” lecture. You do not yet know about de Beauvoir or Merleau-Ponty, but that is about to change.