On the elusive elixir of truth..............

     Huis clos made Sartre famous, and it is another instance of the unrivaled power of the theatre to project ideas.  But, oddly enough, it was through the old-fashioned forum of the public lecture that Sartre became world-famous, indeed notorious, a monstre sacré.  Within a year of the play's opening France was at peace.  Everyone, especially youth, was catching up greedily on the lost cultural years and searching for the post-war elixir of truth.  The Communists and the new-born Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) were fighting a fierce battle for paramountcy on the campus.  Sartre used his new philosophy to offer an alternative:  not a church or a party but a challenging doctrine of individualism in which each human being is seen as the absolute master of his soul if he chooses to follow the path of action and courage.  It was a message of liberty after the totalitarian nightmare. . . .
     Nothing is so powerful, Victor Hugo had laid down, as an idea whose time has come.  Sartre's time had come in two distinct ways.  He was preaching freedom to people who were hungry and waiting for it.  But it was not an easy freedom.  "Existentialism," says Sartre, "defines man by his actions . . . It tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action."  So, "Man commits himself to his life, and thereby draws his image, beyond which there is nothing."  The new European of 1945, Sartre said, was the new existentialist individual—"alone, without excuses.  This is what I mean when I say we are condemned to be free."  So Sartre's new existential freedom was immensely attractive to a disillusioned generation:  lonely, austere, noble, slightly aggressive, not to say violent, and anti-elitist, popular—no one was excluded.  Anyone, but especially the young, could be an existentialist.

-Paul Johnson,  Intellectuals:  From Marx And Tolstoy To Sartre And Chomsky