Cocktails and consciousness in postwar Paris

The book opens in Paris in 1933, at a bar on the rue Montparnasse, where Raymond Aron tells Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir about a new German philosophy called phenomenology. You could make philosophy out of this apricot cocktail, Aron says. Sartre, by Bakewell's account, went pale with excitement. At the Existentialist Café, published in 2016, uses that founding moment to structure an intellectual history of existentialism that is also, equally, a set of human biographies.

Sarah Bakewell tracks the development of phenomenology through Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, showing how Sartre and Beauvoir adapted it into a philosophy centred on radical human freedom and the weight of responsibility that freedom carries. Existence precedes essence, in Sartre's formulation: we are not born with a fixed nature but create ourselves through our choices.

One of Bakewell's gifts is showing what these ideas meant in practice. Beauvoir applied the framework to women's experience, producing The Second Sex. Albert Camus argued with Sartre's politics in ways that fractured their friendship. Heidegger's collaboration with the Nazi regime became a crisis that the book handles with unusual nuance — not dismissing his philosophy, not exempting it from scrutiny.

The title's café setting is not just atmospheric. The existentialists were, Bakewell argues, unusually committed to the idea that philosophy should emerge from and return to everyday life — to the texture of experience, to boredom, anxiety, joy, and the peculiar freedom of deciding what to order for breakfast. Their revolt was partly against the idea that abstract systems could substitute for attending to actual existence.

By the end, what stays with the reader is not a doctrine but a disposition: the habit of questioning whether one is living authentically, whether one's choices are genuinely one's own or merely what the crowd expects.