Where did the statue of Jean-Paul Sartre go? – release

During one of the more active years of his life, in 1960, Sartre had fun dictating some of his dreams to his adoptive daughter, Arlette Elkaïm. One of them concerned a statue story: “It was in the banquet of a foreign university where I had spoken the day before. Besides me, the rector or the dean, who said to me: « We voted credits to erect a statue in the garden-I know, I replied, but in a few years, I will be or too forgotten, or too much known to have my statue in the garden. » « 

In fact, for almost twenty-two years (from 1987 to 2009), between the Paris Stock Exchange and the Jardins of the Royal Palace, in the Vivienne garden, in the heart of the National Library of France (BNF), a small massive man, leaning forward, hands in the back, was walking. This bronze statue, tribute to Jean-Paul Sartrehad been commissioned to the sculptor Roseline Granet in 1985, five years after the death of the philosopher. And, for almost twenty-two years, rubbing shoulders with this « Sartre En Marche »-probably inspired by the photography of Antanas Sutkus on a beach in Lithuania in the 1970s-, many readers of the BNF mentioned a few lines of the most prolific writer of the 20th century, like this famous « A whole man, made of all men and who is worth them all, and q