Thus, although he had little hope for the prospects of human institutions, Sartre championed human individuality and universal justice.
Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born in Paris, France, on 21 June 1905. Sartre's father, naval officer Jean-Baptiste Sartre, succumbed to enterocolitis on 17 November 1906, within seventeen months of his son's birth. Without extensive financial means, Sartre's mother, Anne Marie, moved with her infant son, called Poulou, to her parents' home in Meudon, France. The move set in motion Sartre's lifetime association with learning, knowledge, cultural investigations, and iconoclasm, for Anne Marie's father was Karl "Charles" Schweitzer, noted writer, music historian, Albert Schweitzer's uncle, and the major influence on young Sartre. For five years Sartre learned from and rebelled against his strict, pragmatic, bourgeois grandparents. He spent much time alone, for, although his grandfather taught German to French schoolchildren, once classes ended, Schweitzer left school and its inhabitants behind. Sartre had few playfellows other than books and his imagination. Born with strabismus, he was further isolated when at age four he contracted influenza, causing a leucoma in his right eye and destroying the muscles and part of the vision of his eye. For the rest of his life Sartre suffered partial blindness and disfigurement from this errant eye.
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