No Institution Can Hold a Free Man

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In October 1964 the Swedish Academy awarded Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Sartre refused it. It was not the first time. He had already declined France's own Legion of Honour and had turned down a chair at the College de France, on the same ground each time: a writer who accepts an official honor lets an institution attach itself to his name, and Sartre held that a writer must never be turned into an institution. He also gave an objective reason. The Nobel, he said, went overwhelmingly to writers of the West or to dissidents of the East, and accepting it inside that pattern would make his own writing read as a verdict he had not chosen to hand down. Sartre later said he regretted the scandal his refusal caused, since he had tried, by letter, to stop the Academy naming him before the prize was ever announced. The award stood anyway; his name is still listed among the laureates of 1964, beside the word declined.