Jean-Paul Sartre: Brilliant philosopher, or totalitarian apologist?

"France is a country that reveres philosophy; it's taught in high school, debated in the cafés-philo. But how good was Sartre as a philosopher? Some critics say that in creating existentialism he simply took the ideas of Heidegger and give them a Gallic gloss. Sartre's Being and Nothingness, they complain, is just Heidegger's Being and Time with some racy passages thrown in about the anus and Italian love-making. That is unfair. It is certainly true that Sartre, who grew up in a bilingual Alsatian household, owed a great debt to German thought. But the starting point for his philosophy, as he always insisted, was the Cartesian formula "I think, therefore I am." Consciousness, the core of our being, is an emptiness or "negativity" that must fill out its nature through arbitrary choices—that is the idea behind Sartre's celebrated aphorism "We are condemned to be free."
Despite the phenomenological complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed to make it exciting. Anybody could become an existentialist, especially the young. The teutonic dread of Kierkegaard and angst of Heidegger gave way to Sartrean fun. In the underground caves of St. Germain-des-Prés, jazz dancing was deemed the highest expression of existentialism. Never has a serious philosopher had such an impact on nightlife. Sartre even wrote a rather beautiful song for the great chanteuse Juliette Greco to sing at the Rose Rouge.
Sartre's classic period as a philosopher was over by the late 1940s. The war had politicized him. (After a brief internment in a stalag, he spent the rest of the war in Nazi-occupied Paris, where, in his imagination at least, he was part of the Resistance.) In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, he realized that he was "living a neurosis"; despite his philosophy of action, he had been a mere bourgeois writer, like Flaubert. His interest in Marxism awakened, he decided to align himself with the Communist Party—this at a time when the crimes of Stalin were being documented and other intellectuals were abandoning the party. The erstwhile philosopher of freedom morphed into Sartre totalitaire."