At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. By Sarah Bakewell. Other Press; 439 pages; $25. Chatto & Windus; £16.99.

EXISTENTIALISM is the only philosophy that anyone would even think of calling sexy. Black clothes, “free love”, late nights of smoky jazz—these were a few of intellectuals’ favourite things in Paris after the city’s liberation in 1944.

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Simone de Beauvoir was “the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw”, according to the New Yorker in 1947. Her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre (pictured) was no looker, but he smoked a mean Gauloise. Life magazine billed their friend, Albert Camus, the “action-packed intellectual”.

Certainly there was action. One evening in Paris, a restaurant punch-up involving Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler spilled out on to the streets. In New York another novelist, Norman Mailer, drunkenly stabbed his wife at the launch of his abortive campaign to run for mayor on an “Existentialist Party” ticket in 1960. In addition to such excitements, existentialism offered a rationale for the feeling that life is absurd.

Countless adolescents, both young and old, have discovered the joys of angst through the writings of Sartre and his ilk. In her instructive and entertaining study of these thinkers and their hangers-on, Sarah Bakewell, a British biographer, tells how she was drawn as a teenager to Sartre’s “Nausea” because it was described on the cover as “a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being”.

It was over apricot cocktails on the Rue Montparnasse that Sartre and de Beauvoir glimpsed a novel way to explore such mysteries. The year was 1932, and their friend Raymond Aron, a political scientist and philosopher, had just returned from Germany with news of the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. “If you are a phenomenologist,” Aron explained, “you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” The idea was to glean the essence of things by closely observing one’s own experience of them, preferably in mundane settings. Sartre and de Beauvoir set out to do just that.

Drawing on considerable personal knowledge, Sartre delved into “the meaning of the act of smoking”, among other things. Observing the behavioural tics of waiters, he noted that they sometimes seemed to be play-acting at being waiters. This led to labyrinthine reflections on the nature of freedom and authenticity. De Beauvoir’s efforts were more focused. By dissecting female experience of everyday life, she illustrated the ways in which gender is shaped by self-consciousness and social expectations. Ms Bakewell plausibly suggests that de Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist work, “The Second Sex”, was the most broadly influential product of European café philosophy of the period.

When Norman Mailer was asked what existentialism meant to him, he reportedly answered, “Oh, kinda playing things by ear.” Serious existentialists, such as Sartre, earned their label by focusing on a sense of “existence” that is supposedly distinctive of humans. People are uniquely aware of—and typically troubled by—their own state of being, or so the theory goes. Human existence is thus not at all like the existence of brute matter, or, for that matter, like the existence of brutes. People, but not animals, find themselves thrown into the world, as existentialists liked to say. They are forced to make sense of it for themselves and to forge their own identities.

The café philosophers came to regard each other’s existence as particularly troubling. Except for Sartre and de Beauvoir, who remained an intellectually devoted pair until his death in 1980, the main characters in post-war French philosophy drifted apart with varying degrees of drama. So did the German philosophers who inspired them.

Sartre’s embrace of Soviet communism, which he abandoned only to endorse Maoism instead, led Aron to condemn him as “merciless towards the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”. Ms Bakewell credits the existentialist movement, broadly defined, with providing inspiration to feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and other radical causes. A few cocktails can, it seems, lead to unexpected things.