Paris, June 22 (AFP): When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980, some 50,000 people attended his funeral in Paris’s Montparnasse cemetery, but the hundredth anniversary of his birth today passed off with little comment in France.

In fact, says historian Annie Cohen-Solal, writing in Le Monde newspaper, the French have largely turned their backs on Sartre, while his philosophy goes from strength to strength in other parts of the world.

Part of the indifference in France may have been because news media amply covered Sartre’s legacy in April on the 75th anniversary of his death, including two major documentary films broadcast by the French-German TV channel Arte. And since early March, the French National Library has been exhibiting some 400 documents by Sartre, many of them previously unpublished, giving an insight into the workings of the father of French existentialism.

The exhibition, which is scheduled to run until August 21, also includes three large portraits of Sartre by Andy Warhol.

However, much of Sartre’s world has disappeared and politically engaged philosophers like him have given way to slick television personalities. The last traces of the Renault automobile factory in Bboulogne-Billancourt, where an iconic photograph showed the pro-Marxist philosopher haranging the workers, disappeared under the wreckers” ball a few weeks ago, and is rapidly being replaced by apartments and offices for the bourgeoisie.

The philosopher’s fans mutter that his works are dissapearing from the high school curriculum.