Initially, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) and Jean-Paul Sartre moved along the same path. Both studied philosophy at the École Normale (Merleau-Ponty three years behind Sartre), where they were friendly but not close, and both began teaching careers that were interrupted by the war, in which both served in the French army until its collapse. During the occupation, they worked together in the short-lived intellectual resistance group, Socialism and Liberty. This renewed and deepened their friendship, and when the war ended, they and Simone de Beauvoir founded and ran Les temps modernes. But whereas Sartre simply pursued his path as an independent public intellectual and writer, Merleau-Ponty combined his work at Les temps modernes with the traditional career of a university professor. After three years at the University of Lyon, he was called to a chair at the Sorbonne and taught there until he was elected to the College de France in 1952, where he remained until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1961.

Unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was a committed Catholic when he entered the École Normale (Sartre mentions this as the main reason they were not close), and religion played an important role in his early intellectual formation.