The fact is that I am a writer – a woman writer, which doesn't mean a housewife who writes but someone whose whole existence is governed by her writing.
Simone de Beauvoir was the emblematic example of an “engagée” intellectual: writer, philosopher, essayist, feminist, lover. A polyhedric woman who embodied the spirit of French existentialism and who, by putting forth the idea that “one is not born, but becomes a woman”, wrote some of the most important feminist works of the postwar period. Her life and works globally influenced feminists of the generations to come, especially in the anglophone world, to an almost incomparable extent.
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born January 9th, 1908, in a bourgeois family. She grew up in the small building at 103, Boulevard Montparnasse, at the corner with Boulevard Raspail, where two years later the La Rotonde restaurant would open. Due to failed investments made by her maternal grandfather Gustave, the family fell into disgrace and could not afford to live according to the standards it was used to. Her father, Georges, and her mother, Françoise Brasseur, had met during a vacation in Houlgate and married few months later, but the marriage, although lasting, was soon met by difficulties related to both financial straits and Georges’ lifestyle, whose love for theatre and women caused his wife to live in a state of constant jealousy.
A couple of years later, her sister Hélène, nicknamed Poupette, was born. Their relationship lasted their whole lives, though they grew distant for some time during middle school, when Simone became close friends with Elisabeth Lacoin — who is nicknamed Zaza in her memoirs. The writer-to-be showed a passionate and lively temper since she was a child. Simone possessed the acumen of a critical soul, which would always support her and lead to taking herself and the people around her as source material for her famous multi-volume autobiography – starting with Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée – as well as for her novels, chief among them Les Mandarins, the book which established her as writer. Sitting on her balcony, she observed the coming and going of the people in the streets, listened to them, and imagined their lives. Her mother, who thought of her as her dearest, personally looked after her education, and Simone soon showed early signs of being destined to a great life. Her father, though to a lesser extent, also supported her intellectual endeavours — he made her a small, black, faux-leather book which contained passages by the likes of Racine, Corneille, Molière and Hugo; it was him who passed on to her the idea that nothing in the world could compare to being a writer. The hardness and poverty of Parisian life never undermined her self-confidence and were nevertheless soothed by the lovely summers the family spent in Limousin with her paternal grandfather, Ernest. With him, she went on walks in the chestnut forest and meadows of his estate, during which she observed flowers, plants, and animals. The hiatus from urban life fitted Simone’s love for both the city and nature. If her childhood and adolescence were marked by her romantic friendship with Zaza, at the center of the novel Les Inséparables, it is the tragic end of this relationship which marks her passage into the next phase of her life.
The birth of the Beaver — The first volume of her memoirs ends with a bitter note on her friend’s fate: "...was Zaza a victim of excessive fatigue or anguish? Often, at night, I dreamt of her, all yellow with a pink hat, looking at me with reproach. Together we had fought the muddy destiny which would’ve awaited us at the passage, and for a long time I believed I paid my freedom with her death".
With unrelenting willpower, de Beauvoir decided not to follow the traditional bourgeois destiny which would have awaited her, but decided to study to become a teacher in order to emancipate herself from her family. During her studies, her friend René Maheu nicknamed her Castor, because of the assonance between her last name with the word Beaver, and wrote her this note: "Beavers move in groups and have a constructive instinct". From then on, that became her nickname.
In 1929, at the philosophy agrégation exams at the École Normale Supérieure, she placed herself second after Jean-Paul Sartre. She was one of the first women to be awarded such recognition. Years later she would declare in an interview that, "In those days, professionally speaking, few women completed their studies. Completing an agrégation in philosophy meant positioning yourself as privileged among women. As a result, I got such recognition from men. I was the exceptional woman and I accepted it".
The meeting with Sartre was a turning point: the relationship she had always wished for. Sartre was her companion of choice for most of her life and their mutual commitment — to be each other’s "necessary love" never to be spoiled by any “contingent love” —was always respected. Not even a great passion — such as her “transatlantic love” for American writer Nelson Algren, who even asked for her hand — broke their bond built on “transparency” and on the commitment to tell each other “everything”.
I did not ask myself what I should do anymore. Everything was there; everything I wished to do: to battle wrongs, to find and tell the truth, to enlighten the world, maybe even to change it. It would take time and effort to maintain even a part of the promises I made myself, but I was not scared. Nothing was accomplished, everything remained possible. And then I got very lucky: suddenly I was not alone facing the future. Until then, the men I cared for were of a species different than mine: self-assured, evasive, slightly incoherent, marked by a history of fatal grace; it was impossible to comunicate with them without reservations. Sartre embodied my fifteen-year-old self’s dream: it was the alter ego in which I found all my obsessions, strengthened. I could always share everything with him.
Loves and friendships — As one cannot write about de Beauvoir without writing about Sartre, it seems necessary to at least recall all the others with whom de Beauvoir entertained important relationships and correspondences. Besides the already mentioned "transatlantic love" — American writer Nelson Algren — one should remember her relationship with Jacques-Laurent Bost - which began in 1938 and lasted ten years - who was part of the existentialist «family», and director Claude Lanzmann, who lived with her for seven years. The letters of their correspondence were sold in 2018 to Yale University, notwithstanding Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s objections. Sylvie was a close friend of de Beauvoir’s and later her companion and adoptive daughter; she entered de Beauvoir’s life in 1962 as a shy admirer and never left. Sartre entertained numerous “contingent” relationships as well, which sometimes undermined de Beauvoir’s confidence but never broke their mutual commitment over their “necessary” love.
The intensity of de Beauvoir’s friendships and relationships went hand in hand with her intellectual endeavours. Writing, relationships, and travels are thus at the heart of de Beauvoir’s existence. Among the many references for her Le Deuxième Sexe, it is necessary to mention at least some: Edith Wharton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame De Lafayette, Colette — who she met —, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One's Own she particularly admired and cited extensively in the lecture La femme et la création, which she delivered in Japan in 1966.
In the prime of her life, she is in Marseille, where she is entrusted with her first teaching assignment and where she continues her wanderings in nature. Sartre is sent to teach at Le Havre, where he will remain even when de Beauvoir is transferred to Rouen, where she will bond mainly with writer Colette Audry, one of her colleagues. The relationship with her student Olga Kosakievicz and Sartre’s unrequited passion for the young woman would be the inspiration for de Beauvoir’s novel L'Invitée, published in 1943.
In 1938 she finished her collection of novellas Quand prime le spirituel, in which de Beauvoir, narrates her and Zaza’s childhood. The book was rejected both by Gallimard and Grasset and would only be published in 1979. In 1936 she returned to Paris, her home of choice, to teach at the Lycée Molière, while Sartre was working at the Lycée Pasteur. They lived in separate rooms at the same hotel in Montparnasse and thoroughly lived the city, getting hold of everything it had to offer: books, connections with other young intellectuals, the opera, jazz, art, cinema, and philosophy.
In 1938 Sartre’s La Nausée was published and established him as a writer and engagé intellectual. The freedom and intensity of the 1929-1939 decade, marked by the Spanish Civil War, were shattered by the outbreak of World War II. Sartre and Bost — with whom de Beauvoir had a secret relationship — were drafted, the former in the weather service, the latter on the front line. De Beauvoir always defended her search for happiness to which she felt entitled to, and wrote daily letters to them both. Over these years she worked on Journal de guerre, published only in 1990, as well as her first published novel.
Notwithstanding the strict wartime laws, she found ways to travel to her lovers on the front lines until 1940, when Sartre was captured and taken to Germany and Bost was injured. After Paris was occupied by the Germans, de Beauvoir, in order to continue to work as a teacher, had to sign a document in which she declared herself neither a Jew nor a freemason. She eventually lost her job in 1943, when accused of having an affair with an underage girl, one of her students. In 1941 Sartre was freed and came back to France, and de Beauvoir’s father died. The cold winter and the lack of heating drove the young Parisian intellectuals to take refuge in the cafés, where they spent most of their time. These years, and the previous German occupation of Paris, are narrated in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française.
The publication of L’Invitée established de Beauvoir as a writer. Despite the paper scarcity, the novel would sell over twenty thousand copies. New people entered their circle: Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, who later introduced Jean Genet. After the D-Day landings in June 1944, the Germans capitulated in August and Paris was liberated.
The couple’s philosophical and literary activity was frenetic — in 1943, Sartre published L'Être et le Néant; in 1945 de Beauvoir published Le Sang des autres — and rapidly consecrated them as the royals of Parisian existentialism, attracting thousands of young and curious people who crowded the cafés together with the journalists looking for a scoop. In October 1954, the first number of the magazine Les Temps Modernes was published, containing works by Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss.
Her third novel, Tous les hommes sont mortels, was published in November 1946. It is both a philosophical fable and fantasy tale set between 13th and 20th century Italy, in which the protagonist Raimondo Fosca becomes immortal after drinking an elixir, in a fashion which seems to invoke Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The philosophical work Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté was published in 1947, also the year of de Beauvoir’s personal discovery of the United States, where she travelled to, delivered lectures and met Nelson Algren. Her American “husband” never accepted being in Sartre’s shadow, though de Beauvoir, in their correspondence, extensively demonstrated her love for him and showed him the lively Parisian life. The American “crocodile” and the French “frog” would also travel together to Mexico and Guatemala.
One is not born, but becomes a woman — During the first two years of this relationship, de Beauvoir completed the research for the first of the books that would make her famous all over the world and would be deemed so scandalous as to end up on the Vatican’s Index. The publication of Le Deuxième Sexe sparked off a series of violent reactions against the book and its author, shocked the Church, the bourgeoisie, the conservative minds, but also part of the French intelligentsia, including Mauriac and Camus, who accused her of vilifying the French male. The essay explores the female condition through history, biology, psychoanalysis, and lived experience.
Thanks to the book’s financial success, de Beauvoir was able to leave the hotel she was staying at and afford an apartment near Notre-Dame. Here she would host Algren as well, who however would suddenly leave her to re-marry his ex-wife. Sartre also ended his own American relationship around the same time, writing to de Beauvoir that this way they could “start their old age together and happily”. De Beauvoir, however, was not yet ready to give up her love life — she would be at fifty, when she said she was starting to feel ashamed of her body — and started dating Claude Lanzamann, seventeen years younger than her, in 1952.
The mandarins at the Deux Magots — The happy life of those years is documented in Les Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. Set in the postwar years, it narrates the vicissitudes of a group of leftwing intellectuals, as history and politics unfold through the Cold War and the discovery of the Soviet labour camps. The book is dedicated to Nelson Algren — their relationship appears in the story —, who did not take it well.
In the 1950s “the beaver” de Beauvoir decided to write her memoirs, of which the first three volumes appeared between 1958 and 1964: "I am myself the subject matter of the book". Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée narrates the years from her birth to 1929, the year of Zaza’s death, and tells the story of a life dedicated to emancipation. La Force de l’âge, the second volume, is set between 1929 and 1944, from the beginning of her relationship with Sartre — the book is dedicated to him — up to the end of the German occupation. The book "shines with the flames of youth", say Jacque Deguy and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir in their concise yet poignant book on de Beauvoir: "these lyric pages evoke youth’s inebriation, the splendour of beginnings, of first times: the Mediterranean Sea, roman ruins, Tuscan cities… these pages tell of the losses, illusions, excesses and follies of youth, her youth and of many of her friends and acquaintances". De Beauvoir was aware that "one can narrate but not know oneself".
Camus died in a car crash in 1960 and Merleau-Ponty died in 1961. Camus had already abandoned their lives in 1952, after the publication of L'Homme révolté, which caused a quarrel with Sartre over incompatible conceptions of the subject and freedom. The Algerian War, between Algerian freedom fighters and the French Army, would end in 1962 with the Algerian declaration of independence. Because of their positions on the war, Sartre and de Beauvoir had to leave their apartments which were raided and partially destroyed. This did not end the couple’s political activism, which continued as they travelled to the USSR until 1966.
La Force des choses, the third volume of her memoirs, which covers the years between 1944 and 1962, was published in 1963. The first part is dedicated to the years between the end of the occupation and 1952, while the second part mostly narrates her relationship with Lanzmann, their travels, and the travels with Sartre, up to the end of the Algerian War. "The final and growing invasion of personal history by the force of circumstances is final… as much as the time which passes and accompanies it towards the beginnings of old age".
In 1964 de Beauvoir published Une mort très douce, a novel dedicated to her mother’s throes and to the days she spent by her deathbed. This text is a rebellious cry towards death and, paradoxically, brings her mother back to her beautiful youth and tells of their mother-daughter bond. Two other fiction works were published in the 60s: Les Belles Images in 1966, and La Femme rompue in 1967. In those years she was with Sartre on the front line of the workers’ strikes and student revolts, and continued their political travels to Egypt, Japan, Scandinavia, and Israel.
In June 1970 the couple was arrested for distributing La cause du peuple, a periodical of the Maoist fringe of the proletarian left which was later disbanded by the French government.
To feel young in an old body — De Beauvoir dedicated those years to research, which came together in her book La Vieillesse, a text which explores the personal and social meaning of old age. The book denounces the hypocrisies, lies, myths, and silences concerning old age with the same force and wit she used in writing Le Deuxième Sexe. "Aging is a tragedy for workers more than professors, for women more than for men".
De Beauvoir placed the blame on capitalism, which treats people, as they age, as materials to be discarded. Besides exploring the meaning of old age, de Beauvoir brought a feminist perspective to the problem and focused on the female condition.
In a book of interviews conducted by Alice Schwarzer between 1972 and 1982, de Beauvoir recognised that she used to believe, erroneously, that the coming of socialism would bring with it the end of the problems faced by women, but later came to understand that "class struggle will not emancipate women". The French feminist movement strengthened between 1970 and 1971, the year of the well-known demonstration on November 11th over abortion rights.
In April 1971 de Beauvoir joined the demonstrations again and signed, together with 343 other women, a document declaring they had had an abortion. Her final feminist turning point was an interview given for the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. "I am a feminist": this simple declaration was the prelude to an attack against every political party, both socialist and capitalist, as well as a new awareness of the issues in the myth of motherhood and of a "female nature". "Nobody would question a man’s manliness for not becoming a father". De Beauvoir’s position was as radical as it was outrageous: she declared that motherhood should not be a woman’s life goal, that the biological possibility of motherhood should not entail the raising of children, that motherhood is not — in and for itself — a creative act, that in the present conditions motherhood is a form of slavery to which most women are subjected to. For these reasons it is necessary to forcefully question the myth of motherhood and the separation of domestic labour. Women accept to be exploited in the name of the social construct which is romantic love.
More than half a century later, the female condition has not changed much for most women. Women can now hold positions of power in politics and economy, but this does not mean that the patriarchy has been defeated, nor that the relations between men and women have really changed.
The radicalness of her ideas and political stance did not entail the rejection of men outright: the necessary individual and social change concerned both women and men. Starting from her own life, de Beauvoir knew that cooperation and mutual support were possible, though she recognised she had been very lucky in having been able to escape the female slavery of motherhood and of domestic labour. She therefore urged the readers of the interviews to work and avoid marriage, but not couple life per se; as her relationship with Sartre could show, there could be a life not of mutual influence but a sort of “pure kind of osmosis” between two human beings.
The ceremony of farewells — Sartre was on his deathbed. He grabbed de Beauvoir’s wrist and, without opening his eyes, told her: "I love you dearly, my little beaver", and kissed her before falling asleep. Motionless, she watched over him for endless hours. Sartre died at nine in the evening. «I wanted to lay beside him, under the blankets. But a nurse grabbed me: “No… it’s dangerous… the gangrene”. "I understood the true nature of the widespread necrosis on his skin, I lay beside him, over the blankets, and I slept, a short and heavy sleep. At five some nurses came. They carefully covered his body with a blanket and carried him away. It was April 11th 1980."
Three days later the body was brought to the cemetery followed by an immense crowd. About fifty thousand people gathered for the funeral. Friends, admirers, and journalists flooded Montparnasse cemetery: some climbed on the tombs… a stranger fell from a tree onto Sartre’s coffin. De Beauvoir was photographed sitting on the edge of the grave, her eyes lost, her face worn by sorrow. At twenty she had written: "I knew he would never abandon my life". Fifty-one years later, La Cérémonie des adieux, the last pitiless yet moving volume of her memoirs published in 1981, begins with the following dedication: "This is the first book — and probably the only one — which you have not read before its publication. It is dedicated to you, it does not affect you".
And ends with:
His death separates us. My death will not unite us. So it is; it is already beautiful that our lives were able to carry on in unison.
De Beauvoir died six years later, on April 14
th 1986. They are buried side by side and their grave is still a place of pilgrimage.
Translated by Fabrizio Luca Giannuolo.