Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

French philosopher, novelist, and essayist, the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre and vice versa. Beauvoir's two volume treatise Le deuxième sexe (1949, The Second Sex) is among the most widely read feminist works. Her own life she documented in a monumental, four-volume autobiography. Beauvoir once stated: 

"When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form." 

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris into a bourgeois family. Her father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, was a lawyer, whose fortunes declined after World War I. Bertrand de Beauvoir's lineage could be traced to Guillaume de Champeaux, one of the founders of the University of Paris. Beauvoir's mother, Françoise Brasseur, was a devout Roman Catholic, born to a family engaged in government servide and banking; she raised her daughters in a strict, traditional mode. However, as an adolescent Beauvoir rejected the religious and social values of her background. 

Beauvoir was educated at Catholic girls' schools, preparing to begin her career as a mother, and well as a writer. Her teenage years Beauvoir had spent hoping to marry her cousin Jacques Champigneulle, whom she had known since childhood. Jacques never proposed her. In 1926, Beauvoir entered the Sorbonne, where she studied philosophy and literature. At the age of 21 she passed the difficult final examination, agrégation. In France, the philosophy agrégation had been opened to women during the period between the two word wars. After having a discussion with Jean-Paul Sartre, the star student of the École Normale Supérieure, she confessed: "I'm no longer sure what I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all". Beauvoir eventually joined Sartre's circle, and became his most trustworthy critic, who read his new manuscript before he sent it to a publisher. 

After graduating Beauvoir taught philosophy in several schools in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris. The French photographer From 1941 to 1943 she was professor at the Sorbonne, until she was dismissed by the German authorities. During the Nazi occupation of France, Beauvoir apparently was not involved with the activities of the Resistance. 

In the late 1944 Beauvoir founded with Sartre Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron the monthly review Les Temps modernes, which took its name from Charlis Chaplin's film. The review was for twenty-five years the most prominent forum for radical political and philosophical debate. Beauvoir's Pour une morale de l'ambiguité (1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity) was colored by the post-war disillusionment and gives a diagnosis of political attitudes. "The problems which seem to her most important are those of mass political action, the relation of a man to his party, and of the party to the people it serves; the problem of how to win freedom by violent means that temporarily deny it. How is the Liberal (or Christian) spirit of individualism to survive a long era of ideological warfare?" (Iris Murdoch in Mind, 59, April 1950) 

Beauvoir's first book, L'Invitée, was published in 1943. Beauvoir had started to write at the age of eight, and before L'Invitée appeared she had been writing fiction for over ten years. The fictionalized treatment of Sartre's affair with the young Olga Kosakievicz was born from a crisis that threatened her relationship with with Sartre. The motto of Françoise and Pierre, the novel's protagonists, is: "You and I are simply one. That is the truth, you know. Neither of us can be described without the other." Françoise and Pierre are people of the theatre world. They are used to share all secrets. Xavière, aged twenty, takes up an apprenticeship with Pierre's drama group. Françoise finds that there is something in Pierre's life she cannot share. She sees her as a play object for Pierre. Françoise has an affair with a young man called Gerbert, in whom Xavière also has an interest. Françoise's world of perfect communication with Pierre is destroyed and she realizes that Pierre has lived only for himself. At the end of the book, Françoise kills Xavière. "Without losing its perfect form, their love, their life, was slowly losing its substance, like those huge, apparently invulnerable cocoons, whose soft integument yet conceals microscopic worms that painstakingly consume them." Bauvoir tells that ultimately one is alone – some experiences cannot be shared. 

In 1945 Beauvoir published Le Sang des autres, a novel dealing with the question of political involvement. Beauvoir wrote the work at a time when the final outcome of World War II was still unknown, but in the character of Jean she gave her support to the French Resistance. Jean Blomart is a wealthy young man. He breaks with his family and joins the Communist Party. He meets Hélène, a naive individualist, who lives just for the moment, and do not understand Jean's commitment to his beliefs. Jean must choose between political activism and his private responsibilities. He realizes that he can find freedom in action without love. "He too was alone; he had been wandering all over Paris since morning, with his demobilization gratuity in his pocket; the printing works were closed, his mother was far from Paris. He knew nothing about Hélène. He was alone but he was there. A complete man." The book was filmed in 1982 by Claude Chabrol, starring Jodie Foster as Hélène, who is ready to die for her love, for Jean (Michael Ontkean). 

Beauvoir's breakthrough work was semiautobiographical Les Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Concourt. The central characters, psychologist Anne Dubreuilh, and her husband Robert, were thinly veiled de Beauvoir and Sartre, and the third wheel, American Lewis Brogan, was the novelist Nelson Algren. De Beauvoir had met Algren in 1947 in the United States where she was on a lecture tour. Algren wished to marry her but in the end she remained loyal to Sartre, who was "a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed", as she once said to Algren.

"I raise myself on my elbow, I look at the house, the linden tree, the cradle in which Maria is sleeping. It's a day like any other, and in appearance the sky is blue. But what a desert! Everything is still. Perhaps that stillness in only the silence of my heart. There is no more love in me, for anyone, for anything. I used to think, "The world is vast inexhaustible; a single existence is hardly enough to drink your fill of it." And now, I look at it with indifference; it's nothing but a huge place of exile." (from The Mandarins)

The book was addressed to the leftist intellectuals to abandon their elitist "mandarin" status, and to participate in the real world political struggle. Roman Catholic authorities banned it and Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), in which Beauvoir argued that "one is not born a woman; one becomes one". Women are "the other", the sex defined by men and patriarchy as not male, and consequently they are less than fully human. Judith Okeley has argued that Beauvoir in fact produced "an anthropological village study of specific women", in which the village is that of mid-century Paris and the women are mainly middle-class. (Simone de Beauvoir. A Re-Reading, 1986) Critics have questioned de Beauvoir's assumptions of the male as norm, but her views about misogyny in myth and literature have been extremely influential. 

In 1958 Beauvoir published Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, the first of four volume memoirs. She described her happy childhood, intellectual development and of course Sartre. It was followed by La Force de l'âge (1960), La Force des choses (1963), and Tout compte fait (1972), which examined from an existentialist perspective her choices between love and work. Beauvoir herself thought that she had not influenced Sartre at all philosophically, "because she felt that she was not a philosopher, but rather a literary writer." (from Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, 1999) Beauvoir recalled in her memoirs, that once when Raymond Aron and Sartre had a series of conversations, she was excluded because her "mind moved too slowly for them." In general, Beauvoir differed from Sartre with her focusing on women's condition and tracing of sociopolitical, economic and ideological conditions behind freedom. Her own philosophical studies, Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity, show the influence of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943), and are not considered her best work. 

Beauvoir travelled widely, often with Sartre, visiting Portugal, Tunis, Switzerland, Italy, USA, and China. She was with Sartre when he met Castro and Khrushchev but did not enjoy these public occasions. Although Beauvoir was a well-known figure in the service of social and political causes, she behaved reticently toward people who did not belong to the small circle of her intimates. The photographer Gisèle Freund, who met her from time to time for over forty years, noted that she seldom smiled. "Not smiling was probably her way of protecting herself from others," Freund concluded. (Photographer by Gisèle Freund, 1985) In the late 1960s, Beauvoir became involved with the feminist movement, but her engagement was first largely intellectual. Especially she championed on issues dealing with abortion and sexual violence. With Sartre she participate in 1967 in the Bertrand Russell Tribunal of War Crimes in Vietnam. Originally he thought that "I would not have to do very much more than lend my name", but actually she had to follow Sartre to several meetings in the Eastern European and Latin American countries.

In her later works Beauvoir depicted the problems of aging and society's indifference to the elderly. A Very Easy Death dealt her mother's illness. Beauvoir asked herself, why her mother's death of cancer shocked her so much. When her father died, she only mentioned it in her memoirs as a fact. At the end of the book she realizes that there is no such thing as a natural death. 

In 1981 appeared her book of memoir of Sartre's last years, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. After Sartre's death Beauvoir's life was marked by bitter disputes with Arlette Elkaim. At the age of 18, the young Algerian Jewish student had telephoned the philosopher to discuss about Being and Nothingness. Sartre like her and started to do more and more his writing at Arlette's apartment. Eventually Sartre adopted her and spent several weeks each summer in the house he had bought her in the south of France.

During the last period of her life, Beauvoir's dependence on alcohol hastened her physical and mental collapse. She had always liked the taste of alcohol and she could drink men under the table. And like Sartre, she used drugs, mostly amphetamines. Beauvoir died in Paris, on April 14, 1986. She was buried in the same grave as Sartre.