Simone de Beauvoir

Biography

Early years

Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908 in Montparnasse in the 6th arrondissement in a quality but poorly furnished apartment. Beauvoir's family was historically bourgeois though her aristocratic ancestor was given the title in 1786 and was killed during the revolution in 1790. Her parents were Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, initially a lawyer but who aspired to be an actor, and Françoise Beauvoir (née Brasseur), a wealthy banker's daughter and devout Catholic. The family expected a dowry, but after Françoise's father was jailed, the promised dowry was not available.

As her parents were often absent, Simone was primarily raised by her nanny Louise. Louise had a strained relationship with Françoise Beauvoir. Simone also had a sister, Hélène, who was born on 6 June 1910. Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would boast,

"Simone has a man's brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man."Writing of her youth in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she said:

...my father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.In the onset of World War I and inflation, and her father's turns at the front then the Ministry of War, the family's finances shrank significantly. Her father refused to return to law and likely became physically abusive to Françoise. He then began working for her mother's formerly disgraced father in a shoe factory, but he was an unreliable worker and the factory shuttered after the way. A family member offered him a role in newspaper advertising sales, but he also lost that job. In 1919, the family moved to a small fifth floor apartment with no central heating, running water, or bathroom.

As a young child, Beauvoir only attended school two days per week, starting at 5, and was otherwise educated by her mother. As a teenager, Beauvoir pursued post-secondary education after completing her high school years at Cours Desir. After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy at the age of seventeen in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie.

Young Adulthood

Upon a visit to Lourdes at age eighteen Beauvoir felt disgust at the intellectual and sentimental, and felt her own sorrows could not compare to the suffering of the sick. Though she later updated this thought stating in her diaries that she should not be ashamed of living, and that as she has been given life it is her duty to live in the best possible way, and anything else is moral suicide.

Simone took a volunteer teaching position, in part to escape her mother's control, making up extra volunteer days so she could be allowed to walk Paris or watch her sister's art, and then worked part-time teaching for extra money to spend in Paris. Beauvoir began to expand her friendships, though friends noted she was prudish and often scandalized. She would soon expand her friendship with Merleau-Ponty, and wrote an ethical and love-focused thesis under the direction of Jean Baruzi. It was also at this time that she would become an atheist, stating she could now feel the terrible significant of the word alone. Merleau-Ponty and Zara would court and were kept apart by their parents. When they eventually decided to marry, Zara grew ill and died, with both spiritualizing their suffering, instead of blaming their parents for keeping them apart, which Beavour did not like. Beauvoir would eventually write a novel on Zara and Marleau-Ponty's relationship in Inseparable, published posthumously.

In 1929 Beauvoir became friends and possibly lovers with René Maheau, who was friends with Sartre. Sartre heard of Beauvoir's thesis and sent her a painting of Leibniz bathing with mermaids. Beauvoir initially resisted meeting him, a known womanizer, and sent her sister Helene to meet him instead. Beauvoir and Sartre later met a study group, and Sartre sent her presents including a Japanese painting and porcelain which Beauvoir did not like. Maheau failed to receive one the twenty-six available teaching posts and left Paris, where Beauvoir became closer to Sartre, through notably conflicted between her feelings between Sartre, Jacques, and Maheu, which she later downplayed in her public diaries.

In October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir became a couple for the next 51 years, until his death in 1980. After they were confronted by her father, Sartre asked her to marry him on a provisional basis. One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease". Though Beauvoir wrote, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry", scholars point out that her ideal relationships described in The Second Sex and elsewhere bore little resemblance to the marriage standards of the day.

Teaching Period

After the completion of her studies, Beauvoir saw teaching as an opportunity to work towards earning her own living. She worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. From 1929 through 1943, Beauvoir taught at the lycée level until she could support herself solely on the earnings of her writings. She taught at the Lycée Montgrand (Marseille), the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc (Rouen), and the Lycée Molière (Paris) (1936–39).

During the trial of Robert Brasillach in 1945, Beauvoir was among a small number of prominent intellectuals advocating for his execution for the 'intellectual crimes' of supporting Fascism and the genocide of Jewish people. She defended this decision in her 1946 essay "An Eye for an Eye".

Beauvoir was bisexual, and her relationships with young women are controversial. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Beauvoir maintained three relationships with younger women, including Olga Kosakiewicz, Natalie Sorokin, and Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld). Beauvoir met Olga when she was nineteen and Beauvoir twenty-seven and eventually, she had relationships with both Beauvoir and Sartre, though according to Beauvor, Olga would not have sex with Sartre. At this time Beauvoir would also begin what became a ten-year relationship with Jacques-Laurent Bost, which she hid from her memoirs. While the relationship with Olga ended, Olga would remain friends with Beauvoir through the 1970s. Bost would go on to court and marry Olga which made Beauvoir jealous. Beauvoir stated her only sensual life was with Bost, though she hid this from both Olga and Jacques-Laurent. Beauvoir would also continue years of dishonesty lying and hiding her relationship with Bost from Olga.

Beauvoir met Bianca Lamblin when she was sixteen, and after the year ended and she was no longer a pupil Beauvor travelled to Morvan on a hiking trip with Bianca. and continued a relationship so several years seeing her several times a week as she studied at the Sorbonne. In 1938, Simone introduced Bianca to Sartre, and she was impressed by him and also began a relationship with him. When Sartre was called to the war, Beauvoir began to criticize the much younger Bianca as increasingly controlling and entitled. Bianca opposed Beauvoir sending money to her sister, and wanted her to end her relationships with other. When Beauvoir went to visit Bianca, whose Jewish family fled Paris, Bianca stated her mother had intercepted a letter between them. Beauvoir began to express regret about her sexual relationship with Bianca, which she said took advantage of her body and that it was boorish.

Life as a Public Intellectual

Beauvoir ended her teaching career, and began to live as a writer and public intellectual. From 1941 to 1946 Beauvoir held found the latest paper Les Temps Modernes and wrote some of her most important works, including novels The Blood of Others (1945) and All Men are Mortal (1946) and her first philosophical essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) followed by The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). She began publishing parts of The Second Sex in Les Temps Modernes in 1949.

Post-war Beauvoir's work was increasingly famous in France and abroad, and she began travels including to North Africa to lecture and then in 1947 made a long trip to the United States where she met Sartre's lover Dolors Vanetti. While in America she met author Nelson Algren. Beauvoir met Algren in Chicago in 1947, while she was on a four-month "exploration" trip of the United States using various means of transport: automobile, train, and Greyhound. While in the United States, Beauvoir began writing letters on women's issues, giving lectures on a twenty-four lecture tour on ethics and writing, and landed in New York where she also became friends with Ellen and Richard Wright who introduced her to books on race in America. She would also meet Natalie Sorkin who had moved to the United States and Sorkin's husband She kept a detailed diary of the trip, which was published in France in 1948 with the title America Day by Day. She wrote to him across the Atlantic as "my beloved husband." Algren won the National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm in 1950, and in 1954, Beauvoir won France's most prestigious literary prize for The Mandarins, in which Algren is the character Lewis Brogan. Algren vociferously objected to their intimacy becoming public. Years after they separated, she was buried wearing his gift of a silver ring.

When Beauvoir visited Algren in Chicago, Art Shay took well-known nude and portrait photos of Beauvoir. Shay also wrote a play based on Algren, Beauvoir, and Sartre's triangular relationship. The play was stage read in 1999 in Chicago.

She lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959 in Montparnasse near her childhood home. In 1955 she published Les Temps Moderne in support of Algerian independence and three essays called Privileges which questioning how the privileged can question their situation, and stated the privileged number be not ignorant of hierarchies to address them. Beauvoir would later write a defense of Djamila Boupacha and helped set up a committee for her defense. This greatly angered many people, to the point that she received death threats and Sartre's home was bombed so anti-fascist students stayed at her apartment to protect her. In the 1950s she would run into her cousin Jacques who was a ruined alcoholic, whom she would send financial support.

Philosophy

Existentialist ethics

Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay on existentialist ethics titled Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944). The characters Pyrrhus and Cineas have a socratic dialogue to discuss questions such as 'What are the criteria of ethical action?' and 'Can violence ever be justified?'.

She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

She identifies herself as an existentialist and identifies existentialism as the philosophy of our (her) times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously. It is the only philosophy prepared to counter Dostoevsky's claim [in The Brothers Karamazov] that without God everything is permissible.

'But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?'

Only the authentically moral attitude understands that the freedom of the self requires the freedom of others. To act alone or without concern for others is not to be free. As Beauvoir explains, "No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects."

In Pyrrhus and Cineas Beauvoir argues that pursuing projects is central to being human, as humans have no essence, they must create themselves from their actions with self-creation being its own form of project. Beauvoir states we are always transcending (meaning acting) even through thoughts and desires and, therefore, it is impossible not to engage in projects. Per Beauvoir, projects have a point or purpose (meaning), and thus life only has a point or purpose when we are engaged in them, so completing a goal or tasks might actually reduce one's meaning in life. Therefore, one must find meaning through always having and completing new projects. Beauvoir also states that projects of projects can be meaningful, insofar as someone else actually uses it (such as a book being read, or an institution being created) but may not still have meaning to the originator's life, if they no longer participate in an action towards it. If a project is never used by another human beyond the person who performed the project has no real meaning. As such, humanity is necessary for the existence of meaningful projects and human projects are meaningful insofar as humans exist with Beauvoir stating "My project loses all meaning not if my death is announced, but if the end of the world is announced to me".

The Second Sex

The Second Sex, first published in 1949 in French as Le Deuxième Sexe, turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one: "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman" (French: "On ne naît pas femme, on le devient"). With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes. She draws on narrative accounts of womens' experience to reveal how sexual differences are used to trap women in the role of the "Other".

Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined as inferior to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas referred to women as an "imperfect man" and the "incidental" being. She writes: "In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."

Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the "immanence" to which they were previously resigned and reaching "transcendence", a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.

Chapters of The Second Sex were originally published in Les Temps modernes, in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France. It was published soon after in America due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message. For years, Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.

Only in 2009 was there a second translation, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation in 2010, reinstating a third of the original work.

Other notable works

She Came to Stay

Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943. It has been assumed that it is inspired by her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during the early 1930s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she rejected him, so he began a relationship with her sister, Wanda. Upon his death, Sartre was still supporting Wanda. He also supported Olga for years, until she met and married Jacques-Laurent Bost, a lover of Beauvoir. However, the main thrust of the novel is philosophical, a scene in which to situate Beauvoir's abiding philosophical pre-occupation – the relationship between the self and the other.

In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, Beauvoir creates one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalised versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois.

She Came to Stay was followed by many others, including The Blood of Others, which explores the nature of individual responsibility, telling a love story between two young French students participating in the Resistance during World War II.

Les Temps Modernes

Beauvoir, Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty co-founded Les Temps Modernes, a monthly political journal that featured varied ideologies such as communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and socialists. Sartre wrote the purpose of Les Temps Modernes in the Preface of the first issue published on 1 October 1945.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire's business? Was Dreyfus's condemnation Zola's business? We at Les Temps Modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps Modernes will take sides.

Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death. However, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les Temps modernes. Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions.

Les Temps Modernes was at the center of French intellectual life for many decades. The journal covered many topics including essays on race issues in the United States, articles condemning French actions in Algeria, analysis of life in the Soviet Union, contributions from authors from former European colonies covering race and colonialism, and analysis of Israeli-Arab conflicts. Beauvoir and Sartre both opposed capitalism, but the journal remained neutral on the Cold War, opposed both to American racism against the Stalinist misappropriation of Marx that resulted in oppression.

The Mandarins

Published in 1954, The Mandarins won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. It is a roman à clef set after the end of World War II and follows the personal lives of philosophers and friends among Sartre's and Beauvoir's intimate circle, including her relationship with American writer Nelson Algren, to whom the book is dedicated.

Algren was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir described their sexual experiences in both The Mandarins and her autobiographies. Algren vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of Beauvoir's work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.

Les Inséparables

Beauvoir's early novel Les Inséparables, long suppressed, was published in French in 2020 and two different English translations in 2021, by Sandra Smith in the US and Lauren Elkin in the UK. Written in 1954, the book describes her first love, a classmate named Elisabeth Lacoin ("Zaza") who died before age 22 of viral encephalitis, and had as a teenager a "passionate and tragic" relationship with Beauvoir. According to Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir, Beauvoir never forgave Madame Lacoin for what happened, believing that Elisabeth-Zaza was murdered by the oppressive socio-cultural environment in which she had been raised. Disapproved by Sartre, the novel was deemed "too intimate" to be published during Beauvoir's lifetime.

Relationships impact on work and image

Beauvoir states in All Said in Done that she had a hard time distinguishing between the "I" and the "we" because she always had someone around and later described solitude as a form of death. Beauvoir's prominent open relationships at times overshadowed her academic reputation. A scholar who was lecturing with her chastised their "distinguished [Harvard] audience [because] every question asked about Sartre concerned his work, while all those asked about Beauvoir concerned her personal life."

Beauvoir connected with Sartre on an intellectual level, stating that he 'is in my heart, in my body and above all the incomparable friend of my thought.' Sartre and Beauvoir always read each other's work, and debate continues about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and "Phenomenology and Intent". Beauvoir encouraged Sartre to make Nausea a novel, and Sartre credited her with influencing the book having her own concept of being and nothingness before Sartre began the book. Sartre was not always supportive; in 1929, when Beauvoir told Sartre about her ideas about pluralistic ethics, Sartre critiqued her intellectual capacity.

However, recent studies of Beauvoir's work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a whole generation of French thinkers, including Sartre, to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Beauvoir, reading Hegel in German during the war, produced an original critique of his dialectic of consciousness.

Beauvoir published a series of letters Sartre sent to her and kept a number of student-era diaries, not published in English until 2008 and letters to Claude Lanzmann which were not available until 2018. These documents show that Beauvoir presented herself in her autobiography somewhat differently than she had lived, particularly in her relationship with Sartre. When Beauvoir's letters to Algren were published in 1997, it created an uproar about the truth of her memoirs. In 2018 there was a new expanded edition of her biographies published in France with additional letters and materials and includes critiques of her belittlement next to Sartre. While her biographies presented Sartre as her primary romantic interest, in letters sold by Lanzmann to Yale, Beauvoir stated that her love with Sartre was without true reciprocity. Beauvoir had more significant romantic and sexual relationships with others including Lanzmann, Bost, and Algren but did not widely document these in her published biographies or letters, preferring to, at least publicly, center Sartre. Beauvoir was also intellectually engaged with others beyond Sartre including with Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and at times rejecting Sartre's ideas and developing her own independent ideas (though her work was commonly dismissed or assumed to be Sartre's by many papers). The day after her death Le Monde published an obituary saying her works were more "popularization than creation".

Legacy

Beauvoir's The Second Sex is considered a foundational work in the history of feminism. Beauvoir had denied being a feminist multiple times, but ultimately admitted that she was one after The Second Sex became crucial in the world of feminism. The work has had a profound influence, opening the way for second-wave feminism in the United States, Canada, Australia, and around the world. Although Beauvoir has been quoted as saying, "There is a certain unreasonable demand that I find a little stupid because it would enclose me, immobilize me completely in a sort of feminist concrete block," her works on feminism have paved the way for all future feminists. The founders of the second-wave read The Second Sex in translation, including Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Ann Oakley and Germaine Greer. All acknowledged their profound debt to Beauvoir, including visiting her in France, consulting with her at crucial moments, and dedicating works to her. Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often regarded as the opening salvo of second-wave feminism in the United States, later said that reading The Second Sex in the early 1950s "led me to whatever original analysis of women's existence I have been able to contribute to the Women's movement and its unique politics. I looked to Simone de Beauvoir for a philosophical and intellectual authority."

Beauvoir's work has also been influential on existentialism, ethics, phenomenology, and political thought.

Beauvoir also had a rich relationship with many of her readers, who often wrote her letters in response to her work and to whom she commonly replied. One notable letter recipient from Beauvoir is Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux; in the letter, Beauvoir complimented Ernaux, saying she had a "a great talent" after the publication of Ernaux's first novel, Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out).

At one point in the early 1970s, Beauvoir also aligned herself with the French League for Women's Rights as a means to campaign and fight against sexism in French society. Beauvoir's influence goes beyond just her impact on second-wave founders, and extends to numerous aspects of feminism, including literary criticism, history, philosophy, theology, criticism of scientific discourse, and psychotherapy. When Beauvoir first became involved with the feminism movement, one of her objectives was legalizing abortion. Donna Haraway wrote that, "despite important differences, all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born a woman [one becomes one].'" This "most famous feminist sentence ever written" is echoed in the title of Monique Wittig's 1981 essay One Is Not Born a Woman. Judith Butler took the concept a step further, arguing that Beauvoir's choice of the verb to become suggests that gender is a process, constantly being renewed in an ongoing interaction between the surrounding culture and individual choice. Beauvoir also influenced others such as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and Luce Irigaray.

Prizes

Prix Goncourt, 1954

Jerusalem Prize, 1975

Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1978