The Facts
- Full name: Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
- Born: January 9, 1908 in Paris, France.
- Death: April 14, 1986
- Nationality: French
- Significant other: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Profession: Philosopher, writer, social theorist, activist
- Philosophy: Existentialist, feminist existentialis
The Gist
She had a deeply religious childhood but had a crisis of faith at the age of 14, and decided definitively there was no God. Her decision to renounce religion fueled her decision to pursue and teach philosophy. She never entertained the idea of marriage, yet she spent her entire life in a partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, and lived the life of an intellectual.
She passed the baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, and studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature and languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, and later studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She was the youngest philosophy teacher in France, having taken the highly competitive philosophy aggregation exam at the Ecole Normale. It was during her time at the Ecole Normale where she met Sartre.
Sartre and Beauvoir were never married, but remained “essential” lovers while allowing for “contingent” lovers whenever they desired one. De Beauvoir had sporadic relationships with both men and women, the most notorious one being with American author Nelson Algren.
She was a teacher in 1940 when the Nazis occupied Paris, and the Nazi government dismissed Beauvoir from her teaching post. The Nazi occupation began what Beauvoir called the “moral period” of her literary life, when she began questioning the problem of the intellectual’s social and political responsibility in regards to his/her time. Her first published novel, “She Came to Stay,” is based on the triangular relationship she and Sartre had with her student, Olga Kosakievics, and was polished in 1943. In 1945, Beauvoir along with several other intellectuals founded the politically non-affiliated, leftist journal Les Temps Modernes.
Her focus on the mechanics of morality gave birth to The Ethics of Ambiguity, published in 1947 where, amongst many other complex issues, she touched on the existentialist tension between freedom of choice and the constraints of life, this giving birth to the idea that happiness is the ultimate moral obligation of every human being. This mirrored Sartre’s notion of Bad Faith:
“It must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is … to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness.”
The Ethics of Ambiguity remains one of the best examples of an existentialist ethics, where she took her stand and questioned the pre-determined societal roles we’re given and that we as humans lock ourselves into, shaping our lives without much control or consent. This also began to give way to her feminist notions, realizing the social constructions of womanhood restricted her from fully embodying the life she wanted to live. In 1948, these initial airs of feminism gave birth to The Second Sex, a two-volume investigation into woman’s oppression and her role in society.
In 1954, Beauvoir published her most famous novel and recipient of the Prix Goncourt (the most prestigious French award for Literature), The Mandarins. As a roman a clef, The Mandarins is based on the real-life happenings of her group of intellectual friends, and many of the main characters are notably stand-in figures for the most notorious of them: Henry Perron as Albert Camus, Robert Dubreilh as Jean-Paul Sartre, Anne Dubreuilh as Beauvoir herself, Lewis Morgan as Nelson Algren, Scrissiane as Arthur Koestler, and so on. Beavoir denied this herself in the third volume of her autobiography, yet mentioned there were some similarities between art and truth. In The Mandarins, Beauvoir brings to the table many of her personal concerns regarding the products of her time (remember this book takes place right after the Nazis have de-occupied Paris right after WWII). Themes of feminism, existentialism, and personal morality take the spotlight in this book; the title, The Mandarins, refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China, and is a nod towards the idea that well-educated people need to take action (social, political, etc.) when the time demands for action.
In the 1970s, Beauvoir took an active role in France’s women’s liberation movement, and became a feminist icon herself. Not long after Sartre’s death in 1980, Beauvoir died in 1986 in Paris of pneumonia. She is buried next to Sartre at the Montparnasse Cemetery, and her letters to Sartre (amongst many others friends and lovers) were published unedited by her adopted daughter and literary heir, Sylvie Le Bon.
Prizes
- Prix Goncourt, 1954
- Jerusalem Prize, 1975
- Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1978
Published books
- L'Invitée (1943) (English – She Came to Stay) [novel]
- Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) [nonfiction]
- Le Sang des autres (1945) (English – The Blood of Others) [novel]
- Les Bouches inutiles (1945) (English - Who Shall Die?) [drama]
- Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946) (English – All Men Are Mortal) [novel]
- Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947) (English – The Ethics of Ambiguity) [nonfiction]
- "America Day by Day" (1948) (English – 1999 – Carol Cosman (Translator and Douglas Brinkley (Foreword) [nonfiction]
- Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) (English – The Second Sex) [nonfiction]
- L'Amérique au jour le jour (1954) (English – America Day by Day)
- Les Mandarins (1954) (English – The Mandarins) [novel]
- Must We Burn Sade? (1955)
- The Long March (1957) [nonfiction]
- Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
- The Prime of Life (1960)
- Force of Circumstance (1963)
- A Very Easy Death (1964)
- Les Belles Images (1966) [novel]
- The Woman Destroyed (1967) [short stories]
- The Coming of Age (1970) [nonfiction]
- All Said and Done (1972)
- Old Age (1972) [nonfiction]
- When Things of the Spirit Come First (1979) [novel]
- Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981)
- Letters to Sartre (1990)
- Journal de guerre, Sept 1939 – Jan 1941 (1990); English – Wartime Diary (2009)
- A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (1998)
- Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926–27 (2006)
- Cahiers de jeunesse, 1926–1930 (2008)
Relevant Quotes
- “The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play.”
- “To fight unhappiness one must first expose it, which means that one must dispel the mystifications behind which it is hidden so that people do not have to think about it.”
- “She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
- “...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
- “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
Where to start?
- If you like novels: The Mandarins, The Woman Destroyed, She Came to Stay, When Things of the Spirit Come First, The Blood of Others
- If you like thought-provoking essays: The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
- If you like biographies: America Day by Day, A Very Easy Death, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Diary of a Philosophy Student
- If you like cracking your head open (aka, you like philosophy): All Men are Mortal, Pyrrhus et Cinéas
