The Facts

• Published: 1954
• Original language: French
• Genre: Fiction, existentialist fiction, philosophy, novel
• Number of pages: 610

Before we jump into the thick of it, let's get a few terms straight: 

Roman-a-clef: (French for “novel with a key”) a novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.

Bad faith: an act committed under social pressure, where a person adopts false values and loses their true freedom. To act in “bad faith” means to act without free will, as the individual is a subject of social/governmental forces.

Mandarin: In Chinese culture, a mandarin (Chinese: 官; pinyin: guān) is a bureaucrat scholar in the history of China, Korea and Vietnam. 

The title refers to the imperial-China system of scholar-bureaucrats; the protagonists of The Mandarins, who are leftist intellectuals, attempt abandoning their elite, “mandarin” status and engage in political activism.

Existentialism: 

• Existence precedes essence
• Existentialism is a philosophy coined by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Existentialism “identifies people as having free will to determine the course of their lives. It emphasizes individual responsibility to create meaning rather than relying on a higher power or religion to determine what is important, valuable, or morally right.” (source)
• Our actions define our essence/identity, therefore our existence, and our existence is defined by our relationships to others as well as with the world. The inability to identify meaning in one’s life causes anxiety, known as an existential crisis.

Notable existentialists:

Friedrich Nietzche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka.

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The Context

Called a roman-a-clef, The Mandarins is a novel loosely based on the close-knit group of intellectuals Beavouir hung out with in real life. Think Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.  The book begins on Christmas night of 1944, right after the French Liberation from the Vichy regime (pro-Nazi). Half of the book is told in third person by Henri Perron, and the other half is told in first person by Anne Dubreuilh

The book asks fundamental questions such as: 

• What defines human essence?
• Does the past define our future?
• What does it mean to be free? 
• How does our social responsibility suffuse our free will?
• Do we have free will? 
• Does existence precede essence? (existentialism)

In The Mandarins, we are shown how freedom and the political/social/cultural context merge, how the conditionality of a situation defines our free will, and how situation suffuses free choice. This last instance is extremely important as it was the core of Existentialism, back when France was under Nazi occupation and several citizens found themselves either completely disentagled from the situation, or completely immersed in it (such as the members of the French Resistance were).

Beauvoir used real-life situations to demonstrate a moment in life when nothing made sense, reason why WWII was the perfect context for this story: The war raging across the globe made life itself seem absurd; people were murdered in the blink of an eye for no apparent logical reason. Everything and anything was possible, nothing made sense anymore, reason why people's hold on their own identities was pretty much gone. Why? Because we define ourselves in the context of our physical environment, which has a social, cultural, political, and economical factors that affect it. If the world doesn't make sense, we ourselves don't make sense.

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The Plot

Taking place in the aftermath of World War II, The Mandarins centers around French leftist intellectuals as they navigate the challenges of rebuilding their country amidst the shadows of the Nazi occupation and the Soviet and U.S. dominance on the global stage. The novel begins on Christmas night of 1944 and ends 4 years later; it delves into the intricate political landscape of the time, exploring how these intellectuals grapple with their roles and ideologies. Additionally, the personal lives of these characters, many of whom were former members of the French Resistance, intertwine with the broader uncertainties, reflecting the impact of their wartime experiences and the ongoing struggle to reconcile their pasts with the present. The book is divided in two, and the plot itself follows the life of mainly two characters: Henri Perron, a leftist writer and columnist (based on Camus) who used to be heavily involved in politics during the Occupation, but no longer wants to be involved in politics after the end of the War; and Anne Dubreuilh, a psychoanalist (based on De Beauvoir herself) who finds no reason to live after WWII. The parts focused on Henri Perron are told in third person, while the parts focusing on Anne are told in first person by Anne (Simone De Beauvoir) herself.

This is a philosophical, political, and a romance novel for the following reasons/quotes:

Philosophical:

"You can’t keep yourself from thinking what you think; you can’t escape yourself.“

"The freedom of a writer - it would be interesting to know what that entails.”

Political:

“That’s just it,” he said spiritedly. “To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.”

“A set of principles necessarily includes a political attitude. And on the other hand, politics itself is a living thing.”

Romance:

“Ahead of us, behind us, the black arches were repeated into infinity; it was as if they formed a belt around the entire earth and we would eternally continue walking beneath them.”

"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”

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‍The Characters

Henri Perron

• Editor of the leftist newspaper L’Espoir (Hope)
• Before the war, Henri was a celebrated novelist. After the war, Henri discovers that, having become a Resistance activist during the occupation, he is now someone who cannot cease to be politically engaged. 
• He has to take a series of crucial decisions, personal and political, and each of which involves a specific kind of freedom. These different kinds of freedoms are profoundly affected by its situation (i.e. professional freedom, interpersonal freedom)

Does he act in good faith or bad faith? 

• Henri’s choices are already constrained by who he has become after the war: a leftist, a member of the Resistance, an activist. He is no longer just a writer.
• Freedom brings Henri anguish because it forces him to act and choose: to take action or not to take action. His actions reveal fragments of his unconscious to his conscious self. 
• Henri shuts himself in a cage in order to escape his responsibilities and continue writing his novel, meaning he’s acting in bad faith and therefore doesn’t truly have free will. 

• “Every time you do something decent, it leads to new duties.”

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Anne Dubreuilh

• Anne is Robert Dubreuilh’s wife and a psychoanalyst. She has an affair with Lewis Brogan, based on Nelson Algren, during a trip to America, and a large portion of her thoughts are about death and aging.
• Anne is based on De Beauvoir herself, who had a notable affair with Nelson Algren during one of her trips, and is the embodiment of the woman described in De Beauvoir's Second Sex.

• Anne has to make a choice: whether to live and how to live if she decides to do so, or to kill herself. The fact that life resembles the same absurdity brought by WWII is what has her so obsessed with age and death.

Why does she want to kill herself?

1. She’s tired of fleeing/seeing death everywhere
2. As a psychoanalysis, she treats many people traumatized by the War and the concentration camps, so she’s in constant exposure to death and its significance for those who survive it
3. Her decision to live is the embodiment of freedom. To kill herself means she can’t bear the weight of responsibilities (can’t act in good faith)

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Robert Dubreuilh

• Robert is an intellectual and a committed political activist who began the S.R.L., a political movement of the non-Communist left. He is passionate about his leftist ideals and dedicates himself to political work, organizing meetings and writing political articles. He is deeply invested in the fight against fascism and the struggle for justice and equality. He's also the one who convinced Henri to back the S.R.L. with his newspaper L'Espoir, thus involving Henri politically.
• He grapples with personal conflicts and struggles throughout the novel by experiencing self-doubt, questioning his beliefs and the effectiveness of his political actions. He battles with feelings of alienation and a sense of disillusionment with the political landscape.
• Robert embodies a strong sense of idealism and moral integrity. He strives to live according to his principles and is not willing to compromise his ideals for personal gain. He stands up for his convictions, even when faced with challenges or criticism from others.
• He is responsible for the eventual loss of his friend Henri's newspaper, L'Espoir, and for the breakup of the friendship between the two men. Just like the characters in the book, Camus and Sartre also broke up their friendship due to intellectual differences.
• Robert is based on Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist and lifelong partner of De Beauvoir

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Nadine Dubreuilh

• Nadine is Anne and Robert Dubreuilh's daughter, described as an angsty, rebellious teenager at the beginning of the book.
• Tormented by the death of her boyfriend Diego during the Nazi occupation, Nadine finds it extremely hard to find herself and a purpose for living now that the war is over. Moreover, the fact that she wasn't in the thick of things (meaning in the concentration camps like Diego) makes her feel extremely guilty, making it impossible for her to find peace in these new times
• She later enters a romantic relationship with Henri and eventually marries him, but her character is an interesting one due to the fact that she represents a new generation of women who is aggressive and more selfish, unlike her mother, and the author herself seemed to have a more negative opinion of her at first.

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Paula Mareuil

• Paula is Henri Peron's girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, and she is a singer who refuses to sing due to the fear of failure.
• She is the embodiment of a woman who cannot live without a romantic partner, due to the fact that her partner's presence reaffirms her identity.
• Due to her dependence on Henri, Henri grows to resent her until he leavers her, and his leaving is the catalyst of Paula's mental decline.

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Why should I read this novel?

Several reasons, dear reader:

1. Evil and inhumanity are part of our world. While dark episodes such as The Holocaust seem to be well behind us, it is extremely important to remember and understand it because our human nature makes us forgetful, and we repeat our mistakes when we forget. More than that, it is extremely vital to look at particular problems from every possible angle, and that's something this book provides in a masterful way. De Beauvoir shows the perspective of every single person who lived through the Holocaust, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and demonstrates how one person's problem has to be everyone's problem. While we're not politically engaged, she demonstrates how we all have social responsibility, and how ignoring this responsibility means we're not truly free.
2. This book is the easiest, most entertaining way of understanding what Existentialism is and why it's so important to know about this philosophical theory. Existence precedes essence, yes, but why? How does it affect our daily lives?
3. More than being a novel about complex ideas, it's also infinitely entertainig: it has romance, action, travel writing, extremely graphic scenes, and perfect portraits of different personalities.

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You can buy the novel, used or new, here.

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