Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir: The Philosopher Who Refused the Given

Five thousand people walked behind her coffin through Paris in April 1986, and the flowers came from women's organizations on four continents. It was an extravagant send-off for a writer who had spent her life insisting that nothing about a human being is settled in advance — not her nature, not her destiny, and certainly not her sex. She was buried in the same grave as Jean-Paul Sartre's ashes, a final domestic arrangement between two people who had spent fifty years refusing to marry.

A Dowry Lost, a Career Found

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on 9 January 1908 in the fourteenth arrondissement, into the exact bourgeois comfort she would spend her adult life dismantling. Her father Georges was an agnostic lawyer; her mother Françoise a devout Catholic who policed her daughters' reading by pinning together the pages of books she judged unsuitable. After the First World War the family's money evaporated. They moved to a smaller flat, and the daughters were told plainly that they had lost their dowries.

The consequence was decisive. A girl of her class without a dowry could not expect to be married into security; she would have to earn. What was intended as a humiliation functioned instead as a release, and the convent-schooled child of the Cours Désir was pushed toward the one avenue open to her — an education taken seriously.

The Examination That Made a Pair

At the Sorbonne, and then among the philosophy elite orbiting the École Normale Supérieure, Beauvoir sat the agrégation de philosophie in 1929. She was twenty-one, the eighth woman ever to pass it, and she placed second — behind Jean-Paul Sartre. By some accounts she was the youngest candidate ever to take the degree. The examiners' verdict on the pair became legend in French intellectual life; what mattered more was that the ranking installed a hierarchy the culture would never let her escape.

Sartre proposed not marriage but a contract, renewable or cancellable after two years, with "contingent" loves permitted on both sides. Neither wanted children. Neither would submit what they called their free relationship to the bonds of an institution they despised. The arrangement held, in modified form, until his death.

Teaching, a Triangle, and a First Novel

From 1931 to 1943 Beauvoir taught philosophy in secondary schools in Marseille, Rouen and Paris. In 1933 she and Sartre attempted a ménage à trois with Olga Kosakiewicz, one of Sartre's students — an experiment whose anguish she later mined directly. In 1943 she was dismissed from teaching; the same year, her first novel appeared.

*She Came to Stay* (1943) turns the Kosakiewicz episode into metaphysics: an intruder installs herself in a couple's life and slowly destroys everything around her. *The Blood of Others* (1945), written under German occupation, alternates between a Resistance fighter and a woman confronting Nazi atrocity, and asks the question that would preoccupy her for decades — what one owes to the freedom of others. After Sartre's return from nine months as a prisoner of war, both abandoned the classroom for writing and political activism, founding the review *Les Temps Modernes*.

An Ethics Without Guarantees

*The Ethics of Ambiguity* (1947) is her most underrated book. It refuses absolute moral systems while refusing, equally, the nihilism that critics said existentialism implied. Ethical action, she argued, means recognising the freedom of others while accepting human finitude — and she gave a name to the mechanism, the "appeal," the summons by which one person calls another into a shared project. Her prose was the point: her simplicity of statement made these arguments reachable in a way the sometimes impenetrable apparatus of Sartre's *Being and Nothingness* never was. That accessibility would later be used against her.

The Book That Changed the Terms

*The Second Sex* appeared in 1949 and delivered the sentence that outlived every other line she wrote: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The argument beneath it is structural. Men have constituted themselves as the essential, the absolute human type, and defined women relationally as the Other — the inessential. Femininity, on this account, is not a trait but an artificial posture, produced and enforced.

Conservative readers were scandalised; the passages on female anatomy and homosexuality drew particular fury; the Vatican put the book on its Index. Millions of women encountered, for the first time, a frank discussion of their own condition. Translated into some forty languages, it became the battle cry of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and after — though Beauvoir herself did not publicly call herself a feminist until 1973.

The Novelist of the Intellectuals

*The Mandarins* (1954) won the Prix Goncourt. It captures the euphoria of Liberation Day and the souring that followed, as the Resistance community fractured over Soviet labour camps and Cold War allegiance. Beauvoir always denied it was a roman à clef, but the rupture between Sartre and Camus, and the characters of Henri Perron and Anne Dubreuilh, made the denial hard to sustain.

Memoirs, a Mother, and Old Age

Four autobiographical volumes — *Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter* (1958), *The Prime of Life* (1960), *The Force of Circumstance* (1963) and *All Said and Done* (1972) — remain among the best records of twentieth-century French intellectual life; *The Prime of Life* contains one of the most vivid accounts of France under occupation. *A Very Easy Death* (1964), written after her mother's death from cancer, was the book Sartre thought her finest. *Old Age* (1970) turned the same unflinching gaze on the social conditions of ageing. *Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre* (1981) chronicled his decline; unusually for their partnership, Sartre never read it before publication.

Why Simone Is Called a Genius

The specific gift was denaturalisation — the ability to look at an arrangement everyone treats as given and demonstrate that it was made. Biology, motherhood, femininity, old age: in each case Beauvoir performed the same manoeuvre, separating the brute fact from the meaning a society had wrapped around it, then showing the wrapping to be historical and therefore removable. It required an unusual combination — phenomenological patience, a novelist's ear for lived detail, and an almost merciless refusal of consolation.

The claims made for her are large. Gloria Steinem told the *New York Times* that more than any other single human being, Beauvoir was responsible for the international women's movement. Decades of feminist scholarship have established her as an original thinker rather than merely Sartre's intellectual companion.

The counter-case is real and was long the majority view. She resisted the label of philosopher herself, and her mid-century essays were widely read as popularisations of Sartre — a service role she partly invited. Scholars have detected an antifeminine bias in *The Second Sex*, since her framework treats traditionally male activities such as the exercise of rationality and independent action as a higher form of civilisation than the domestic. Others reply that what reads as contempt is anger at women's circumstances. Her private life, including a triangular involvement with a student and her dismissal from teaching in 1943, complicates any account of her as a straightforward moral authority.

Legacy

She built the philosophical foundation on which modern feminism was constructed, and she did it in books that ordinary readers could actually finish. The grave at Montparnasse holds two names. Only one of them changed what half the species could say about itself.

Achievements

• Jerusalem Prize — 1975
• Austrian State Prize for European Literature — 1978
• Educated at University of Paris and Lycée Fénelon, Paris