Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de
Beauvoir was born into an eminent Parisian family in 1908.
Her father, who had ties—or at least pretensions—to the nobility,
had ceded his aspirations in the theater for a respectable law career.
He was an art-loving atheist who encouraged de Beauvoir’s love of
literature, but he was also extremely conservative on social issues.
Her mother was from a wealthy bourgeois family, and was a devout
Catholic who tried to raise her daughters, Simone and her younger
sister, Helene (“Poupette”), in the same tradition.
Though pious as a child, de Beauvoir repudiated religion
at the age of fourteen, and this became a recurring source of tension between
her and her mother. Her renunciation of God also brought marked
loneliness, a realization of the deep solitude of life. Throughout
her youth, de Beauvoir’s closest companions were Helene and a classmate,
Elizabeth Mabille (“Zaza”). In 1929, Zaza died,
officially of meningitis, though de Beauvoir always believed that
Zaza’s struggle to resist an arranged marriage had been the real cause
of her death. Zaza’s friendship and her untimely death haunted de
Beauvoir for the rest of her life, and many of de Beauvoir’s later
critiques of rigid bourgeois constraints on women were rooted in
her anger over Zaza’s death.
Having lost his wife’s dowry in World War I, de Beauvoir’s
father was tormented by the necessity of his daughters taking professional careers.
De Beauvoir, however, looked forward to a career as a writer and
teacher, which she preferred over the “vocation” of motherhood.
Early on, she decided to devote her life to studying philosophy,
and, aside from a brief engagement to her cousin, she never seriously
considered getting married. The autonomy of the intellectual life
had always appealed to her more.
In 1929, after studying mathematics,
de Beauvoir earned the second-highest score in a competitive philosophy
exam called the agrégation. Only Jean-Paul Sartre,
who was taking the exam for the second time, beat her, and he had
received far more training than she had—she was, after all, four
years his junior, as well as female. Following this success, de
Beauvoir moved in with her grandmother to study at the École Normale
Supérieure, the most prestigious educational institution in France.
At the École, de Beauvoir met a group of intellectual mavericks,
including Sartre.
For the first time in her life, de Beauvoir felt she had
found an intellectual equal in Sartre, who would become her lifelong
companion. She resisted an “institutionalized” pairing with him,
however, and refused his only offer of marriage early in their relationship.
Her convictions scandalized her proper bourgeois friends. De Beauvoir’s
relationship with Sartre became notorious for the two progressive
beliefs the couple espoused: the liberty to love others and the
commitment to total honesty and openness. She and Sartre became
“essential” lovers, while permitting themselves “contingent” romances
with others. While they remained in a committed relationship for
the rest of their lives, they never married, had children, or even
shared the same residence. De Beauvoir had numerous other romantic
liaisons with both men and women.
In the early 1930s, de Beauvoir
taught in various provincial outposts in France. When the Nazis
invaded Paris in 1940, de Beauvoir was fired
from her teaching job for her outspoken views. Fired from another
job in 1943 and shaken by World War II, during
which Sartre was imprisoned, de Beauvoir became interested in the
social problems of the age. An important precept of existentialism—the intellectual
movement with which she was associated—concerns the intellectual’s
engagement with her historical realities. In her determination to
fulfill this commitment, de Beauvoir quit teaching and decided to
pursue writing as a livelihood. In 1943,
she published her first novel, She Came To Stay,
which chronicles the incremental collapse of a couple’s relationship
after a young girl moves into their house. The successful novel
was a fictionalized account of the intrusion of a young female student,
Olga Kosakievicz, in her relationship with Sartre. The three-way
relationship was reputedly upsetting to de Beauvoir.
During the German occupation of France, from 1941 to 1943, de
Beauvoir’s engagement with politics deepened and is expressed in several
works, such as the novel The Blood of Others (1945),
the ethical essay Pyrrhus et Cineas (1944),
the play Useless Mouths (1945),
and yet another novel, All Men are Mortal (1946).
While de Beauvoir’s involvement in the French Resistance remained
marginal, in 1945,
she, Sartre, and other intellectual comrades founded Le
Temps Modernes, a monthly left-wing political journal.
In several of the articles she contributed, de Beauvoir explores
her debt to marxism and concomitant uneasiness about communism.
While working at the journal, she also published The Ethics
of Ambiguity (1946),
an indispensable primer on existentialist ethics. Then, in 1949,
she published the most controversial work of her career, The Second
Sex. This lengthy study of the sources of women’s inequality, still
a cornerstone of feminist theory, made de Beauvoir a feminist icon
for the rest of her life.
De Beauvoir’s experiences at Les Temps Modernes,
along with her continued perplexity over the intellectual’s role
in politics, inspired one of her finest novels, The Mandarins,
for which she received France’s highest literary honor, the Prix
Goncourt, in 1954. Her
output remained prolific throughout her middle years, a remarkably
happy period of de Beauvoir’s life. In the late 1950s,
she began work on her monumental four-part autobiography. The first volume, Memoirs
of a Dutiful Daughter (1958),
focuses on her childhood. In the second volume, The Prime
of Life, de Beauvoir contemplates the difference between
the “I” and the “we”—a major Existentialist question that Sartre
also studied. In the third volume, Force of Circumstance,
de Beauvoir reveals a heightened interest in issues of the day,
from the French occupation of Algeria to universal questions about
human rights. She finished the final volume, All Said and
Done, in 1972. The
Coming of Age, another major work of this period, reflects
her growing interest in the subject of aging, and this chilling
examination of society’s indifference to the elderly garnered wide
praise.
De Beauvoir stayed with Sartre until his death in 1980,
and she published a wrenching account of his last days, Adieux:
A Farewell to Sartre, the following year. Until her death
in 1986,
she sought to live out the philosophical ideals she articulated
in her autobiographies, novels, and nonfiction treatises. Her diverse
influences—from Bergson to Hegel to Descartes, from Kant to Heidegger
to Marx and Engels—informs one of the richest bodies of work in
twentieth-century letters.
