After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, Simone de Beauvoir studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie.
Gallery of Simone de Beauvoir
Rue des Écoles, 75005 Paris, France
Simone de Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and after completing her degree in 1928.
After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, Simone de Beauvoir studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie.
(Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with...)
Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a woman and a city soon to fall. Although Françoise considers her relationship with Pierre an open one, she falls prey to jealousy when the gamine Xaviere catches his attention.
(Probably de Beauvoir's strangest and most compelling nove...)
Probably de Beauvoir's strangest and most compelling novel, this is the captivating story of a beautiful young actress who revives a downcast stranger at a French resort.
(In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, F...)
In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom.
(Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a persp...)
Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at La Guardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and back again. Embraced by the Condé Nast set in a swirl of cocktail parties in New York, where she was hailed as the "prettiest existentialist" by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, de Beauvoir traveled west by car, train, and Greyhound, immersing herself in the nation's culture, customs, people, and landscape. The detailed diary she kept of her trip became America Day by Day, published in France in 1948 and offered here in a completely new translation. It is one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer's pen.
(In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvo...)
In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her - Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren - de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time.
(A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone ...)
A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death "shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence." Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.
(In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks a greater ...)
In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks a greater understanding of our perception of elders. With bravery, tenacity, and forceful honesty, she guides us on a study spanning a thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and alarming picture of "Society's secret shame" - the separation and distance from our communities that the old must suffer and endure.
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French writer and philosopher, who laid the foundation for the modern feminist movement. She was a member of the intellectual fellowship of philosopher-writers who have given a literary transcription to the themes of Existentialism.
Background
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris to Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise Beauvoir on January 9, 1908. Her father was a legal secretary and her mother was the daughter of a wealthy banker.
"I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white-enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail." Thus begins the first of four memoirs written by de Beauvoir. It is through these autobiographies that de Beauvoir's readers best know her, and it is in her book The Second Sex.
The first child of a vaguely noble couple, de Beauvoir was a willful girl, prone to temper tantrums. Her sister, Poupette, was born when de Beauvoir was two and a half, and the two had a warm relationship. After World War I her father never fully recovered his financial security and the family moved to a more modest home; the daughters were told they had lost their dowries.
Education
After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, Simone de Beauvoir studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique de Paris and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and after completing her degree in 1928, she wrote her diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg (the topic was "Le concept chez Leibniz." De Beauvoir was only the ninth woman to have received a degree from the Sorbonne at the time, due to the fact that French women had only recently been allowed to join higher education.
De Beauvoir first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss, when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or beaver). The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of de Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.
She taught at a number of schools (1931–43) before turning to writing for her livelihood. In 1945 she and Sartre founded and began editing Le Temps modernes, a monthly review.
Her novels expound the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer’s commitment to the times. L’Invitée (1943; She Came To Stay) describes the subtle destruction of a couple’s relationship brought about by a young girl’s prolonged stay in their home; it also treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to "the other," each individual conscience being fundamentally a predator to another. Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins), for which she won the Prix Goncourt. It is a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their "mandarin" (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including Pour une Morale de l’ambiguité (1947; The Ethics of Ambiguity); travel books on China (La Longue Marche: essai sur la Chine (1957); The Long March) and the United States (L’Amérique au jour de jour (1948); America Day by Day); and a number of essays, some of them book-length, the best known of which is The Second Sex. In 2009 a new English-language translation of The Second Sex was published, making the entire original text available to English-speaking readers for the first time; the earlier translation (1953) had been severely edited.
Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography. These include Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), La Force de l’âge (1960; The Prime of Life), La Force des choses (1963; Force of Circumstance), and Tout compte fait (1972; All Said and Done). This body of work, beyond its personal interest, constitutes a clear and telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s.
In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in Une Mort très douce (1964; A Very Easy Death), on her mother’s death in a hospital, and in La Vieillesse (1970; Old Age), a bitter reflection on society’s indifference to the elderly. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie des adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre’s last years. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, by Deirdre Bair, appeared in 1990. Carole Seymour-Jones’s A Dangerous Liaison (2008), a double biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre, explores the unorthodox long-term relationship between the two.
De Beauvoir died of a circulatory ailment in a Parisian hospital on April 14, 1986.
(A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone ...)
1964
Religion
Even though Simone de Beauvoir was highly religious and God-loving since childhood and intended to be a nun, she faced a crisis of faith at the age of 14 and from then on remained an atheist throughout her life.
Politics
Simone de Beauvoir is seldom recognized by critics as a political thinker. In interviews and public statements, Beauvoir always identified herself as a writer, rather than as an activist, philosopher, or political person. Yet even if we think about politics in its most conventional sense - as the art of governance, the study of how power works, or as the interaction between people and states - we notice that Beauvoir was always thinking about political questions and responding to the historical-political events that unfolded in her lifetime (1908–1986). In essays, novels, and longer theoretical reflections, she discussed Stalinism, the disappointments of communism, and the purge trials; German occupation of France and the politics of collaboration and resistance; post World War II trials for collaborators and the articulation of crimes against humanity; racism in America; France’s war in Algeria and the politics of colonization; and the politics of embodiment, specifically addressing the aging body and women’s experience.
Moreover, when responding to and writing about all these situations, Beauvoir provoked and engaged the public in ethical and political debates that probed subjects typically considered outside the realm of the political. For example, she investigated the multiple (many personal) reasons for the actions of collaborators; she brought the Algerian militant, Djamila Boupacha’s, rape by French soldiers to light in the French public in 1960; and she argued that Robert Brasillach’s crime (a Nazi-identified journalist executed for treason in 1945) was a violation against specific embodied Jewish victims rather than a crime against the French state. If we think of politics a bit more expansively, we could say that as a political thinker, Beauvoir made publicly visible what ought to be, but often was not, a matter of public concern.
Views
"One is not born but becomes a woman."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. The fundamental source of women's oppression, Beauvoir notes, is its historical and social construction as the quintessential Other.
De Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined in relation to men. Aristotle referred that women are "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities." De Beauvoir also points out that St. Thomas referred to the woman as the "imperfect man," the "incidental” being. De 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.
Quotations:
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius."
"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay."
"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."
"All oppression creates a state of war."
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end."
"To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."
Personality
De Beauvoir was bisexual and her relationships with young women were controversial. Former student Bianca Lamblin (originally Bianca Bienenfeld) wrote in her book Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (English: Memoirs of a Disturbed Young Lady), that, while she was a student at Lycée Molière, she had been sexually exploited by her teacher de Beauvoir, who was in her 30s at the time. In 1943, de Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had seduced her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against de Beauvoir for debauching a minor and as a result, she had her license to teach in France permanently revoked.
Connections
Simone de Beauvoir once contemplated marriage with her cousin Jacques Champigneulle but that never happened.
Beginning in 1929, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were partners for fifty-one years until his death in 1980. De Beauvoir chose never to marry or set up a joint household and she never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, to write and teach, and to have lovers.
Perhaps her most famous lover was American author Nelson Algren whom she met in Chicago in 1947, and to whom she wrote 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, de 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. However, she lived with Claude Lanzmann from 1952 to 1959.