Simone de Beauvoir was an iconic figurehead of the 20th-century struggle for women’s liberation, but as France marks the centenary of her birth on Wednesday, critics are taking a cold, hard look at her life and legacy.
Beauvoir’s groundbreaking 1949 work on the female condition, The Second Sex, her defiance of social taboos, and the legendary ”open” couple she formed with her life-long companion, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, propelled her to near-mythical status in France and abroad.
Together with Sartre, the elegant Beauvoir, her dark hair twisted back under an eternal turban, came to epitomise the Paris Latin Quarter’s free-thinking, free-loving post-war generation.
Sign of her enduring influence, half-a-dozen books and a tribute DVD series are being released in France this week, 20 years after her death, while dozens of scholars are gathering in Paris for a three-day symposium on her life and work.
”If we’re celebrating Simone de Beauvoir, it’s because she had the enormous courage to live in a free, open relationship in 1929, to talk about the female condition in ways that had never been done before,” said United States scholar Hazel Rowley, author of a study of the Beauvoir-Sartre couple.
”She received an avalanche of hate mail for talking about the double standards involved in aging, about women’s bodies, lesbianism, abortion,” in a rich body of novels, philosophical essays and memoirs.
For Daniele Sallenave, author of a new Beauvoir biography, ”she showed that women are free to choose their destiny, as much as men, and don’t have to obey what is supposedly dictated to them by nature and convention”.
Underbelly
But as scholars including Rowley and Sallenave have pieced together decades of correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir, published after their deaths in 1981 and 1986, the myth of a couple guided by candour and noble ideals of equality has been eroded, revealing a darker underbelly.
”Did they lie to us? The answer is yes,” wrote the right-wing French magazine Le Point this week, while L’Express headlined: ”What we don’t dare to see in Beauvoir” and the Nouvel Observateur ran a front-page picture of a nude Beauvoir under the headline ”Scandalous Simone de Beauvoir”.
The controversy centres on a pact the couple famously sealed in 1929 — the basis of their half-century relationship — that left each free to pursue other love affairs, so long as it was in full transparency.
As well as Beauvoir’s well-known affairs, with the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler or US writer Nelson Algren, her letters reveal she seduced a string of her young female philosophy students before introducing them to Sartre.
Both she and Sartre discuss these young women conquests in cold, detached terms in their letters, which suggest they frequently lied to them and harshly dismissed them when no longer required.
Through Sallenave’s reading of the letters, writes Le Point, ”we discover a Sartre who is sexually cold, macho, authoritarian and jealous”, while Beauvoir is depicted as cruel, calculating and manipulative towards her lovers.
It also emerged that Beauvoir lied about having lesbian affairs, denying right up until her death that she had had relationships with other women.
How, critics ask, can we square such behaviour with her status as feminist icon?
Other recent works have accused her of complacency towards the war-time Nazi occupation — she was briefly in charge of a cultural show on Radio Vichy — and faulted both her and Sartre for failing to denounce the crimes of Stalinism in later years.
‘Slur’
But both Rowley and Sallenave claim their scholarship has been twisted by hostile critics seeking to ”slur” the Sartre-Beauvoir couple, and are heading to the Paris symposium this week determined to set the record straight.
”It’s too easy to turn them into warped sexual harassers,” to portray Beauvoir as ”a liar, a procurer for Sartre”, fired Rowley.
Although she said she had been ”disconcerted and a bit disappointed” by the letters’ contents, Rowley said it would be a mistake to ”reduce their lives, their great lives, to a few lies they told a few young women”.
”That is to forget the good things — that they were experimental, adventurous, courageous, amazingly generous towards their friends, they were full of passion, full of life, of humour and adventure.”
Sallenave also said the outpouring of articles attacking Beauvoir showed a certain ”malevolence”, a ”will to see the icon crack”.
”Sartre and she are exceptional, undeniably, and exception bothers people. They want to cut her down to size by showing she was capable of ordinary pettiness — which both of them were of course.
”There is nothing wrong with thinking about Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre, or the attitude both of them had during the war — but we need to do it without falling into mediocrity and gossip.” — AFP
