Simone de Beauvoir

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908, in Paris, the elder of two daughters of Georges de Beauvoir, a legal secretary with theatrical ambitions, and Francoise Brasseur, the devout daughter of a provincial banker ^[1]. The family lived above the cafe La Rotonde on the boulevard du Montparnasse, respectable but increasingly strained after her maternal grandfather's bank failed and her promised dowry evaporated. That financial decline shaped her prospects: without a dowry, marriage into the bourgeoisie was unlikely, so her father encouraged her to study for a profession ^[2].

She was educated at the Institut Adeline Desir, a conservative Catholic school for girls, where she met her closest childhood friend, Elisabeth Lacoin, remembered in her memoirs as Zaza. Beauvoir was intensely pious as a child, then lost her faith in her early teens and never recovered it. The change was quiet but permanent, and it pushed her toward philosophy as a way of confronting mortality and meaning without religion ^[1].

After passing her baccalaureate examinations in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied at the Institut Catholique and the Institut Sainte-Marie before moving on to the Sorbonne. Zaza's death in 1929, at twenty-one, following a family conflict over the man she wished to marry, marked Beauvoir deeply. She later wrote that she believed her friend had died from the constraints imposed on dutiful daughters, a theme she would return to for the rest of her life ^[2].

At the Sorbonne, Beauvoir wrote a thesis on Leibniz and prepared for the agregation in philosophy, the fiercely competitive national examination that qualified candidates to teach in French lycees. In 1929 she sat the exam alongside a group of brilliant young men from the Ecole Normale Superieure, among them Jean-Paul Sartre. She placed second to Sartre that year, and the jury reportedly debated at length which of the two deserved first place. At twenty-one she was the youngest person ever to pass the examination ^[1][3].

The meeting with Sartre began a partnership that lasted until his death in 1980. They never married, never lived together for long, and agreed early on to a pact allowing what they called contingent relationships alongside their essential one. Beauvoir taught philosophy at lycees in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris through the 1930s, developing her ideas in notebooks and unpublished fiction while the two of them read and criticized each other's work ^[3].

Her first published novel, She Came to Stay (L'Invitee), appeared in 1943, during the German occupation of Paris. It drew on a real triangular relationship involving Sartre and one of her former pupils, and it dramatized the existentialist problem of the Other: what it means to confront another consciousness that threatens one's own sense of self ^[4]. That same year she was dismissed from her teaching post after a parental complaint about her conduct with a student; she never returned to the classroom, living from then on by her pen ^[2].

The postwar years made Beauvoir one of the most visible intellectuals in France. In 1945 she joined Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others in founding Les Temps Modernes, a monthly review that became the flagship of engaged, politically committed writing. She published philosophical essays including The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), which argued that existentialism could ground a genuine ethics: since humans have no fixed essence, they are responsible for willing their own freedom and the freedom of others ^[4].

Her defining work arrived in 1949. The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe), published in two volumes by Gallimard, examined biology, history, myth, psychoanalysis, and lived experience to answer a deceptively simple question: what is a woman? Beauvoir's answer, that woman has been constructed as the Other of man, and her famous formulation that one is not born a woman but becomes one, gave later feminist thought its distinction between biological sex and the social meanings attached to it ^[5]. The book sold in enormous numbers, scandalized conservative and Catholic opinion, and was placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books. Among the most cited Simone de Beauvoir facts is that the first American edition of 1953 relied on a translation by a zoologist, H. M. Parshley, which cut substantial portions of the text; a complete English translation did not appear until 2009 ^[5][6].

Fiction brought her France's highest literary honor. The Mandarins (1954), a long novel about the hopes and quarrels of left-wing Parisian intellectuals after the Liberation, won the Prix Goncourt and became a bestseller across Europe ^[1]. She followed it with a sequence of autobiographical volumes, beginning with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) and continuing through The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, and All Said and Done, an account of a woman's self-creation that many readers rank among Simone de Beauvoir achievements equal to her theoretical work ^[3].

Beauvoir organized her private life around work, travel, and a small circle she called her family. The open arrangement with Sartre held for fifty-one years, though it caused pain on all sides, hers included. Her significant relationships beyond Sartre included the American novelist Nelson Algren, whom she met in Chicago in 1947 and to whom she wrote hundreds of letters in English, and the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, seventeen years her junior, with whom she shared an apartment in the 1950s, the only time she lived with a partner ^[3][6].

She worked most days in cafes, particularly the Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, writing in longhand for set hours in the morning and late afternoon. Travel fed her books: an extended American lecture tour in 1947 produced America Day by Day, and a two-month journey through China with Sartre in 1955 led to The Long March ^[2].

In 1980, shortly before Sartre's death, she legally adopted Sylvie Le Bon, a philosophy teacher who had become her closest companion, ensuring that her literary estate would pass to someone she trusted. Le Bon de Beauvoir later edited her letters and diaries for publication ^[6].

From the 1960s onward Beauvoir moved from analysis toward activism. She had supported Algerian independence during the war of 1954 to 1962, co-authoring with the lawyer Gisele Halimi a 1962 book on Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman tortured by French forces, which forced the case into public view ^[2]. In 1971 she drafted and signed the Manifesto of the 343, a declaration by French women, many of them famous, stating that they had undergone illegal abortions and demanding legal reform. The campaign contributed to the Veil Law of 1975, which legalized abortion in France ^[5].

She served as president of the French League for Women's Rights and supported the journal Questions Feministes, backing campaigns against domestic violence and workplace discrimination. Old age itself became a subject: her 1970 study The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) examined how societies discard the elderly, applying to old people the same analysis of otherness she had applied to women ^[4].

Sartre's death in April 1980 devastated her. Her account of his final decade, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), was unsparing about his physical decline and was the only major book of hers he never read before publication. Her own health weakened through the early 1980s, and she died of pneumonia on April 14, 1986, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, at the age of 78. She was buried beside Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery, a few streets from where she was born ^[1][3].

Any serious Simone de Beauvoir biography must reckon with the reach of The Second Sex. The book shaped second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe: Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and later theorists such as Judith Butler worked with, and against, its central claims. The distinction between sex and gender that structures much contemporary debate descends in large part from Beauvoir's argument that femininity is made, not given ^[5][6].

Her standing as a philosopher has risen sharply since her death. For decades commentators treated her as Sartre's follower, a view she sometimes encouraged. Scholars working from her student diaries and early essays have since argued that ideas usually credited to Sartre, including elements of the analysis of the Other, appear first in her notebooks, and her Ethics of Ambiguity is now taught as a distinct contribution to existentialist ethics ^[4][7].

The traces of her life remain public. Paris named a bridge across the Seine the Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir in 2006, and the Prix Simone de Beauvoir, established in 2008 on the centenary of her birth, honors individuals defending women's freedom around the world. Her novels stay in print, her memoirs are mined by historians of twentieth-century France, and her grave in Montparnasse, shared with Sartre, still draws readers who leave metro tickets and notes weighted with stones ^[1][7].