Simone de Beauvoir: biography of this philosopher

Simone de Beauvoir is one of the great minds of the 20th century. A great thinker, novelist and, although she did not recognize it, a feminist, her fight for women's rights has been a before and after in achieving gender equality.

Her way of being and seeing her human relationships was a scandal at the time of her, especially considering the type of relationship she had with another great philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.

If you want to know more about the prolific intellectual life of this author, and also about her interesting personal life, read on to see a short biography of Simone de Beauvoir, with which we will know her life and work.

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Biography of Simone de Beauvoir

Next we will see the most remarkable vital events of Simone de Beauvoir, among them the great historical figures with whom she was able to interview and her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

1. Early years

Her full name is Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

she was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris, France, into a bourgeois family in the French capital. From the early years of the young Simone de Beauvoir, in her family there were two tendencies that pushed her to touch the extremes.

On the one hand, her mother was a devout Catholic, while her father was an atheist, and invited the young woman to expand her vision and knowledge of the world through reading. It is perhaps for this reason that de Beauvoir's childhood is deeply marked by an exalted faith in God, wanting to be a greater nun. But, when she reaches the age of 14, she definitively abandons these beliefs, assuring that God simply does not exist.

The young woman was always an excellent student, and in fact her father encouraged her to continue her studies. One of the phrases her father used to tell her and that perhaps contributed to her dedicating herself to thinking about the differences between men and women when she was older. she was "Simone thinks like a man", it being understood that she saw her as intelligent as a man, according to the sexist perspective clearly predominant in that epoch.

2. Academic training

Around the age of 16, Simone de Beauvoir she decides that she will study to be a teacher. This could not have been possible if her family had not gone through financial problems, which she did who could not offer a good dowry to marry off their daughters and chose to have them study what would like.

After successfully passing the mathematics baccalaureate exams in 1925, de Beauvoir enrolled at the Catholic Institute in Paris. This was also combined with studies in literature and languages ​​at the Saint-Marie Institute. Later, she would study philosophy at the Sorbonne, finishing her studies in 1928 and presenting her thesis on Leibniz.

At that time, Simone de Beauvoir was the ninth woman to achieve a degree offered by the Sorbonne, because until very recently in France it had not been possible for women to study studies superiors.

Years later, she took the exams to be a teacher in France (agrégation) and she decided to attend the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris as a listener. It was during that time that she had the opportunity to meet some great French thinkers of the 20th century, such as Paul Nizan, René Maheu and, most notably, Jean-Paul Sartre.

At the end of the agrégation tests, Sartre was in first place, while de Beauvoir was in second position, becoming at the age of 21 the youngest person to have managed to overcome that exam.

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3. Times of war

Since she obtained the agrégation in 1929 until 1943, Simone de Beauvoir he dedicated himself to teaching in secondary education. She taught at lyceums in several French cities, including Marseille, Rouen, and Paris. It was also from the year 1929 that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre became a couple.

In 1943 she decides to leave her job as a teacher and focus on writing, publishing that same year her first novel, L’invitée. At that time Paris had been taken over by the Nazis and de Beauvoir dedicated himself to reflect on the responsibility of intellectuals in times of war, exhibited in his book Le Sang des Autres.

She was also in the years of the German occupation that she wrote the only play of her, The useless bouches, which would be represented in 1945 at the Théâtre des Carrefours in Paris.

In 1944, together with other intellectuals such as Sartre, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier and Jean Paulhan, she founded the magazine The modern temps, with an ideology close to that of the communist party and a publication in which existential thought was disseminated.

4. End of the war and philosophical maturity

After the end of the occupation, she began to publish her first philosophical essays., which would not go unnoticed. In 1947 she held several conferences throughout the United States in which she spread her philosophy. It was also that year that she published the probably best-known book of hers: Le deuxième sexe, known in Spanish as The second sex. The publication of this work was very controversial, even for France at that time, a country which was considered tolerant and very secular with respect to its neighbors Spain and the United Kingdom.

In the fifties she made several trips both inside and outside her native country, including to countries under communist regime such as China and Cuba. she interviewing Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

5. Last years and death of Sartre

Although marked by Marxist ideology, de Beauvoir always defended human rights against her political vision, signing a manifesto against the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Despite being a French citizen, she was very critical of the French administration in Africa, defending the independence of Algeria. He considered that colonialism was just another form in which the oppression of the strongest towards the weakest is presented.

Years later, de Beauvoir, she along with Sartre, she would formally move away from communism when the invasion of Czechoslovakia happened by the Soviet authorities.

During the sixties she continued her travels, going to Japan, Egypt, Israel and the USSR and, already in the following decade, She showed her opinions on controversial issues such as abortion, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rights of the woman.

In 1980 Sartre died, ending their open relationship that had already lasted about 50 years. In honor and memory of him, de Beauvoir published the following year La cérémonie des adieux, recounting her relationship throughout the five decades.

Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986 from pneumonia at the age of 78.

Work and thought

The thought of Simone de Beauvoir has laid the foundations for the construction of feminism as it is understood today, in addition to being a hymn to individual freedom, both economic, sexual and reproductive.

Below we will briefly see three texts written by the French philosopher, focusing in particular on the relationship of women with men, both in the most traditional and personal view of de Beauvoir.

1. L’invitée

L’invitée, in Spanish translated as "The Guest", is Simone de Beauvoir's first novel published in 1943. In it she describes her relationship with Sartre and two of her students when she worked in Rouen, the Kosakiewicz sisters, albeit changing the names of the characters. In fiction, Sartre and de Beauvoir even have threesomes with the students.

2. Le deuxième sexe

Le deuxième sexe (1949) turns the most important principle of existentialism, that is, that existence precedes essence, into a feminist slogan: one is not born a woman but becomes a woman.

The author she distinguishes between the concepts of sex and gender. On the one hand, sex is something biological, defined by the X and Y chromosomes, while gender is understood as the historical and social construction of what it is to be a man and to be a woman. De Beauvoir also argues that oppression of women is strongly linked to the historical concept of what femininity is.

The title of the book is already a declaration of intent. Simone de Beauvoir refers to women as the second sex because, traditionally, they have been defined in terms of their relationships with men.

Although it may surprise, de Beauvoir never considered herself a feminist, although feminism has been based on what was explained in her most remarkable work. De Beauvoir's doctrine expounded in Le deuxieme sexe, promoting the economic independence of women and the right to receive the same education as men, have been a great contribution to the constitution of feminism.

3. The mandarins

The mandarins, published in 1954, has been the work that has managed to win the most important literary award in France, the Prix Goncourt.

In this book, de Beauvoir explains in a literary key her relationship with philosophers close to the environment both of the author, and her life with her partner, Sartre, as well as explaining her relationship with Nelson Algren.

Awards and decorations

In 1954 she was awarded the Goncourt Prize for her work The mandarins. In 1975 she received the Jerusalem Prize for Freedom of the Individual in Society and in 1978 she received the Austrian Prize for European Literature.

In 1998 an asteroid was named as (11385) Beauvoir, followed by asteroid (11384) Sartre. In 2000, a square was inaugurated in Paris in honor of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and in 2006 a small bridge was inaugurated in that same city in honor of de Beauvoir. Since 2008 she has been offering the Simone de Beauvoir prize for women's freedom.

Personal life

One of the best known and most striking aspects of Simone de Beauvoir is having She maintained numerous relationships, even being paired with Sartre, something that to this day continues surprising. While this need not be viewed as a negative, it may have partly overshadowed her prolific intellectual output.

The relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre lasted fifty years. However, they both met other people, maintaining a kind of verbal contract that they renewed every two years, in which they allowed to have an open relationship.

De Beauvoir never intended to marry, nor did she intend to become a housewife and have children of her own. This allowed him to focus on her academic training, in addition to dedicating time to her literary production and philosophy, and also being free to meet whoever she wanted.

It should be said that although her bisexuality was already controversial at a time when sexual diversity was little toleratedThe most controversial thing was the fact that she, like Sisyphus of Lesbos, had relations with some of her students. In fact, one of her students at the Lycée Molière in Paris claimed that she was sexually exploited by Simone de Beauvoir. Due to rumors and comments of this type, she de Beauvoir was suspended from employment in 1943 after she was also accused, in this case by the mother of a 17-year-old student.

Simone de Beauvoir, along with other great intellectuals of the time, signed a petition for the age of sexual consent to be lowered in France.

Bibliographic references:

• De Beauvoir, S. (1945) Maurice Merleau-Ponty's La phénoménologie de la perception, Les Temps modernes, 2. 363–67
• De Beauvoir, S. (1945) Idéalisme moral et réalisme politique, Les Temps Modernes, 2. 248-68.
• De Beauvoir, S. (1946) Littérature et métaphysique, Les Temps modernes, 7. 1153–63.