Simone de Beauvoir and her even-more-famous lover Jean-Paul Sartre, darlings of feminists and the left, were loathsome characters in their personal lives as well in their politics, despite the heroic and self-aggrandizing legends they took great pains to establish.
When it first came out I tried to read a 2009 book called A Dangerous Liaison, a joint biography of the two and their relationship. It was slow going, and ultimately I could only bear to read a small portion of it, and skipped around to read smaller sections a bit at a time, finally abandoning it and going for a book review instead.
The book was meticulously researched and sourced; that wasn’t the trouble. It was almost literally unreadable because the story of the two and their twisted (a word that’s exceptionally apropos) relationship was simply too abhorrent and repellent to voluntarily wallow in.
Here are some facts about those giants of philosophy, wonderful examples of personal freedom and love without the shackles of conventional commitment, that independent feminist and her thinking man (remember, also that this review appeared in the Guardian, not known for its conservatism) [emphasis mine]:
Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew…
For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others…They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, [biographer] Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.
De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day…
Sartre’s seemingly illogical devotion to the Soviet Union in later life is thus viewed through the prism of his passionate affair with Lena Zonina, who was almost certainly a KGB agent. His love of communism was also a replacement for Christianity. However hard Sartre tried to reconcile his devotion to individual freedom with the cyclical view of history perpetrated by Marxism, he never quite convinced his critics, among them Albert Camus. Sartre’s protestation that we should ‘judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions’ seemed grotesque in the face of between 15 and 30 million deaths in the gulag.
But it is in her depiction of de Beauvoir that Seymour-Jones really hits her stride. Although de Beauvoir believed that her relationship with Sartre was ‘the one undoubted success of my life’, Seymour-Jones gently scratches at the varnish of this statement until it flakes off like gilt from an icon. The appearance of unity was only achieved at the cost of de Beauvoir’s emotional unravelling.
The story goes on—and on—and on, a descent into a cesspool of human exploitation and, yes, evil. That these two are still lionized anywhere is an abomination, in part because one can’t look at their intellectual achievements as separate from their private lives. They wanted their lives to be examples of the strength of their philosophy, and they are—only that strength has an opposite valence from the myth they tried to erect (to a certain extent their effort to whitewash their lives was successful, though; witness how few people seem to know this story).
Another review of the book states it quite well:
Ever since their deaths in the 1980s, six years apart, there has been a seepage of disclosure and reappraisal. We have learnt the extent to which this equivocating pair were Communist fellow-travellers for a full decade after the revelations of Stalinist brutalities and the Hungarian uprising destroyed the myth for all but the most bigoted party members. We have learnt how they failed to play any significant part in wartime resistance, but managed to create a subsequent impression that they had been in on it all. Even more tellingly, we have become aware of a bubbling stew of resentment, accusations and conflicting interests and of the existence of adopted heirs (one his and one hers) squabbling over personal papers. There must, one felt, have been something amiss with the structure of their legendary and much-vaunted free union, and with their whole notion of ‘contingent’ attachments around the central one, if it all ended so squalidly – and so drenched in pills and alcohol.
Just how far the Sartre-Beauvoir compact became a travesty of all their claims to honesty and freedom now becomes clear in this excoriating study. Carole Seymour-Jones has gained the confidence of Beauvoir’s ‘daughter’ and literary executor, and has had access to hitherto unknown letters that Beauvoir had declared to be lost; she has also got on the track of the Russian interpreter for whom the 56-year-old Sartre naively hoped to ditch Beauvoir, and of this woman’s KGB handler. She has talked to the Jewish protégée whom Beauvoir abandoned during the war, and to others in the harem (‘the family’) of inadequate women that Sartre maintained to bolster his fragile self-esteem. She tracks Beauvoir’s agonies of unreconstructed female jealousy through her letters and journals, agonies that of course she expunged from her published memoirs but which appear tellingly in her fiction. We also hear about the clandestine affair that Beauvoir maintained for many years with the pliable husband of Olga, another member of the ‘family’. Seymour-Jones’s account is indefatigably detailed and even-handed. She has mastered a great deal of French political life over many decades. She claims, in her introduction, still to admire her main subjects. One wonders how she manages to…
There is a telling moment, halfway through the book, when the author describes her two central figures as ‘glued together by their lies’. She is referring to their shifty repositioning of themselves in the years after the Occupation, but the phrase might stand equally as an epitaph for their entire life together.
Truth is so different from the fiction that the mind stands in awe of the breadth of the Orwellian reversal.
None other than Nietzsche foresaw something of the sort years earlier when he wrote “If God is dead, all is permitted.”
For centuries, the idea of God had provided a metaphysical underpinning for moral values. Without this underpinning, Nietzsche surmised, the moral values of mainstream society would eventually come to seem arbitrary and false. Already, in Nietzsche’s time, leading thinkers were questioning core values that had maintained the social order for centuries. Darwin, Marx and Dostoyevsky were discussing morality in evolutionary, economic and existential terms. Soon, morality would be revealed for what it truly was: a human invention.
What then, Nietzsche wondered? Nihilism, he answered in his final books. ”˜What does nihilism mean? The highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; “why” finds no answer’ (The Will to Power, §2). If God is dead, everything is permitted.
De Beauvoir and Sartre lived it out, feeding on each other—and off of others more innocent than they—in the process.
On an individual level, not all atheists live the way de Beauvoir and Sartre did, of course. Most live quite moral lives. Nor are the lives of all believers morally exemplary. But a society that abandons the general underpinnings of its moral code, and one that celebrates lives such as de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s, is in big, big trouble.
[ADDENDUM: I thought I’d add some details I wrote in a comment. Sartre and de Beauvoir didn’t just seduce underage women, although that would be bad enough. They seduced her students, which was also a perversion and betrayal of her status as teacher, and she usually began it and then handed them over to him. They toyed with their feelings and abandoned them at some point after the girls had become emotionally dependent on them, causing even greater emotional harm. And if I recall correctly, Sartre and de Beauvoir could not have cared less.
More here [emphasis mine]:
…[O]n October 1, 1929, Sartre suggested their famous pact: they would have a permanent ‘essential’ love.
They would sleep together and have affairs on the side which they must describe to each other in every intimate detail.
During the first years, Sartre embarked on the arrangement with gusto. He liked to sleep with virgins, after which he rapidly lost interest.
This left the highly sexed Simone, now teaching philosophy, constantly frustrated, despite the lovers she took.
It was when she developed a relationship with one of her young female pupils that the first of her love triangles with Sartre came about.
When Sartre had a breakdown after experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, Simone asked her new lover to nurse him.
But she was not prepared for the crippling jealousy she felt when Sartre tried to seduce not only the girl but her younger sister as well.
Simone’s reaction to Sartre’s faithlessness was to sleep with another of her pupils, and when Sartre retaliated by deflowering another virgin, Simone pinched her lover’s 21-year-old boyfriend.
If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.
Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.
Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests…
Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher’s attentions, were permanently blighted.
One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her ‘family’.
Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.
Much much more at the link, all of it abominable.]
[ADDENDUM II: By the way, I happened to go to the Wiki page of de Beauvoir and that of Sartre. There is a very brief mention of open relationships, and on de Beauvoir’s page there is a very short discussion of her relationship with two students. It doesn’t even remotely begin to express what was going on and how pervasive it was. I’m all for “innocent till proven guilty,” but de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s own letters to each other fully describe the scope and depth of their depravity. Her Wiki page nearly ignores it, and his ignores it totally as far as I can see, despite being very lengthy.]
