Becoming Beauvoir

A Life

Kate Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350047198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one", Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself.

1

Growing Like a Girl

At 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 9 January 1908 Simonne Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born into the sixth arrondissement of Paris and stifling social conventions.¹ The first air she breathed came through second-storey windows overlooking the boulevard Raspail, and by the age of 4 she had mastered the art of extracting her engraved calling cards from the velvet bag she carried when making visits with her mother.² Beauvoir would live in the same chic zone of Paris for nearly all of her life, but at the time of her birth the family’s fortunes were waning.

The Bertrand de Beauvoirs were high bourgeoisie, originally from Bourgogne. One of their ancestors was given an aristocratic title in 1786 only to lose his head, after the Revolution, in 1790. Despite occurring over a century before her birth, this incident has divided biographers of Beauvoir, who diverge in their estimation of her family’s social standing: Bair makes a great deal of Beauvoir’s pedigree, but Simone’s sister Hélène assigned it much less importance. After the decapitation of their esteemed ancestor the family did not make much of their aristocratic pretensions.³

They did, however, still own land with a château in Limousin. But Simone’s father, Georges de Beauvoir, was not firstborn so would not inherit it. He was intellectually gifted and charming, but his aspirations did not align with his parents’ – he wanted to be an actor. His father encouraged him to pursue a more respectable profession and propriety prevailed: Georges studied law and worked in the office of a well-known Parisian lawyer. He was not ambitious: neither his father nor his brother needed to work to earn a living, and although his mother had attempted to instil the value of work in him it never took root. He did want to be married, however, so eventually he left his secretarial role to practise law in his own right, in the hope that it might improve his prospects.

Through the brokerage of his father a suitable contender was found: Françoise Brasseur, a young woman from a northern family with a sizeable dowry. Although their name did not have an aristocratic particle (like the ‘de’ in Bertrand de Beauvoir), the Brasseurs were much wealthier than the Bertrand de Beauvoirs. Gustave Brasseur, the father of the bride, was a very successful Verdun banker. Françoise was his first born but least loved child: her birth had disappointed his hopes for an heir. She was educated in a convent and her parents took little interest in her until they encountered financial challenges, which reminded them that she was well into marriageable age. This wasn’t the only time that the Brasseurs would exhibit disappointment at a female birth: after encountering it as a daughter, Françoise faced it as a mother, and throughout her life she suffered from her parents’ coldness.⁴

When the two families met for met for the first time in 1905 it was on the neutral terrain of a Houlgate resort, in Normandy. Françoise was unenthusiastic about the meeting, but she was also nervous on account of the artificial ritual that was expected of her: according to custom her suitor’s first sight of her was carefully prearranged. In the hotel she was surrounded by her classmates from the convent in a scenario that displayed her beauty and social bearing, so that he could assess the aptitude of his potential companion as she presided over conversation and tea. Within a few weeks of meeting, Georges proposed. And although the marriage was arranged, by the time of their wedding on 26 December 1906 they were also united by love.⁵

In its early years Simone remembered her parents’ relationship as a passionate one, emotionally and physically.⁶ Just after their first anniversary, Simone was born. Although happy, her 21-year-old mother and 31-year-old father were still negotiating the combination of their lives and the competition of their expectations. Their address – 103 boulevard du Montparnasse – reflected Georges’ status, but its furnishings did not. Georges wanted to recreate the splendour of his father’s house; Françoise was young, provincial, and bewildered by the society in which she found herself.

Despite their differences (or perhaps because circumstances let them lay dormant), for a few blissful months the family fell into a harmonious rhythm: It was the role of their servant, Louise, to bathe and feed Simone as well as to cook and undertake other household chores. Georges went to work at the Courts of Appeal each morning, often returning in the evening with Françoise’s favourite flowers. They played with their baby before Louise took her to bed, ate dinner together when Louise had returned to serve it, and passed the evening in reading aloud and needlepoint. Georges took it to be his responsibility to provide his wife with the culture befitting her class; Françoise took it to be her responsibility to ensure that her learning never exceeded the quantity or kind befitting her sex.

Two and a half years after Georges’ and Françoise’s marriage, in 1909 they had still not yet received Françoise’s dowry when her father fled Verdun in disgrace. Gustave Brasseur’s bank was ordered into liquidation in July 1909, and everything was seized for sale, including the personal possessions of the Brasseur family. To add insult to ignominious injury, he was sent to jail, where he spent thirteen months before he was tried and condemned to a further fifteen-month sentence. His former influence still exerted some of its power, however; he was released early. So he moved to Paris, with his wife and youngest daughter, to live near Françoise and start over.

This turn of events meant that Françoise’s dowry would never be paid, but at first the family remained harmonious and hopeful even so. They were happy and their fortune seemed secure: Georges had a reasonable income from his work, and his own inheritance (although modest) had been invested in a way they thought wise. Georges’ attention to Françoise was tender, and she blossomed into a laughing and lively woman.⁷

On 9 June 1910 a second daughter was born. She was christened Henriette-Hélène Marie but was called Hélène or, within the family, ‘Poupette’ (meaning ‘little doll’). Although she was only two and a half years younger, Simone saw Hélène as a student in need of her expert tutelage; she was already a teacher in the making. The family had hoped for a boy, and Beauvoir detected their disappointment at her birth, writing in her memoirs (with characteristic understatement) that ‘it is perhaps not altogether without significance that her cradle was the centre of regretful comment’.⁸ In Hélène’s own memoirs we read that after the birth announcement her grandparents had written a letter congratulating Georges and Françoise on the arrival of a son. They didn’t bother to soil new paper when they were informed that it was a girl – they simply added a postscript: ‘I understand that the birth was a little girl, according to the will of God.’⁹

Beauvoir described her earliest years with a feeling of ‘unalterable security’ broken only by the realization that eventually she, too, was ‘condemned to be an outcast of childhood’. She loved to be outdoors exploring nature, relishing in running through lawns and examining leaves and flowers, seed pods and spiders’ webs. Each summer the family spent two months in the country: one month at Georges’ sister Hélène’s house (a turreted nineteenth-century château called La Grillère) and another at his father’s estate, Meyrignac. The château at Meyrignac was set in a large property of more than 200 hectares, providing ample opportunity for Simone to lose herself in the beauty of nature. Her wonder at natural spaces would be a permanent feature of her life; she continued to associate the countryside with solitude, freedom and the highest heights of happiness.¹⁰ But for all its grandeur, much to the surprise of some Parisian visitors, the château had neither electricity nor running water.¹¹

Their Paris apartment, by contrast, was now plush, sparkling, and overwhelmingly red – red moquette upholstery, a red Renaissance dining room, curtains of red velvet and red silk. The drawing room walls were mirrored, reflecting the light of a crystal chandelier, and there were silver pose-couteaux for resting their table knives. In the city Françoise would say goodnight to her daughter in dresses of tulle and velvet before going back to play the grand piano for their guests. Here solitude and natural spaces were harder to come by: Simone had to settle for that ‘common playground’, the Luxembourg Gardens.¹²

Simone was a precocious reader and her family cultivated her curiosity with great care. Her father made an anthology of poetry for her, teaching her how to recite it ‘with expression’, while her mother enrolled her in one book subscription service or library after another.¹³ The year of Simone’s birth was the year in which French state schools were finally granted permission to prepare girls for the baccalauréat – the exam which allowed access to universities. But a girl of Beauvoir’s milieu did not go to a state school. In October 1913 (when Beauvoir was 5½ years old) it was decided that she would attend a private Catholic school, the Adeline Désir Institute (which she nicknamed Le Cours Désir). Although Beauvoir later recalled jumping for joy at the prospect of going, it was a black mark for a girl of her status to be educated in a school at all – those who had the means had governesses at home. She only attended two days a week – Wednesdays and Saturdays – and the rest of the time her schoolwork was supervised by her mother at home, with her father taking interest in her progress and successes.¹⁴

Hélène missed her sister on school days and their relationship remained very close, partly because of a deep affection and partly because the girls were not allowed to socialize with anyone their mother had not vetted, and their mother did not think many of their peers passed muster. Georges and Françoise doted on their eldest but did not consider Hélène an individual in her own right. Hélène knew that her parents were proud of Simone: When Simone came first in her class, she was praised profusely by their mother; when Hélène also came first Françoise credited her success to the fact that she had it easier with an older sister to help her. Hélène recognized that ‘as the second-born girl, I was not really a welcome child. But Simone valorized me even though she could have crushed me by siding with our parents, and that’s why I remained attached to her. She was always nice, always defending me against them.’¹⁵ The family had few toys, but the sisters enjoyed playing imaginary games and confiding in each other.¹⁶

Figure 2 Françoise de Beauvoir with her daughters, Hélène (left) and Simone (right).

At the age of 7 Simone had her first private communion – beginning a practice that she would continue to observe three times a week, either with her mother or in the private chapel at the Cours Désir. The same year she wrote her first surviving story, Les Malheurs de Marguerite (The Misfortunes of Marguerite) – it was 100 pages long, written by hand in a little paperback notebook she received from her grandfather Brasseur.¹⁷

Until the age of 8 there was only one other child that Simone thought worthy of her respect: her cousin, Jacques. He was six months older than her, but had had a boy’s education – and a good one, at that: she was dazzled by his confidence. One day he made her a stained-glass window, inscribed with her name. They decided that they were ‘marri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Praise for
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations of Beauvoir’s Works
• Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir – Who’s She?
• 1 Growing Like a Girl
• 2 The Dutiful Daughter
• 3 Lover of God or Lover of Men?
• 4 The Love before the Legend
• 5 The Valkyrie and the Playboy
• 6 Rooms of Her Own
• 7 The Trio that Was a Quartet
• 8 War Within, War Without
• 9 Forgotten Philosophy
• 10 Queen of Existentialism
• 11 American Dilemmas
• 12 The Scandalous Second Sex
• 13 Putting a New Face on Love
• 14 Feeling Gypped
• 15 Old Age Revealed
• 16 The Dying of the Light
• 17 Afterwords: What Will Become of Simone de Beauvoir?
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright