Sartre & de Beauvoir

In 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were twenty-four and twenty-one years old, freshly graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure, and deeply involved in developing the ideas that would, over the following decades, become the central documents of French existentialism. They made an agreement that has been analyzed, celebrated, and criticized ever since.

The terms, as both described them: they were the necessary relationship to each other, the primary and essential bond. But they would not be exclusive. They would be free to pursue other, contingent, relationships. They would be honest with each other about those relationships. They would not allow possessiveness or bourgeois expectations about fidelity to limit their freedom or each other's.

The pact was not a casual arrangement. It was a philosophical program. It expressed their shared conviction that the standard model of romantic love, with its demands for exclusivity and its implicit ownership of the other person, was incompatible with authentic existence. It was, in their framing, an experiment in applied existentialism.

The experiment ran for fifty years. The question is whether it proved the theory or refuted it.

The distinction between necessary love and contingent love was central to how they understood their arrangement. They were necessary to each other: the foundational relationship, the primary intellectual and emotional bond. The other people were contingent: important, perhaps deeply felt, but not structural.

This framing had an internal logic that was also a hierarchy. Sartre's many other relationships were, by definition, less important than his relationship with de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir's relationships, including her long relationships with Nelson Algren and Claude Lanzmann, were similarly designated as secondary. The pact insulated the primary bond from the threat that other attachments might otherwise represent.

But the framing was also, in practice, more comfortable for Sartre than for de Beauvoir. Sartre pursued other women serially and with intensity. He fell in love repeatedly, proposed marriage to at least one other woman, developed relationships with women who became deeply attached to him. De Beauvoir was aware of these relationships in varying degrees of detail and was expected, under the terms of the pact, to accept them without the possessiveness that the philosophy identified as inauthentic.

The pact was presented as symmetrical. The lived arrangement was not. Several factors made it structurally unequal.

Sartre was, from the beginning of their relationship until well into his sixties, more publicly prominent than de Beauvoir. His philosophical work preceded hers in publication and in public recognition. He had greater institutional power: professorships, publication connections, intellectual authority in the Paris left-bank world they both inhabited. The contingent arrangements he pursued were, because of this power differential, available to him in ways that were not equally available to de Beauvoir.

Furthermore, de Beauvoir played a specific role in Sartre's relationships with other women that complicates any claim to equal openness. She introduced Sartre to young women who became his lovers. She maintained friendships with these women that were sometimes more like management than friendship. She was, in at least some cases, part of the architecture by which Sartre accessed these relationships.

De Beauvoir published edited versions of her letters and diaries during her lifetime. After her death in 1986, less edited versions became available, and they revealed something she had not allowed the published versions to show: the full extent of her emotional dependency on Sartre and the real cost of the arrangement's asymmetry.

The published letters to Sartre contain passages expressing longing, distress, jealousy, and need that de Beauvoir the public intellectual had theorized as signs of inauthentic attachment. The gap between the theory and the private record is not hypocrisy in a simple sense. It is the evidence that the theory was genuinely harder to live than to write, and that de Beauvoir was living it under conditions that were structurally more demanding for her than for him.

The most important thing the letters reveal is not that de Beauvoir was emotionally dependent: most people in long relationships are. The important thing is that the philosophical framework she and Sartre had developed together made it difficult for her to acknowledge this dependency to herself, because acknowledging it was, within that framework, an admission of inauthenticity.

The Second Sex, published in 1949, is one of the founding documents of modern feminism. De Beauvoir's analysis of how women are constituted as Other within a male-defined culture, of how women internalize the definitions placed on them, of how the expectation of love and attachment is itself a mechanism of constraint: all of it reads, with the benefit of the letters and the biographical record, as partly a document of her own situation.

She was analyzing the conditions in which she was living. She was theorizing the structure of an arrangement she was both constructing and inhabiting. The book's intellectual power does not diminish this reading. It deepens it. She was not writing from outside the condition she was analyzing. She was writing from inside it.

Sartre died in 1980. De Beauvoir wrote Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre about his last years and their final period together, a book of unusual frankness about physical decline and the complicated texture of very long intimacy. She died six years later and was buried next to him in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

The fifty-year relationship produced between them a combined body of work that is one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. It was genuinely collaborative in ways that the individual authorship credits do not capture. Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex and the plays and the novels and the journalism: all of it was read, discussed, and influenced by the other.

Whether the pact was a model of liberation or a sophisticated way of ensuring Sartre had what he needed without the constraints he found intolerable is a question that the fifty years of evidence allows readers to form their own views on. What the evidence does not support is the presentation of the arrangement as straightforwardly equal.

- Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. Summit Books, 1990. - Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Gallimard, 1958. Translated by James Kirkup. Harper & Row, 1959. - Beauvoir, Simone de. The Prime of Life. Gallimard, 1960. Translated by Peter Green. Harper & Row, 1962. - Beauvoir, Simone de. Letters to Sartre. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare. Arcade, 1991. - Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Pantheon, 1987. - Rowley, Hazel. Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. HarperCollins, 2005.

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Interpretive opinion based on the public record. Not a clinical assessment or diagnosis of any individual.