French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher and novelist whose book The Second Sex, published in 1949, is the founding text of modern feminist theory. She was born in Paris on 9 January 1908 and died there on 14 April 1986.[1]
The Second Sex runs to about a thousand pages and asks one question: why are women treated as the second sex, and how did that come about? Its most quoted sentence is that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — the claim that femininity is produced by upbringing, law, economics and expectation rather than by biology.
Beauvoir's other books include six novels, one of which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, and four volumes of memoir.[2] She also wrote essays on ethics and on old age, travel books, and a short book about her mother's death and about dying.
She met Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, when he placed first and she placed second in the philosophy agrégation, and they were together for the next fifty-one years without marrying or sharing a home.[3]
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in the sixth arrondissement of Paris on 9 January 1908, the elder of two daughters. Her father, Georges, was a lawyer who claimed a noble descent the family did not have; her mother, Françoise, was a devout Catholic from a banking family in Verdun.
The family lost its money after the First World War. Without a dowry, Beauvoir could not expect the marriage her class assumed, and her father told her plainly that she would have to work. She was educated at a Catholic convent school for girls of good family and was, until fourteen, intensely religious.
At fourteen she stopped believing, decided the loss was permanent, and did not tell her mother. She wrote later that this was the first serious secret of her life and the first thing she thought through alone.
Beauvoir studied mathematics, literature and philosophy, took her degree at the Sorbonne, and in 1929 sat the agrégation in philosophy, the national examination that qualifies teachers and ranks candidates against each other.[4]
In that examination Jean-Paul Sartre placed first and Beauvoir placed second. At twenty-one she was the youngest person to have passed the agrégation, and the examiners argued about which of the two was really the better philosopher.[4]
Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 while preparing for the examination, and their relationship lasted until Sartre's death in 1980. They never married, never lived in the same flat, and agreed from the start that each could have other lovers while treating the relationship between them as essential. Both wrote about the arrangement at length, and it has been criticised heavily since. Beauvoir had relationships with her own pupils, and in 1943 she was dismissed from teaching after the mother of one of them complained to the authorities.
Beauvoir taught philosophy in lycées at Marseille, Rouen and then Paris through the 1930s. Teaching was the job; writing was what she wanted, and her first attempts were rejected.
Her dismissal in 1943 ended her teaching career. She never went back to a classroom, and she supported herself by writing for the rest of her life.
Her first published novel, She Came to Stay, appeared in 1943. It describes a couple who invite a younger woman into their lives and are damaged by it, and it is drawn directly from what happened when she and Sartre both became involved with her former pupil Olga Kosakiewicz.
The Second Sex was published in two volumes in 1949. Beauvoir began it almost by accident: she set out to write about herself, realised she could not do that without first asking what it had meant to be born a girl, and spent the next two years finding out.
The first volume examines how women have been described by biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, history, myth and literature. The second describes a woman's life as it is actually lived, from childhood through marriage, motherhood and old age. The method throughout is to treat a girl's upbringing as a set of instructions that produce the adult, and then to ask who benefits.
Its central argument is that women have been defined as what men are not — man as the standard human being, woman as the deviation, the Other — and that this is a social arrangement rather than a natural fact.[3] Hence the famous sentence: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
The book sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week in France and was attacked immediately, by Catholics, by communists, and by François Mauriac and Albert Camus among others. The Vatican put it on the Index of Forbidden Books. It was translated into English in 1953, in a version cut and mistranslated by a zoologist who knew no philosophy. A full English translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, did not appear until 2009.
Beauvoir published six novels. The best known is The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954[5]: a novel about French left-wing intellectuals after the Liberation, arguing about communism, America and what they owed the Resistance. Its characters are close enough to Sartre, Camus and Arthur Koestler for readers to have identified them immediately, and one strand draws on her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren, to whom the book is dedicated.
The Blood of Others, published in 1945, is about the Resistance and about responsibility for other people's lives. All Men Are Mortal, from 1946, follows a man who cannot die.
Beauvoir met the Chicago novelist Nelson Algren in 1947 and they were involved for the next several years. She wrote him hundreds of letters in English, and she wore the ring he gave her until her death and was buried in it. Algren wanted her to move to America and marry him. He was bitter that she had written publicly about the relationship, and gave hostile interviews about it afterwards.
From 1952 she lived with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, seventeen years younger, for about seven years — the only person she ever shared a home with.
From 1958 Beauvoir published four volumes of autobiography: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, and All Said and Done.
The four memoirs are among the most detailed accounts any writer has left of an intellectual life, and they brought her a readership well beyond her philosophy. She became known as the person who had recorded French intellectual Paris from the inside.
A Very Easy Death, published in 1964, is a short book about her mother's death from cancer in a Paris hospital, and about the lies told to the dying. It is generally considered her best piece of writing.
The Coming of Age, published in 1970, does for old people what The Second Sex did for women: a long study of how societies define and dispose of the old, and of how the old are made invisible.
During the Algerian war she worked with the lawyer Gisèle Halimi to publicise the case of Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian activist tortured and raped in French custody. The two of them published a book about the case in 1962.
Beauvoir became actively political in her sixties. In 1971 she signed and helped organise the Manifesto of the 343, in which women publicly declared that they had had illegal abortions, daring prosecutors to charge them and pressing for the ban to be repealed. She helped found the League of Women's Rights, edited the feminist journal Questions féministes, and campaigned on abortion and violence against women.
Sartre died in April 1980. Beauvoir wrote an account of his last ten years, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, which describes his physical decline in unsparing detail and which some readers found unforgivable and others thought the most honest thing she ever did.
She died in Paris on 14 April 1986, of pneumonia, aged seventy-eight, one day short of six years after Sartre. She is buried with him in Montparnasse cemetery, wearing Nelson Algren's ring.
The Second Sex changed the terms. Before it, arguments about women's position were mostly about rights and access. After it, they were also about how a person is formed. The distinction between being female and being made into a woman is the foundation second-wave feminism built on. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Judith Butler and most of what followed start from it.
In the four memoirs, in A Very Easy Death and in The Coming of Age she described her own seventy years, her mother's death and her own ageing. She treated each as a condition to be examined rather than accepted, which is the same method she used on womanhood.
Gallimard published She Came to Stay, her first novel, in 1943, and The Second Sex in 1949, and remained her publisher across her career.[6]
Born in Paris on 9 January, the elder of two daughters of Georges de Beauvoir, a lawyer, and Françoise Brasseur, a devout Catholic from a Verdun banking family.
Enters the Cours Désir, a Catholic convent school for girls of good family.
The family loses its money after the war. Without a dowry, Beauvoir is told she will have to work for her living.
Stops believing in God at fourteen and does not tell her mother.
Begins studying at the Sorbonne, taking mathematics, literature and philosophy.
Places second in the philosophy agrégation, behind Jean-Paul Sartre. At twenty-one she is the youngest person ever to pass it. They meet that year.
Begins teaching philosophy at a lycée in Marseille.
Moves to teach in Rouen, where she meets her pupil Olga Kosakiewicz.
Returns to teach in Paris.
War is declared. Sartre is drafted and later captured.
Is dismissed from teaching after the mother of a former pupil complains to the authorities about her conduct. She never teaches again.
Publishes her first novel, She Came to Stay, drawn from the triangle with Olga Kosakiewicz.
Publishes Pyrrhus et Cinéas, her first philosophical essay.
Publishes The Blood of Others and helps found the review Les Temps modernes with Sartre and others.
Publishes The Blood of Others and her play Who Shall Die? (Les Bouches inutiles).
Publishes All Men Are Mortal.
Publishes The Ethics of Ambiguity. Travels in the United States and meets the novelist Nelson Algren in Chicago.
Publishes America Day by Day, her account of the American journey.
Publishes The Second Sex in two volumes. It sells twenty-two thousand copies in its first week in France and is attacked from all sides.
The Vatican places The Second Sex on the Index of Forbidden Books.
Begins living with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, seventeen years younger, the only person she ever shares a home with.
The Second Sex appears in English in a version cut and mistranslated by a zoologist.
Wins the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins, a novel about French intellectuals after the Liberation.
Publishes Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first of four volumes of autobiography.
Publishes The Prime of Life. Signs the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian war.
Publishes Force of Circumstance, the third volume of memoirs.
Publishes A Very Easy Death, about her mother's death from cancer and the lies told to the dying.
Serves on the Russell Tribunal on American conduct in Vietnam.
Publishes The Coming of Age, a study of how societies define and dispose of the old.
Signs and helps organise the Manifesto of the 343, in which women publicly declare that they have had illegal abortions.
Publishes All Said and Done, the last volume of memoirs, and becomes president of the French League of Women's Rights.
Helps found the journal Questions féministes.
Jean-Paul Sartre dies in April. About fifty thousand people follow the funeral procession.
Publishes Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, an unsparing account of his last ten years.
Dies in Paris on 14 April of pneumonia, aged seventy-eight, six years and a day after Sartre. She is buried with him at Montparnasse, wearing Nelson Algren's ring.
A complete, uncut English translation of The Second Sex is published, fifty-six years after the first.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator. Fifty-five at the time of her mother's death. Cared for her mother alongside her sister Hélène in the six weeks between the fall on 24 October 1963 and the death on 6 December.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator, at seventy-two, writing in the year after Sartre's death. Records what she saw of Sartre's last decade and edits the 1974 interviews for publication.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator, at sixty-four, revisiting the whole life across a thematic rather than a chronological framework. Corrects the 'I was cheated' controversy of Force of Circumstance, records her 1970 turn toward MLF feminism, and reviews her own old age.
How Simone appears in its pages: The diarist. Thirty-nine years old at the trip's start, thirty-nine at its end. Writes the entries in real time between 25 January and 20 May 1947 and revises them in the summer before Gallimard publishes the book in September 1948.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator, at fifty-five, covering the eighteen years from the Liberation of Paris to the end of the Algerian War. Writes The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, The Mandarins, and Djamila Boupacha during the period the book covers.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator, telling the story of her first twenty-one years at fifty. Selective, argumentative, shaped — the memoir is written after The Second Sex and against the constraints The Second Sex had described.
How Simone appears in its pages: The book's first-person narrator, at fifty-two, covering the fifteen years from her 1929 agrégation to the Liberation. Teaches successively at Marseille, Rouen, and Paris; writes three novels; makes and holds the partnership with Sartre; is dismissed from teaching in 1943; is a witness of Paris under Occupation.
Françoise Miquel is invented, drawn from Simone: The novel's centre. A woman in her early thirties, novelist working on her first book, administrative partner in the Paris theatre her lover Pierre runs. Believes she and Pierre form a self-sufficient world; watches it come apart across three long parts; arrives at the philosophical conclusion the novel closes on.
Anne Dubreuilh is invented, drawn from Simone: Narrates half the book in the first person. Forty-one at the novel's opening, a psychoanalyst, married for twenty years to Robert Dubreuilh, mother of Nadine. Falls in love with Lewis Brogan on a lecture tour of Chicago in 1946. The novel closes with her decision. Drawn openly from Beauvoir.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Beauvoir met in the Left Bank Resistance circles around Sartre in 1943, and remained frequent debating partners through the postwar years. Beauvoir's third memoir volume Force of Circumstance (1963) is one of the closest first-person accounts of Camus's Paris years and of the 1952 break with Sartre over The Rebel, which she witnessed at close range.
Met · 1944
Beauvoir and Sartre discovered Genet's writing in 1944, after which Genet joined their Paris intellectual circle and dedicated The Thief's Journal to them.
It introduces Simone de Beauvoir as a person and writer before asking a new reader to enter the larger philosophical and historical argument of The Second Sex.
Beauvoir's first novel: an established Parisian couple's promise of freedom is tested — and shattered — by the younger woman they invite into their lives.
Beauvoir's first philosophical essay, written under the Occupation and published a few months after the Liberation — the shorter, earlier statement of the argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would work out at book length three years later.
Beauvoir's Resistance novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris and published at the Liberation — an ethical thriller about a man who cannot forgive his own privilege and the woman he sends into a mission she may not survive.
Beauvoir's only completed play, written under the Occupation and staged in Paris in October 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed.
A twentieth-century Parisian actor meets a man who cannot die, and asks him to remember her. His answer runs seven centuries and every version of that promise.
Beauvoir's 1947 essay giving existentialism the ethics Sartre never got around to writing — the philosophical statement of the argument She Came to Stay had put in a novel and The Second Sex would put in a thousand pages two years later.
Beauvoir's diary of her four-month lecture tour across the United States in 1947 — the trip on which she met Nelson Algren, an encounter later scored across The Mandarins and her Letters to Nelson Algren.
Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.
Beauvoir's Prix Goncourt novel: a six-hundred-page roman à clef of the Parisian intellectual left in the four years after Liberation — Sartre, Camus, Koestler and Nelson Algren all present under lightly changed names.
Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.
Beauvoir's 1957 book on her two-month trip to Mao's China — the most politically contested of her nonfiction, a document of what a serious European left intellectual could and could not see in the People's Republic in the mid-1950s.
The first volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: a bourgeois Catholic Paris childhood, the loss of faith, philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a friendship whose ending she said cost her her freedom.
The second memoir volume, covering Beauvoir from her 1929 meeting with Sartre through the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris — the years the intellectual partnership at the centre of her life was built and tested.
The third and longest volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: the eighteen years from the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 through 1962, the years in which she wrote The Second Sex and The Mandarins, met Nelson Algren, campaigned against French torture in Algeria, and became one of the most-watched public intellectuals in Europe.
Beauvoir's hundred-page account of her mother's month-long death from cancer in a Paris clinic — the shortest and most direct book she wrote, and the case study The Coming of Age would turn into general argument six years later.
Beauvoir's late short novel about a Paris advertising executive and the polished consumer world that has trained her, her family, and her ten-year-old daughter to see other people's suffering as a stain to be removed from the picture.
Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.
Beauvoir's six-hundred-page 1970 study of old age — the companion volume to The Second Sex, arguing that Western societies treat their elderly as a scandal to be hidden and that this is a decision, not a fact.
The fourth and final volume of Beauvoir's memoirs — written at sixty-four with the whole life visible behind her, organised by theme rather than chronology, and containing the reckoning with 'I was cheated' that Force of Circumstance had ended on.
Beauvoir's earliest book — five linked stories about young Catholic bourgeois Paris women written in 1935–37, rejected by Gallimard and Grasset, and published only forty-two years later as a document of the author before she had learned to write.
Beauvoir's account of Sartre's last ten years — the blindness, the strokes, the political engagements, the dependence on her care — followed by the 1974 interviews the two of them recorded together, the most direct testimony we have of what fifty years of that partnership actually consisted of.
The Café de Flore's own history identifies Simone de Beauvoir as one of the first writers to adopt the café's heated room after Paul Boubal took over in 1939. During the German occupation of Paris, she and Jean-Paul Sartre used the café as a regular place to work and meet people.
Visit the place
Beauvoir was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in 1986, in the grave she shares with Sartre — across the road from the flat she had lived in for thirty years.
Visit the place
The square beside Saint-Germain-des-Prés, renamed for Beauvoir and Sartre together in 2000. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots stand on it, and Beauvoir worked whole days at a table on the Flore's first floor.
Visit the place
Beauvoir attended the private Catholic girls' school at this address from the age of six until her baccalauréat — an institution meant to produce devout, marriageable daughters. The premises are now the Librairie des Femmes, the feminist bookshop and publisher.
Visit the place
Beauvoir was born here in 1908 and spent her childhood in the flat with her sister Hélène. Nearly all of her Paris lies within a short walk of the door.
Visit the place
The first flat Beauvoir could buy with her own money, bought after the 1954 Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins. The Les Temps modernes circle met here, and the building faces the cemetery she is buried in.
Visit the place
Beauvoir rented a room in her grandmother's building in July 1929, at twenty-one, to gain her independence, and studied here for the agrégation in philosophy — passing it that year, second to Sartre.
Visit the placeA French philosopher, novelist and memoirist, born in Paris in 1908 and died there in 1986. Her 1949 book The Second Sex is the founding text of modern feminist theory. She also won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for her novel The Mandarins.
Why women are treated as the second sex, and how that came about. Beauvoir argues that man has been taken as the standard human being and woman defined as the deviation from him, and that femininity is produced by upbringing, law and economics rather than biology. Hence its most quoted line: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
That being female is a biological fact but being a woman is a social one — the product of how girls are raised, what they are allowed to do, and what is expected of them. Beauvoir's point is that the result is made rather than natural, and can therefore be changed.
No. They met in 1929, when he placed first and she placed second in the philosophy agrégation, and they were together for fifty-one years without marrying or sharing a home. Each was free to have other lovers. The arrangement has been criticised since, particularly because both had relationships with their own students.
The 1953 English version was cut by about fifteen per cent and translated by a zoologist with no philosophical training, who rendered Beauvoir's technical vocabulary inconsistently. A complete and accurate English translation did not appear until 2009.
Six novels, four volumes of memoirs, essays on ethics, travel books, and two long studies: The Second Sex and The Coming of Age, on how societies treat the old. A Very Easy Death, about her mother's death from cancer, is often considered her best piece of writing.
Frequented · 1939–1945
The Café de Flore's own history identifies Simone de Beauvoir as one of the first writers to adopt the café's heated room after Paul Boubal took over in 1939. During the German occupation of Paris, she and Jean-Paul Sartre used the café as a regular place to work and meet people.
Buried at · 1986
Beauvoir was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in 1986, in the grave she shares with Sartre — across the road from the flat she had lived in for thirty years.
Frequented
The square beside Saint-Germain-des-Prés, renamed for Beauvoir and Sartre together in 2000. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots stand on it, and Beauvoir worked whole days at a table on the Flore's first floor.
Lived at · 1908
Beauvoir was born here in 1908 and spent her childhood in the flat with her sister Hélène. Nearly all of her Paris lies within a short walk of the door.
Lived at · 1955–1986
The first flat Beauvoir could buy with her own money, bought after the 1954 Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins. The Les Temps modernes circle met here, and the building faces the cemetery she is buried in.
Lived at · 1929
Beauvoir rented a room in her grandmother's building in July 1929, at twenty-one, to gain her independence, and studied here for the agrégation in philosophy — passing it that year, second to Sartre.
Studied at
Beauvoir attended the private Catholic girls' school at this address from the age of six until her baccalauréat — an institution meant to produce devout, marriageable daughters. The premises are now the Librairie des Femmes, the feminist bookshop and publisher.
Met · 1943–1952
Camus and Beauvoir met in the Left Bank Resistance circles around Sartre in 1943, and remained frequent debating partners through the postwar years. Beauvoir's third memoir volume Force of Circumstance (1963) is one of the closest first-person accounts of Camus's Paris years and of the 1952 break with Sartre over The Rebel, which she witnessed at close range.
Met · 1944
Beauvoir and Sartre discovered Genet's writing in 1944, after which Genet joined their Paris intellectual circle and dedicated The Thief's Journal to them.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Simone de Beauvoir and their work.
The national library's authority record: born 9 January 1908 in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, died 14 April 1986 in the 14th, recorded as femme de lettres and professeur agrégée de philosophie, with Le Castor among the variant name forms.
The BnF's catalogue of everything published under her name, used to check the shape of the bibliography: six novels, four volumes of memoir, the essays and the travel books.
Reference entry on the novels, the Prix Goncourt and The Second Sex.
Her publisher's own page, used for the publishing relationship that ran from She Came to Stay in 1943 through The Second Sex in 1949 and across the rest of her career.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Simone de Beauvoir. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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