All Men Are Mortal

Simone de Beauvoir wrote All Men Are Mortal between 1943 and 1946, immediately after The Blood of Others, and Gallimard published the French edition in November 1946 under the title Tous les hommes sont mortels. The novel came out of the same postwar preoccupation with mortality, freedom, and political action that fills The Ethics of Ambiguity a year later, cast as historical fantasy rather than philosophical treatise.

The book is structurally unusual: a prologue and epilogue in twentieth-century Paris and the spa town of Nyons frame five long historical episodes narrated by Fosca himself. Each episode takes an era he tried to shape — Renaissance Italy, imperial Spain under Charles V and the New World he opened, the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, and the twentieth — and shows the same optimism failing on a different scale. Historians of Beauvoir's fiction call it her most Gothic novel; philosophers of her thought call it the clearest fictional statement of the existentialist claim that mortality is not a defect of life but the condition of its value.

It failed commercially and was greeted skeptically by critics when it appeared, in the shadow of Sartre's Being and Nothingness and against the postwar hunger for realistic novels of the Resistance. The English translation (Leonard M. Friedman, 1955) was reissued by Virago in 1995 with an introduction by Ali Smith, and the novel is now read as an early exercise in what Beauvoir would soon call the philosophy of ambiguity — mortality as the sting that gives choice its urgency.

The prologue is present-day Paris and the spa town of Nyons, in the south-east of France, sometime in the mid-1940s. Régine — a French stage actor at the point of a breakthrough — comes down for a rest, and notices a silent middle-aged stranger, Raymond Fosca, sitting at the hotel fountain and watching nothing. He is polite, absent, without anywhere to be. She asks Roger, a friend, to help her invent an introduction; when Fosca finally speaks with her, he tells her, matter-of-factly, that he cannot die. She refuses to believe it, then does, then decides that she can use him: if a man who never dies will remember her, her name will survive. She insists on hearing his life story. He tells it in five parts.

The first episode is Carmona, Tuscany, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Fosca, born in 1279, becomes prince of the city at thirty and, needing decades to complete his reforms, drinks an immortality elixir given to him by a mysterious old man. He rules Carmona through a hundred years of war, marriage, and betrayal. His son Antonio ages and dies in front of him; his wife Catherine ages and dies; the reforms that meant everything at thirty go stale. He learns that governing across centuries turns the people he loves into strangers. The second episode moves to the sixteenth century, in the service of Emperor Charles V. Fosca crosses to the New World with the conquistadors, watches the settlement of Peru, then makes the passage back to Europe as the Emperor abdicates and retires. He learns, in the burning of a Mexican town, that scale corrupts the same enterprise faster than time does.

The third episode places him in the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, alongside a fictional French philosophe and inventor named Marianne, and then the fourth carries him through the French Revolution and into the early Napoleonic wars. He funds Marianne's balloon experiments, argues for a rational government of Europe, watches the Terror liquidate the people he believed in. The fifth episode — Beauvoir's most sustained, in his account — is the failed European revolutions of 1848: Fosca as a workers' organiser in Paris, working alongside a young idealist named Armand, and then the June Days rising crushed by the National Guard. Armand dies at a barricade in his arms. Fosca stops trying. He spends the sixty years between 1848 and Régine looking at fountains.