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.
Simone de Beauvoir's second novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris between 1941 and 1943 and published by Gallimard in September 1945. It stages the fictional test of the ethics she would state directly two years later in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Jean Blomart is the son of a wealthy printer who refuses his father's factory and his family's money and spends fifteen years in the Communist Party and the trade-union movement trying not to benefit from anyone else's suffering. Hélène Bertrand is a young woman who falls in love with him, is pushed by the Occupation from ordinary life into the Resistance, and is wounded on a mission Jean has sent her on. The novel takes place across one night in a Paris apartment where she may not live until morning, and Jean, sitting beside the bed, walks back through the twelve years that put her there.
Beauvoir wrote Le Sang des autres between the spring of 1941 and the summer of 1943, drafting in her hotel room and at the Café de Flore during the Occupation. She could not have published it under the Vichy censors even if the war had left the option open, and the manuscript sat in a drawer until the Liberation. Gallimard brought it out in September 1945; Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse's English translation, The Blood of Others, appeared from Secker and Warburg in London in 1948 and from Knopf in New York the same year. Beauvoir told interviewers she cared more about this novel than about anything else she had written before The Second Sex.
The book is Beauvoir's most direct novelistic statement of the ethical problem She Came to Stay had ended by killing and The Ethics of Ambiguity would solve philosophically. Its title comes from a line Jean Blomart speaks in the second part: the horror of political action, he says, is that it is always paid for in other people's blood. Beauvoir sets up the problem in the most acute form the Occupation made available — Jean is a Resistance leader who has sent Hélène on a mission she may not survive — and gives him the whole book to work through the argument for and against having done so. The novel does not let him off the hook and does not let her die pointlessly either.
The frame — one night in a Paris apartment, moving between Jean at the bedside and his memory of the twelve years that got them here — is Beauvoir borrowing from a technique she had been reading in William Faulkner and John Dos Passos through the late 1930s. The chapters alternate between the third person (Jean's memory) and the second person (Hélène addressing herself through her fever), and between the pre-war years, the Occupation, and the present. It is Beauvoir's most formally experimental novel and the one closest to what she was actually reading during the years she was writing it.
Part I opens in the apartment. Hélène has been shot on a mission Jean sent her on; she has been carried to a friend's flat where she cannot be moved and will probably not survive the night. Jean sits beside her, unable to do anything except think. The rest of the book is his memory, in third person, with Hélène's own feverish voice from the bed interrupting in a second-person present tense. Book I covers Jean's early adulthood: the son of a prosperous Paris printer, he watches a young factory worker on his father's payroll die of tuberculosis, refuses to take up the family business, moves out of his parents' apartment, and joins the Communist Party. He organises a strike; a young comrade named Jacques is killed by the police during it; Jean quits the Party. He spends the rest of the 1930s in trade-union organising, in a job with a printers' federation, and in a small circle of friends including his childhood friend Marcel and the young writer Paul Perrier.
Book II is Hélène. She grows up in a bourgeois Paris family, works in a bookshop, has a first love affair that leaves her cynical, and meets Jean through his sister Madeleine. She falls in love with him. Jean does not reciprocate at first; he has been in love with a woman named Denise, from the Party years, who died in Spain. Hélène pursues him anyway. When they finally sleep together she is convinced she has won, and when he tells her he does not love her she takes the news with a kind of hard-won practicality — she has, she tells herself, extracted what she wanted out of the affair. Meanwhile Germany invades Poland; France is mobilised; Jean is called up. Book II ends with the fall of France in June 1940.
Book III is the Occupation. Paris under the Germans; the ration cards; the first arrests; the founding of Jean's Resistance section. Hélène has by now, after her own year of shock at the collapse, become a Resistance courier alongside her love for Jean. Jean's cell mounts small operations — leaflets, communications, eventually explosives against German positions. In the last three chapters he sends Hélène on a mission that is meant to reach a rendezvous with an escaping British aviator. She is shot at the rendezvous by a Vichy police patrol, is carried to the friend's apartment, and is being kept alive on morphine while the book's frame closes back around her.
The novel closes at dawn. Hélène has been dying through the night. Jean, sitting beside her, has taken the whole book to argue with himself about whether he should have sent her. The argument he arrives at is not that political action is pure — the book has been repeating for four hundred pages that it is not — but that inaction under Occupation is also a form of consent, and that a person who refuses to spend other people's blood is refusing to allow other people to spend their own. Hélène wakes up long enough to say she does not regret going. She dies shortly after. Jean, watching the light come up over the roofs of Paris, decides that the retaliation Nazi reprisals will inflict on the neighbourhood if his cell mounts another operation is nevertheless not a reason to stop. He will go on. The last sentence names the argument the whole novel has been building toward: 'We must accept that we are not innocent, and act.'
The Blood of Others is Beauvoir's novelistic answer to the question She Came to Stay had ended by killing. She Came to Stay ended with Françoise murdering Xavière because there was no principled way to affirm both her freedom and Xavière's. The Blood of Others accepts that political action costs lives — that it can never be innocent — and refuses to use that fact as an excuse for withdrawal. Two years later The Ethics of Ambiguity would put the same argument into a philosophical essay. The novel gets there first, in prose, with a woman dying on a bed in a friend's apartment because the man sitting beside her sent her out.
The first pages put two kinds of time in conflict. Laurent needs a decision about the following morning, while Jean watches Hélène's breathing as though the night had no future beyond her death. The narrative moves from his inability to answer into repeated accusations against his own existence. That movement makes responsibility feel less like a settled principle than an experience of being unable to step outside another person's danger. His private vigil cannot suspend the shared world in which others still need him to choose.
Jean's childhood memory gives guilt a physical architecture: sunlight and comfortable furnishings above, workers and green-shaded lamps below. Smell and machine noise cross the boundary that separates the family's ease from the labor sustaining it. Crucially, the child does not realize that the workers can also see him. This reverses the direction of observation and unsettles his position as an innocent spectator. The remembered room is therefore more than a contrast between wealth and poverty; it shows how a person's place in other people's lives exceeds what that person knows.
It turns an abstract debate about freedom into a wartime question with immediate human costs.
Read it beside The Ethics of Ambiguity, where Beauvoir develops the responsibility that freedom creates toward other people.
Beauvoir wrote it in secret in Occupied Paris between 1941 and 1943, could not publish it until after the Liberation, and told interviewers she cared more about this novel than anything else she wrote before The Second Sex. Its last line — 'We must accept that we are not innocent, and act' — is the argument the whole book was written to reach.
The novel's narrator in memory. Son of a prosperous Paris printer whose family business he refuses to inherit. Twelve years in the Communist Party and the trade-union movement; a Resistance section leader by 1942. Sends Hélène on the mission that opens the book. Spends the frame night beside her bed arguing with himself about whether he should have.
The wounded woman on the bed. Grew up in a bourgeois Paris family, worked in a bookshop, fell in love with Jean and pursued him without waiting for reciprocation. Pushed by the Occupation into Resistance work as a courier. The book's other narrator, in a second-person voice from the bed.
Jean's comrade in the Communist Party years. Killed by police during a strike Jean helped organise. The death from which Jean's twelve-year argument with himself about political violence begins.
Jean's childhood friend from his bourgeois Paris upbringing. A painter, uninterested in politics, whose steady non-engagement is the counterexample against which Jean's activism defines itself.
Jean's sister. The friend of Hélène's who first brings the two of them together in the Paris of the mid-1930s.
A young writer in Jean and Marcel's Paris circle in the 1930s. Represents, alongside Marcel, one of the paths Jean might have taken and refuses — the literary rather than the political life.
Spring 1941 – Summer 1943
Beauvoir writes Le Sang des autres in Occupied Paris, drafting at the Café de Flore and in her hotel room. The manuscript is unpublishable under Vichy censorship and stays in a drawer.
September 1945
Gallimard publishes Le Sang des autres in Paris, a year after the Liberation.
1947
Beauvoir publishes The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosophical essay that states the argument The Blood of Others had made in fiction.
1948
Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse's English translation, The Blood of Others, appears from Secker and Warburg in London and from Knopf in New York.
1954
The Mandarins wins the Prix Goncourt; the postwar-left setting of The Blood of Others is picked back up in the later, larger novel.
1984
Claude Chabrol's film adaptation, Le Sang des autres, is released. Beauvoir cooperated on the screenplay in the last two years of her life; she died in 1986.
Modern editions
Éditions Gallimard reprint Le Sang des autres in the Folio paperback series; Penguin Modern Classics keeps the English translation in print.
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.
Read our take
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.
Read our takeBeauvoir's second novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris and published at the Liberation. Jean Blomart, a Resistance section leader, sits through one night beside the bed of Hélène Bertrand, whom he has sent on a mission and who has been shot and may not survive. The rest of the book is Jean's memory of the twelve years that got them there and Hélène's feverish voice from the bed. It is Beauvoir's most direct fictional statement of the ethical problem The Ethics of Ambiguity would state philosophically two years later.
Gallimard published Le Sang des autres in Paris in September 1945, one year after the Liberation. Beauvoir had written it in secret in Occupied Paris between 1941 and 1943 and kept the manuscript in a drawer until the Germans left. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse's English translation, The Blood of Others, appeared from Secker and Warburg in London and from Knopf in New York in 1948.
The Blood of Others is the novelistic statement of the ethical argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would make discursively two years later. Both books argue that political action can never be innocent — that it always costs someone else's blood — and that inaction under conditions like the Occupation is a form of consent to what is being done. The novel makes the argument through Jean at Hélène's bedside; the essay makes it in a hundred and sixty pages.
The whole novel takes place across a single night in a Paris apartment, where Hélène Bertrand is dying of a wound she took on a mission Jean Blomart sent her on. Jean sits beside the bed. The rest of the book is his memory of the twelve years that led here, told in third person, alternating with Hélène's own feverish voice from the bed in second person. Beauvoir borrowed the technique from William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, both of whom she was reading through the late 1930s.
In part. The last third of the book takes place under the German Occupation and follows Jean's Resistance cell and Hélène's work as a courier. The first two-thirds cover the twelve years before the war: Jean's refusal of his family's printing business, his years in the Communist Party, his break with the Party after a friend's death in a strike, his trade-union work, and Hélène's own bourgeois Paris childhood and their meeting in the mid-1930s. The Resistance is where the accumulated ethical argument finally has to be resolved.
The last sentence — 'We must accept that we are not innocent, and act' — is the argument the whole book has been building toward. Jean, watching the light come up over Paris after Hélène's death, decides that the retaliation the Nazi reprisals will inflict on the neighbourhood if his cell mounts another operation is nevertheless not a reason to stop. The Blood of Others is Beauvoir's novelistic answer to the ethical problem She Came to Stay had ended by killing.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Blood of Others, its publication, and its place in literary history.
The publisher's sample in Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse's translation supports the added close readings of the opening vigil and childhood workshop. Locators follow the 2024 edition's printed pages.
The academic library catalogue verifies the translators, Penguin edition, publication year, ISBN, and Ali Smith introduction.
Used to place The Blood of Others within Simone de Beauvoir's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
Used for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Simone de Beauvoir's career and the period in which The Blood of Others appeared.
Used to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Simone de Beauvoir's wider catalogue.
Used to verify Simone de Beauvoir's bibliography and place The Blood of Others within the broader chronology of Simone de Beauvoir's career.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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