The Mandarins

Beauvoir wrote The Mandarins between 1949 and 1954. Gallimard published Les Mandarins in Paris in October 1954, and it won the Prix Goncourt on 6 December of that year — one of the very few times the prize has gone to a book by an author who did not court it. Leonard M. Friedman's English translation appeared from World Publishing in Cleveland in 1956 and, in the United Kingdom, from Fontana in 1957. The novel runs to about six hundred and twenty pages in most editions.

The Paris the novel describes is the same one Beauvoir had lived in. The paper Henri edits, L'Espoir, is close to the one Camus edited (Combat); the political group Robert helps found (the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire) is close to Sartre's real one; the American writer Anne loves in Chicago and Mexico is closely drawn from Nelson Algren, to whom Beauvoir dedicated the book. Beauvoir insisted in her Force of Circumstance memoir volume (1963) that the book was a novel and not a key: the characters redistribute experience rather than name people. Both statements are true at once. Sartre, Camus, Koestler, and Algren are all present under lightly changed names; the plot the four characters live is Beauvoir's invention.

The novel's central political question is one the postwar French left never resolved. When credible evidence emerged in 1949 of an enormous Soviet forced-labour system, French intellectuals aligned with the Party split between those who thought publishing the evidence would strengthen an aggressive American anti-Communism and those who thought that silence was complicity in the camps themselves. The Mandarins fictionalises that split as a quarrel between two men who love and depend on each other — and one that neither of them fully wins.

The first section is Paris in the winter of 1944–45. The Liberation four months earlier has left the country broken and the intellectual left in ecstatic reunion. Robert Dubreuilh — an established philosopher and novelist — is founding a new political movement to give a home to socialists who cannot accept the French Communist Party. His friend Henri Perron, twenty years younger, edits L'Espoir, a left-wing daily born in the Resistance. Henri lives with Paule, a former singer whose life has narrowed around him. He begins an affair with the Dubreuilhs' nineteen-year-old daughter Nadine, whose first love was killed in a Resistance ambush; the affair collapses within weeks and Nadine goes on to attach herself to the young journalist Lambert. Anne Dubreuilh, forty-one and a psychoanalyst, narrates her half of the book from inside the marriage she and Robert have built into a partnership of complete intellectual sharing and receding personal warmth.

The second section moves outward in 1946 and 1947. Anne makes her first long visit to America on a lecture tour of the universities. In Chicago, an academic hostess introduces her to Lewis Brogan, a novelist working from a rented room over a bar. They spend a week together and become lovers. Anne returns to Paris and cannot stop thinking about him; she comes back to Chicago the following summer for four months, and again the summer after that, and takes long trips with him to Mexico and Guatemala. Robert knows about the affair and treats it as within their arrangement. Anne watches, over her three summers, the American reactionary politics closing around Brogan's own left — the Hollywood investigations, the loyalty oaths — and her sense that the Chicago life she has been imagining alongside her Paris one has to end. Meanwhile, in France, Robert's new party fails; the newspaper struggles for financial survival; Paule, whose relationship with Henri has been over for two years, collapses into a psychiatric episode from which Anne, professionally, has to help her recover.

The third section is 1949 and the camp crisis. A Soviet defector, in Paris, offers Henri credible testimony about the scale and cruelty of the Soviet Gulag system. Henri, after weeks of hesitation, decides to publish. Robert argues him out of it: publishing the material now, he insists, will strengthen the American right and destroy any possibility of an independent French left. Henri publishes anyway. The paper loses its Communist readers and its Communist writers, its finances collapse, and the friendship between Henri and Robert opens a fracture the book had spent its length building toward. Meanwhile Nadine marries Henri — the union both of them treat with a kind of resigned decency — and is pregnant. Paule undergoes a course of psychiatric treatment that changes her, badly. Anne receives a last letter from Lewis Brogan saying that he can no longer share her: it has to be all or nothing, and Paris is not something he can compete with.