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.
Simone de Beauvoir's Les Bouches inutiles (The Useless Mouths, translated into English as Who Shall Die?) is her only completed play. Written during the Occupation and published by Gallimard in 1945, it opened at the Théâtre des Carrefours in Paris on 29 October 1945, ran fifty performances, and closed. Set in the fourteenth-century Flanders town of Vaucelles during a siege by the Duke of Burgundy, the play stages the moral question a town council faces when it decides to expel the women, children, elderly, and sick — the 'useless mouths' — to save the food supply for its fighting men. The people condemned refuse the decision, and the play works out the collision between them and the council. It is Beauvoir's most compressed statement of the argument The Blood of Others had made novelistically the same year and The Ethics of Ambiguity would make philosophically two years later.
Beauvoir wrote Les Bouches inutiles in the winter of 1943–44, in Occupied Paris, alongside her novel The Blood of Others. Gallimard published the play text in April 1945. It opened at the Théâtre des Carrefours in the 5th arrondissement of Paris on 29 October 1945, directed by Michel Vitold, with Olga Kosakiewicz — Beauvoir's former student and the model for Xavière in She Came to Stay — in a small role. Fifty performances into the run the play closed. Beauvoir wrote in The Prime of Life (1960) that she thought the play deserved to close: she had loaded it with dialogue that read but did not sound. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier's English translation, Who Shall Die?, appeared from River Press in New York in 1983 — thirty-eight years after the Paris production.
The play is set in the town of Vaucelles in fourteenth-century Flanders. The Duke of Burgundy is besieging the town. Food is running out. The town's ruling council — men — decides, at the play's opening, to expel from the walls the women, children, elderly, and sick who cannot fight, so the food supply reaches the defenders. The proposed victims — the 'useless mouths' of the French title — organise. The rest of the play works out the argument between the council and the condemned, and the specific test-case of one family: Louis d'Avesnes, the council leader; his wife Catherine, whom he has just condemned; and their daughter Clarice.
The play is Beauvoir's philosophical argument in dramatic form. It refuses two positions. The first, that political action is justified by any future good it makes possible (the council's position), is refused: the council does not have the right to declare part of the community disposable in the name of preserving the rest. The second, that no political action is legitimate at all if it costs a life (the pacifist position that surfaces briefly), is refused too: the town cannot simply surrender to the Duke and be spared thinking about who bears the cost. The play's answer, closer to what The Ethics of Ambiguity would say two years later, is that the condemned must be brought into the decision and given the right to accept or refuse it themselves. The play's staging of that answer — with a woman who has been marked for death being reinstated as a full participant in the town's choice — is the philosophical case in ten scenes.
Act I opens in the council chamber of the town hall of Vaucelles, a fictional Flemish town under siege by the Duke of Burgundy. Louis d'Avesnes, the council leader, has, over the course of a long stalemate, arrived at the position that food will soon run out and that the town cannot survive as a whole population. He tables a motion: expel the useless mouths — the women, children, elderly, and sick — beyond the walls, so the defenders can hold out until reinforcements arrive from Ghent. The council votes on the motion. Louis has personally condemned his own wife Catherine, a widow's daughter he married for love against his father's advice ten years earlier. He has to tell her.
Act II opens the next day. The news has spread through Vaucelles. The condemned gather at Louis's house. His daughter Clarice — his and Catherine's — has not been condemned; she is nineteen, able-bodied, and enrolled in the militia. Clarice becomes the natural spokeswoman for her mother and the other condemned. She argues, in the play's central speech, that the council's decision has already inflicted the political violence the siege was supposed to be preventing: it has divided the town against itself. She proposes that the condemned refuse the sentence, and that the whole town make the decision together — either to accept dying together or to break out together and face the Duke's army in the open.
Act III returns to the council chamber. Clarice, admitted as a delegate of the condemned, argues her case; the council splits; Louis, in the play's most difficult scene, changes his vote. The council reverses the expulsion decree. The play closes on Vaucelles preparing for a mass sortie against the Duke's army — the outcome of which the play does not stage — and on the specific reunion between Louis and Catherine that the original vote had severed. The play ends before the battle. Beauvoir's argument is that the political decision Vaucelles has now made together is the only kind of decision a community has the right to make, whether it survives the battle or not.
The play's last scene is Louis and Catherine's reconciliation and Vaucelles's decision to sortie together. Beauvoir does not stage the battle. The victory or defeat is not the play's question. The philosophical work has been done: the community that condemned part of itself in order to preserve the rest has been shown that it had no right to make that decision alone, that a decision made in the name of a whole community requires the whole community's participation, and that whatever cost the sortie may bring is at least a cost the whole town has accepted together. It is Beauvoir's fictional statement, in ten scenes and a single stage set, of the argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would make in a hundred and sixty pages of prose two years later.
The play was staged once, in Paris, in October 1945; it closed after fifty performances and Beauvoir agreed with the reviewers who had disliked it. She continued to defend the play's argument — she reprinted the text in 1946 and again in 1966 — but she wrote in The Prime of Life (1960) that she thought the dialogue was overloaded and undramatic. She did not attempt another play. Les Bouches inutiles is the outlier in her published work: the shortest published book, the least revived, the only one in dramatic form. Its argument, made better elsewhere, was already what she had to say. But the play arrived at it first.
The exchange between Louis and Catherine makes political exclusion visible in a familiar gesture: he cannot meet her eyes. Catherine is prepared to share danger, but Louis already knows the council has assigned them different futures. His pauses delay more than bad news; they expose a decision made without her. When his list of those to be expelled finally reaches women, their marriage no longer guarantees that she belongs to the community he claims to defend. The scene turns an abstract calculation about food into a broken conversation between supposed equals.
The final kiss does not settle Catherine's doubts. Just before it, she asks whether resisting the expulsion has instead condemned the men; Jean-Pierre cannot promise a harmless outcome. That uncertainty matters beside Louis's closing declaration of victory. The reconciliation restores their ability to face danger together, but it cannot establish what will happen beyond the gate. Read against the earlier refusal to meet her eyes, the kiss marks a changed relationship, not proof that the town will survive or that making a shared decision removes responsibility for its consequences.
It is Beauvoir's only completed play and her most compressed treatment of political sacrifice.
Read it beside The Blood of Others, which asks the same wartime question through a novel's private relationships.
Beauvoir's only play, written under the Occupation and staged in 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed. A theatre piece by a philosopher, and the shape of the argument she would soon publish as The Ethics of Ambiguity.
The council leader of Vaucelles who tables the motion to expel the town's women, children, elderly, and sick. Also the husband of one of the condemned. His change of vote in the last act is the play's central hinge.
Louis's wife. Marked for expulsion by her husband's motion. Silent through most of the play; her reunion with Louis at the end is what the reversal of the decree makes possible.
Louis and Catherine's nineteen-year-old daughter. Not marked for expulsion (she is able-bodied and militia-enrolled). Becomes the spokeswoman for the condemned and argues, from inside the council chamber, the play's central case that a community has no right to make a life-and-death decision without the participation of the people it will affect.
A young man of Vaucelles engaged to Clarice. His decision — to stand with the condemned rather than with the council — is the specific personal case the political argument runs through.
A young council member. Louis's protégé and rival. Argues most strongly on the council's side against Clarice; his changing vote in the last scene closes the deliberation.
Winter 1943–1944
Beauvoir writes Les Bouches inutiles in Occupied Paris, alongside The Blood of Others.
April 1945
Gallimard publishes the play text in Paris.
29 October 1945
Les Bouches inutiles opens at the Théâtre des Carrefours in Paris, directed by Michel Vitold. It runs fifty performances.
1946
Beauvoir reprints the play in a Gallimard collected edition.
1947
The Ethics of Ambiguity, the philosophical essay that states the play's argument in full, is published by Gallimard.
1960
The Prime of Life, the second memoir volume, includes Beauvoir's judgment that the play deserved to close.
1983
Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier's English translation, Who Shall Die?, appears from River Press in New York — thirty-eight years after the Paris production.
Modern editions
The French text stays in print through Éditions Gallimard; the English translation is now available through print-on-demand.
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.
Read our take
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 takeIt is Beauvoir's only completed play. Set in the fictional fourteenth-century Flanders town of Vaucelles during a siege by the Duke of Burgundy, it stages the moral question a town council faces when it decides to expel the women, children, elderly, and sick — the 'useless mouths' — to save the food supply for its fighting men. The condemned refuse the decision. The council eventually reverses the decree. The play is Beauvoir's philosophical argument in dramatic form.
Gallimard published Les Bouches inutiles in Paris in April 1945. The Paris production opened at the Théâtre des Carrefours on 29 October 1945, directed by Michel Vitold, and ran fifty performances before closing. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier's English translation, Who Shall Die?, appeared from River Press in New York in 1983.
'Les bouches inutiles' literally means 'the useless mouths.' It is a medieval siege-warfare term for the members of a besieged population who cannot fight and therefore consume food without contributing to the defence. The term appears in real medieval accounts of sieges (Vaucelles is a fictional town but the practice was documented). Beauvoir uses the term as the play's philosophical target.
Who Shall Die? (1945), The Blood of Others (1945), and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) are the three works in which Beauvoir stated the same argument in three different forms. The play stages the argument in a fictional siege; the novel stages it inside a Resistance leader's memory of the decisions he made in the war; the essay makes it as a systematic philosophical case. The essay is the fullest statement; the novel is the sharpest emotional case; the play is the most compressed.
No. In The Prime of Life (1960) she wrote that she thought the play deserved to close after its fifty performances — the dialogue was overloaded, the drama insufficient. She continued to defend the philosophical argument the play made, but she never attempted another play. The reviewers of the 1945 production had made the same points about the writing, and Beauvoir came to agree with them.
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Both French writers used novels, essays, journalism, and public argument to ask how freedom and responsibility operate without a fixed moral system.
View author
The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
View author
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Who Shall Die?, its publication, and its place in literary history.
Publisher record used to verify the 2011 scholarly collection, hardcover ISBN, pagination, and inclusion of a new English translation of the play.
Used to place Who Shall Die? 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 Who Shall Die? 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 Who Shall Die? within the broader chronology of Simone de Beauvoir's career.
Quoted play passages in the Naji–Stanley translation-in-progress support the two scene readings; this is not a reading of the complete play or the 1983 translation.
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.
Explore more resources