Gendering resistance and philosophy? Simone de Beauvoir’s Vichy

Beauvoir’s Vichy: Collaboration and gender in Les Bouches inutiles

Familiarly, Les Bouches inutiles is based on a medieval chronicle, ⁴ but it resonates on all levels with Vichy’s legacy and its choice of collaboration to support material well-being rather than political morality. France had declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 following the invasion of Poland. After the eight-month-long ‘Phony War’, the Germans launched their offensive in the west (on 10 May 1940) and quickly defeated France militarily. In the ensuing chaos, many members of the Third Republic’s leadership and National Assembly fled, leaving the remaining officials, hiding in the city of Vichy and then establishing a new government in July 1940. Marshal Philippe Pétain, empowered as ‘President of the Council’, replaced the lost French Republic with a so-called ‘French State’ (L’État Français), purportedly aimed at ‘regenerating the Nation’, but designed to contain German aggression, suppress dissent, and avoid repeating the economic and moral devastation of WW I. The ‘armistice’ between Pétain’s state (actually, a surrender to Germany) was signed on 22 June 1940, creating a France divided and Nazi-occupied until the country’s August 1944 liberation. As a nominally legal government including the remaining Assembly members, Vichy was recognized by the world powers.

Vichy France would also betray many of its citizens as it appeased its German occupiers and saved its infrastructure (see Jackson, 2001): it complied with the 21 September 1940 Nazi ordinance forcing Jews to register, and with the October 1940 authorization of concentration camp internments that would begin in 1941. Thus began a slippery moral slope for French citizens, as their government added various other ‘undesirables’ to the camp lists: Jews, métèques (immigrants), Freemasons, and Communists. Over 1.5 million French prisoners were transferred to Germany in 1940 alone, mostly as enslaved labour. In July 1942, Paris’ Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, including children who were not on the official roundup list. Eventually, one-quarter of France’s Jewish population was eradicated.

The potential political crisis facing France after the war was mitigated (suppressed?) by legalisms woven into Vichy’s foundation that distracted from the state’s moral culpability. Its architects had been careful in structuring their collaboration, to the degree where postwar trials did not or could not settle approaches to political guilt, as Marcel Ophüls’ film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1971) underscores. This was Pétain’s doing: in his 30 October 1940 radio address announcing Vichy, he had authorized only state collaboration, while not overtly committing individual French citizens to Nazi rule. ‘Pétainistes’ as individuals were thus not automatically suspect or presumed culpable by the letter of the law because they had been left to their own consciences in deciding to collaborate or flee – a move that left the state in the role of caretaker and faceless perpetrator, and individuals subject to moral, not necessarily legal, guilt. After the war, when Pétain was tried for collaboration and convicted, President Charles de Gaulle even used this loophole to commute Pétain’s death sentence on the basis of his World War I service, because he had not compromised the French state in collaborating to save France without committing its citizens to treason.

That story, of course, served the old order well after the war. The president who pardoned Pétain – the fabled Charles de Gaulle – had during the war been a general and head of the Free French Forces in London and Algiers (created in June 1940). After Operation Overlord (D-Day), de Gaulle proclaimed the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) in exile, in June 1944. ‘Regime change’ came soon thereafter: Paris was liberated on 31 August, after which the Vichy government decamped to Sigmaringen, Germany. On 23 October, de Gaulle’s exile government was declared France’s legitimate leadership. ‘Normalization’ proceeded apace, now that the puppet regime had been removed, a regime with clean hands installed, and legal questions about collaboration and guilt forestalled.

For intellectuals like Beauvoir and Sartre, however, this ‘normalization’ was anything but assured, given that they were well over a decade and a world removed from their 1929 university degrees – they ran the danger of looking old school to younger France, while still being untested from the older generation’s point of view.

Sartre’s personal relaunch as a public intellectual was straightforwardly enabled by his personal history: he emerged as the public voice of philosophical resistance against the inauthenticity of bourgeois France and its Vichy ‘choice’. He had the necessary personal credentials, given his 1939 conscription into military service, and his nine months as a prisoner of war (when he engaged in an intensive reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time). He ultimately returned to Paris in March, 1941. Released from the army because of ill health, he reclaimed a teaching position in Le Harve and then was able to transfer to Paris itself to sit out the end of the occupation, filling a position that had been occupied by a Jewish teacher.

As a child of the upper bourgeoisie (son of a naval officer and a relative of Albert Schweitzer), Sartre was, by definition, a war hero, no matter that his prison camp had been well enough furnished to allow him to read and write; he also had a job. In 1943, he turned his hand to Les Mouches (The Flies), a reworking of the Oresteia, as ‘a protest against those who give into tyranny, a remarkable message for an audience to hear under the censorship of German occupation’ (Fahnestock in Sartre, 1993: x). It was produced in 1943 to lukewarm public reception; intellectuals evaluated it as a gesture of resistance, solidifying Sartre’s anti-Vichy public image.

Beauvoir’s emergence into life as a public intellectual was different. She lacked a heroic victim story: she had not seen the worst of the Nazi occupation, living mainly in the countryside and in rural city teaching posts. She had endured food shortages and helped refugee friends (Arp, 2001: 14). Accused of seducing a student in 1943, she had lost her teaching job (and eventually her teaching credentials) on a morals charge. Still, she, too, was able to return to Paris and to a new career, due to the 1943 success of L’Invitée (She Came to Stay). That was followed quickly by her 1944 philosophical essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas, one of the first books published after the Liberation, which some read as opposing the Communists who attacked existentialism and its German-Heideggerian roots (Arens, 2008; Daigle, 2006).

Yet Beauvoir’s politics were and are less than clear-cut. During the Occupation, Beauvoir always claimed support for the Resistance, while asserting her need to distance herself from them, because her visibility could compromise their work (Arp, 2001: 15). She decried Camus’ Plague as ‘an inadequate fictionalized account of the Resistance (or Occupation) because it descends to a sub-human level’ (Mahon, 1997: 33). And her own Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, de Beauvoir, 1945b) referenced the la rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv in July 1942, the notorious Vichy roundup and deportation of Jewish citizens (Arp, 2001: 31) and featured a woman who collaborates with the regime and a man who resists it, traumatized by politics but still debating group responsibility.

‘Group responsibility’, however, was precisely how Vichy used the letter of the law to circumvent the spirit of justice – the ‘collective guilt’ narrative that was debated for Germany did not gain an equivalent foothold in France. Nonetheless, especially for a woman, to be branded a collaborator spoke directly of gender difference in the war experience. Many Frenchwomen during the war interacted with German occupiers in the name of France’s survival and their own, but their fight for resources and survival did not entitle them to be considered ‘front line’ fighters, even in their significant fight for resources and survival – they were easily branded collaborators rather members of a home front resistance.

Beauvoir’s war experience documents typical inequalities in the scripts applied to ‘heroism’ or ‘collaboration’. During the war, she had assumed financial responsibility for a household of up to seven people, an extended motley family consisting of relatives and Sartre’s and her own various amours. To make ends meet, she took a job that arguably dirtied her hands: she became a researcher at a German-controlled radio station, working on a medieval history programme (Arp, 2001: 14; Galster, 1996). That job weakened her claims to being in the resistance because, to get it, she had to sign an oath that she was neither Freemason nor Jew – both true, but a gesture that could have branded her a collaborator. By 1944, in liberated France, Beauvoir was also publicly distanced from overt political engagement, preferring to with Surrealist artists, including Dora Marr (Mahon, 1997: 16). ⁵ And she experienced the resurgence of old order France, to which she (unlike Sartre) did not belong, either by birth, recent history, or education.

Beauvoir integrated women’s overwork and dislocation into Les Bouches inutiles, Based on a medieval chronicle that she had encountered in her radio job, she staged in historical costume common post-Vichy tensions between politics and gender roles (Keltner, 2006: 211), especially collaboration and power during ‘a crisis of political legitimation’ (Fichera, 1986: 51 ⁶ ). Despite its moderate success, Genet did not like it; she herself later dismissed it as abstract. ⁷ More recently, ‘To many contemporaries, the plot must have seemed a sweeping generalization, a reductio ad absurdum, an oversimplification’ (Fichera, 1986: 56). Or perhaps it raised the question of collaboration and political guilt rather too clearly?

Addressing the text of Les Bouches inutiles rather than its purported receptions suggests that it did in fact nuance Occupation politics. Most critical, the original chronical showed a questionable political decision by the powers that be that doomed a town; Beauvoir recast it to show differential gendered effects of this decision on the home front, and the questionable definitions of heroism or guilt scripted by official politics. The play restages an episode from a medieval war, but its plot actually offers two interpretations of the episode: first from the point of view of the strong, purportedly enlightened male leaders who engage in gallant political action, then from the point of view of the ‘resistance’ to a political leadership gone astray (or even suicidally mad) – first a male from the margins of the ruling class, and then by women who understand the significant costs that will be imposed on the home front innocents caught in their backdraft. To be sure, the women’s roles are not attested in the source chronicle, only the men’s. Yet neither narrative shows heroes: the male resistance chooses ‘self-sacrificing’ heroism, and women seem to be collaborators or moral failures because they have no alternatives, even while seeking them.

The play starts as a simple, even simplistic, morality fable about war. A medieval town has freed itself from the tyranny of the Duke of Burgundy, who then retaliates by besieging it. The town fears it will starve to death before a relief army comes to liberate it from the siege. To try to survive, the town council first declares that ‘useless mouths’ will be killed so that supplies can be stretched to save as many as possible. The town magistrate, however, resists this proposal, because killing townspeople would be collaborating with the enemy. To undercut the elite council’s plan, he reveals their misdeeds and then rallies the townspeople to resist these tainted leaders and their murderous proposal.

At this point, the main line of the story descends into heroic madness. The magistrate wants to resolve the impasse with a braver but even more futile act: the townspeople should open the gates and attack the besieging Burgundians in a suicide charge rather than remaining within the walls and starving. To force the town into compliance, he will burn it to the ground behind the townspeople as they charge out of the gates – precluding any option of falling back. The play ends with the town gates being flung open; the people will die ‘heroically’ rather than as victims. At first glance, this denouement seems to argue for an existentialist leap into the authenticity of the situation’s facticity – but it is nothing but another scenario that ignores that factivity, bringing collective death. The magistrate’s appeal to the people to resist the council would have resonated in 1940s France, with a confrontation with a besieging army necessarily evoking France’s cherished home-front myth of the people acting overwhelmingly ‘in the Resistance’ – resisting not only the Nazis, but Vichy itself.

Yet the play is not that simple, if considered as a more extended political allegory about the failures of Europe’s old orders. The historical Duke of Burgundy enacted such a town siege came from a line of ruling nobility that died out in 1477, extinguishing one of the greatest early modern culture centres of Europe – and leaving his territory to be annexed by France. Burgundy’s pyrrhic victory resembled Vichy’s own: its politicians ‘saved’ the bourgeois, as a political ancien régime, but made civilians pay the price and betrayed many of its citizens – anything but an ethical outcome. The play’s title reinforces the analogy by echoing Heinrich Himmler’s declaration about ‘nutzlose Esser/useless eaters’ which was an early justification for Nazi genocide against the weak and disabled, branding them as detrimental to the nation. ⁸ The useless mouths of Beauvoir’s town who resist takeover by the Duke of Burgundy ultimately self-tate because they hold to a different version of the council’s ideology of heroic ‘liberation’. Dead is dead, only the stories justifying them differ.

From this perspective, Beauvoir’s ‘useless mouths’ might more accurately be defined as those who spoke to create a political-moral lose-lose situation. Her play adds to the chronicle an unattested subplot, a meditation about ‘the clear sex division in society between the governed and the governing’ (Fichera, 1986: 53). The confrontation between men’s politics versus women’s ethics that is heralded by feminist critics today has a darker view – it is as morally one-sided as Vichy was, positing two ‘opposing’ solutions that rely on two overlapping but different ethical domains that both are fatally flawed. The women’s solution brings death, just as the men’s would – only for different victim groups, justified by different narratives.

The play’s women characters start out as cardboard, stereotyped figures. Catherine, the magistrate’s wife, acts as a more traditional mother and helper to her husband, while her daughter Clarice is more ‘the sceptic, or rather, the realist’ (Fichera, 1986: 55). The play’s women, led by Catherine as a visible townswoman, achieve some sort of moral force as they absolutely oppose both male plans for the town’s suicide assault against the besiegers. As they see it, charging the Burgundian army under any conditions would be at best a futile act of self-immolation, a mythic resistance that cannot succeed.

But Beauvoir does not let her audience mistake opposition for morality. Catherine tries to kill her husband to quash the scenario of the town’s total annihilation (it does not work), an act that would leave the siege intact and give some the chance to survive (the ‘useful’ people). Her daughter, the pregnant Clarice, takes a more ‘practical’ route based on her own identity rather than any appeal to the group, attempting suicide to choose her inevitable fate – she sees no future in either option. Her solution, however, would be condemned by the Catholic church as doubly immoral (suicide plus infanticide). Both Catherine and Clarice, in two generations, still embrace the sacrifice of the innocents – espousing variant moral narratives from two different generations (or ideologies, one collective and one personal – or perhaps communist and existentialist?). To consider their solutions ‘feminist’ misreads the parallelisms in the play’s texts: both the men and the women make choices about ‘freedom’ that are based on cultural scripts that predicate particular definitions of both hero and victim: they are normalized as instead of factivities – as somehow real as opposed to simply being designated real by a user group.

The onomastics of the names underscores that Beauvoir is dealing in cultural narratives or scripts, not unquestionable morality. Here, she uses the strategy of echoing past iconographies to create allegories of the present, a known theatrical convention of the era: the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd (including Sartre’s 1943 Les Mouches/The Flies and Jean Genet’s 1943 Notre Dame des Fleurs) reworked mythological plots from French Classical drama for the contemporary world, and the later French feminists adapted the tropes of the philosophical canon and the iconography of revolt from the French Revolution (see Arens, 1998; Cixous, 1975).

The play’s men bear names familiar from French politics. The magistrate is named Louis, hereditary name of the (occasionally sainted) Valois kings – yet another dynasty that died out in France’s history. And they have as their project the construction of a belfry – which is not a church tower, but (as of approximately the thirteenth century) a watchtower containing a set of alarm bells that confirms the town’s status as a legitimate chartered town – a town that has permission from the sovereign to have its self-determination. ⁹

The women, unnamed in the source chronicle, bear familiar names from Catholic culture, linking them to ‘official’ narratives about women within church social standards, and adding an additional dimension to what it means to be ‘made a woman’, as in Le Deuxième Sexe. ¹⁰ The women’s names target a longer-standing but no less dangerous act of collaboration between church and state that would have been straightforwardly legible to French cultural Catholics.

The magistrate’s wife is named after a familiar French national icon associated with reclaiming the French state for the Valois: St. Catherine of Alexandria, ‘vierge, martyre et docteur de l’Église, patronne des jeunes filles’, as common usage would have it, is often seen as the Church’s recasting of Hypatia of Alexandria (born ca. 350 and dying by 415 CE), the last of the great Neo-Platonist and Hellenist philosophers, torn apart by a mob incited by a local bishop to wipe away her scientific and philosophical resistance to Christianization (see Dzielska, 1996).

This Saint Catherine is also implicated with the Valois dynasty through the foundational French myth of Joan of Arc (and thus with official political culture, even if in an oppositional mode). Joan helped the French Dauphin reclaim his throne, by donning armour and leading his army into battle – inspired by visions from three saints: Michael the Archangel (who battled Satan), St. Margaret (a crusader saint, another patron of ‘reclaiming’), and perhaps most importantly for the present argument, St. Catherine of Alexandria. This Catherine underwent a dark martyrdom. She had resolved to marry only a groom who is superior to her in every way (in wisdom, beauty, and morality), a standard that only Jesus could match. Resisting various marriages proposed by her father, while winning disputations against wise men who challenged her beliefs, the church’s Catherine ran afoul of the emperor and his court for asserting her choice. She was martyred by being broken on a wheel, to become one of the Church’s ‘14 Holy Helpers’, a set of Rhenish saints dating from the Black Plague era. Alas, that heroic female resistance fighter has, in recent (if not current) French popular culture, acquired a more questionable role. On her feast day (November 25), this patron saint of milliners and dressmakers oversees the celebration of the catherinettes, unmarried women over 25 who were made to wear elaborate – often satirical – hats, purportedly to hasten the end of their single status as ‘spinsters’ by signalling their availability.

Beauvoir has woven such signifiers deeply through her play. Her Catherine starts as a potential feminist heroine (when she recommends her husband’s murder for his recalcitrant stupidity) but ends as a fool defending a husband who will annihilate her family – her ‘oppositional’ ideology vanished in face of the city burghers. This traditional patron saint of women guarantees their probable destruction – she is not a militant Hypatia, insisting on her rights.

This Catherine’s inability to stand fast taints into the play’s next generation, as well. Clarice, the child of the play’s French political ‘saints’ (martyr Catherine and King Louis), is pregnant but still attempts suicide to avoid the siege’s devastation – a mortal sin, by Catholic norms. ‘Clarice’, however, is a name with distinct institutional-hegemonic implications. ‘Clarice’ is a variant of the Latin ‘clara’, meaning ‘bright’ or ‘clear’. More critically, the name refers to a central figure in institutional Catholicism: St. Clare of Assisi, who (like Hypatia) ran away from an arranged marriage. This Clare became the helpmeet of St. Francis (caring for him in his final illness until his 1226 death); she also founded the Poor Clares, a cloistered order of nuns in the Franciscan mode, dedicated to poverty. ¹¹ Later, as abbess, the historical Clare resisted the pope’s attempt to bring her order under male control, working to thwart the imposition of the harsher Rule of Benedict in their cloister. Beauvoir’s Clairice tries to resist the male authority she lives under, but is institutionally powerless – her devotion will not be rewarded because their ‘faith’ in social order wall her in, silences her, and leads her to a probable death.

The women’s subplot in Les Bouches inutiles, then, starts by signalling the need for heroines (and making them the voices of the resistance), portrays them in roles recognizable to traditional French social and political roles, and then shows how they will be destroyed or be led to self-annihilation by the situations created by the men to whom they are subject – politics triumphs over morality. A feminist dramaturge might recover this religious subtext to stage quite a different play, stressing how France and its alpha males have turned its St. Catherines and St. Clares into catherinettes, doomed to opprobrium, when they dare to step out of their separate spaces or cede their status as wise virgins – but the text by no means valorizes women’s ethics as correctives to men’s failings, as virtually all modern feminist critics assume. ¹²

The story told here is thus not one of direct political resistance, but is rather indirect, as befits speech under censorship, but it would have been legible to culturally French theatregoers or the educated classes familiar with Christian allegory. ¹³ Beauvoir explores the logic of such allegorical narratives that have become historical or social facticities and recovers them as factive instead – as narrative given the status of power and authority. As such her female saints become active meditation figures for her era (Denkfiguren), allowing the unthinkable to be faced and thought by means other than direct confrontation. She is thus not so much staging a confrontation between the ethical worlds of men and women but rather showing how the social significations inherent in the official stories limit individuals – and bringing the question of collaboration to the fore, asking what it really means to resist. The play’s ending has all parties acting in good group solidarity – and ready to charge the enemy (and die).

When the 1968 generation of French feminists (the most famous of whom were not French – Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva) acknowledged in declaring Beauvoir the spiritual mother of their movement, they clearly saw her working at such questions of how discourses and identities were intertwined – not as a ‘feminist’ in the Anglo-American sense of politics, nor as an existentialist seeking authenticity, but rather as a precursor in exploring the nexus of power, narrative, and identity instead.

Metaphorically speaking, this reading of the play suggests that the Beauvoir of the mid-1940s was at least ambivalent about her future and the future of France’s women after Vichy and liberation. She could never, in the public France in the latter 1940s, gain from playing Joan of Arc to political France. Without allies within the male hegemony, she could not stand in the public space, and that would never guarantee that she would be listened to. The ‘normalcy’ that was reemerging in post-Occupation France would not easily consider the travails of its women during the war with eyes who saw only males as heroes. The women, in turn, did not have the power to resist the devastation brought by nominally heroic male collaborators (who had to hide from the French as well as the Germans). And Beauvoir’s personal liabilities needed to be factored into her postwar future as a woman, as the new generation’s politics represented nothing more than a coverup for the older orders.

Reversing the optic: Transgression in philosophy’s Vichy empire

To this point, we have tracked Les Bouches inutiles as an allegory about Vichy and women’s place in France after German occupation. One should not forget, however, that St, Catherine was herself a political recast, the Catholic version of Hypatia, a pagan philosopher who was martyred by a bishop for holding to her own philosophical beliefs. But where did Beauvoir see herself in this Hobson’s choice? That figural doubling about women subject to male power necessarily also implicated Beauvoir herself, as part of a budding intellectual empire that existentialism hoped to create.

Part of Beauvoir’s own answer is found in Le Deuxième Sexe: at the end of the war, she was confronting her own position in that empire as a product of France’s own social and religious heritage. Was she going to be Catherine, considering her own husband’s murder, consciously aware that she was being forced by convention into defending him, despite leading her own institution? Or was she considering what it meant to play St. Clare to Sartre’s St. Francis of existentialism, perhaps as founders of separate but unequal monastic institutions – living publicly under the male-driven monastic rule of Benedict that had cloistered the genders apart (perhaps the ‘rule’ of the ENS and its intellectual elite?). Or would she be a pagan martyr to the expectations of public France, if she truly went her own way? Her Hobson’s choice revolved around what it might mean for her to be a public intellectual – or, more broadly, how gender would correlate with the power and status of being a public intellectual and a woman. `The play signals that women will not survive public resistance to the men’s political programmes.

There is additional evidence arguing for Beauvoir’s grappling with the question – first, in her letters and autobiographical writings, as will be addressed now, and then in another partially repudiated text: her great philosophical essay Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), as will be addressed below briefly. In these texts, she moves beyond considerations of gender to address directly her own possible authority as a philosopher and public intellectual. It is a commonplace that later French feminists sought to ‘write the woman’, to correct the suppression of women’s voices. Beauvoir moves away from personal liberation as a goal for analysis. Experiences of life, Beauvoir claims, are

due obviously to politics, events, there were events, I don’t know, the Resistance, Liberation, the war in Algeria [. . .] there, those are the things that marked eras, at least for me, in any event, and for Sartre as well, and for many of my friends. That’s what marked the big epochs in our lives, it’s the historical events, the historical involvements one has in those larger events. (cited in Wenzel, 1986: 25)

Where Le Deuxième Sexe argues that ‘one is made a woman’ by social forces, then, she acknowledges here a broader optic on social constructivism, beyond gender or politics in isolation. By 1947, in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, she would address ethics as a problem of such social narratives or scripts, with identity subsumed to choice. ¹⁴ Her concept of existential ‘authenticity’ was not embracing a moment of personal liberation, embracing a self that is self-positing, but seeing how identities rest on choice, which themselves are projections, ¹⁵ sketches of the future, predictable trajectories associated with choices made by individuals.

So what was Beauvoir’s project/projection – her future work? After the war, she needed a new public script, one that did not lead to public self-immolation, or the nihilism that Sartre scripts in L’Être et le néant. Her letters, later interviews, and other texts make it very clear that she indeed had a distinctive philosophical project but also understood the limits imposed by French history and her contemporary French culture, should she try to be either a Catherine or a Hypatia. As Paul Megna summarizes her work with French historical materials as a solution lying outside of both existentialism and dialectical opposition: ¹⁶ she sought what today’s critics would call a revision in her society’s imaginary:

Already when penning The Useless Mouths, I think, Beauvoir was growing increasingly interested in bringing history to bear on her project of producing an existentialist ethics, but was still distrustful of the tendency of teleological historiography to placate its practitioners by triumphantly distancing the present from the patriarchal violence of the past. (Megna, 2018: 244)

Written five years before she began Le Deuxième Sexe, her play likewise engages history to advocate for a society in which men and women struggle together to achieve and maintain what Beauvoir calls, ‘the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given’ (de Beauvoir, 1972: 741; Megna, 2018: 245). ¹⁷

I would argue that in this play (as in Pyrrhus et Cinéas), Beauvoir took as her challenge finding a third way into a public career, in a role that evaded two traditional ones: invisible helpmeet or public mistress/muse, Catherine or Clarice. Equally problematic was a fact adduced by Michèle Le Dœuff in Hipparchia’s Choice (1991): philosophy is a discipline gendered male. ¹⁸ Or as one critic summarizes the dilemma: ‘As the Sartre-Beauvoir story developed and became part of contemporary mythology, it was increasingly filtered through two presumptions regarding the nature of the partnership. One concerned sex, the other philosophy’ (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 2008: xii).

From this perspective, Les Bouches inutiles may be only one piece of evidence for her active address to constructing that alternative narrative – creating the Beauvoir/Sartre mythos as we know it today. Psychologically, such a role-play could not have been easy. There was a continued material cost to the lifestyle she was to share with Sartre, as there had been during the war: the bills needed to be paid, relationships needed to be kept fluid (even gender-fluid) and open but discreet, and their reputations re-established in patterns not subservient to the state or bourgeois society alone, Both had experienced disruptions in their post-university careers (and she felt particularly the disparity of their two options). Perhaps more importantly, she had lost her teaching credential and was in competition with a younger generation of (male) philosopher- war heroes for any other professional position, in the capital or elsewhere. Add to that the simple facts of prestige, access, and connections: Sartre had taken his degree from the most prestigious of French universities, the ENS. She, in contrast, had been able to take courses at the ENS – ‘taking courses was normal’ (Simons, 1989: 22) –, but women were not admitted to the ENS as regular students. Her degree was from the Sorbonne, what the men competing for university jobs at the time would consider a second-class credential, despite her legendary agrégation at the state board.

So Beauvoir knew quite well what she faced, had she decided to go forward as a Hypatia, a philosopher next to Sartre, or chosen the more traditional role as a St. Clare to Sartre’s St, Francis within existentialism. She would neither be the muse-patron saint of the movement, nor its victim. The Second Sex may thus be read as the inventory of her stock-taking – best read as the first of her great memoirs, presented as a new philosophical analysis centred around identity rather than abstracts. Bergoffen (1995: 179) acknowledges that Beauvoir created this myth:

‘Sartre, not she, was the theoretician. She would write philosophy sparingly and always under Sartre’s umbrella – at least that is what she said. Shall we take her at her word? I think not. [. . .] Beauvoir did not, however, announce her challenge to Sartre. (Whether she would not or could not I leave to her biographers to decide.).

And just as importantly, Beauvoir played neither mistress nor muse in the traditional sense. Instead, she situated herself among what she called the Mandarins (the title of her 1954 roman à clef that won the Prix Goncourt): she could not be one of them on their terms, but she could profit from being among them, using her association with them to appear as something new and different, a unique type of public Frenchwoman–a philosophical essayist, rather than a philosopher. ¹⁹

The Beauvoir-Sartre letters and various other private documents require a second conjecture: that Sartre was complicit in what became her public mythmaking, as he ‘supported’ (and profited from) her work and her amours while holding his own role in place as an ENS luminary and member of the French classes with hereditary privilege. Sartre would have had little difficulty in accommodating her in his postwar life: his class straight-forwardly acknowledged liaisons and muses. Fraser (1997: 26) discusses how Sartre and Beauvoir used a ‘pact’ to manage their sexual lives between them as an unwed established couple. Still, Beauvoir managed their public gender roles as time went on. She already knew the dangers of negative publicity on this front, from her earlier morals charge.

But here we must again remember that we are speaking of two lives damaged by Vichy and World War II. The situation that Beauvoir faced on Sartre’s return from the war may have been even worse or more questionable than many critics assume, given his history of mental illness (and/or drug use). He had suffered a serious depression in 1935, when he felt his reputation would never be made. Under hospital treatment in February of that year, he had had mescaline administered, with dire results: ‘Following his unhappy experiment with the drug, Sartre’s depression deepened, and he began to suffer from hallucinations, usually of a lobster that trotted along behind him’; later, ‘he also felt himself followed, no longer by a lone lobster, but by a whole army of giant crustaceans’ (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 2008: 47, 48). What may or may not been his final hallucinations date to 1936. That is when Beauvoir first moved into the role of career manager, eventually helped by two companions (Olga and another student). He recovered but may have remained more fragile (and drug addicted?) than critics prefer to remember, or Beauvoir wished to have revealed.

If Beauvoir were not only the manager of their linked careers, but also a kind of caregiver, Beauvoir could more easily control and present images of a close working relationship to the public, with her shown as neither muse nor dependent, with her own projects as a publishing novelist, memoirist, and essayist. Many photographs document how they appeared together as a new kind of celebrity couple, based on a marriage of minds. They were sighted writing in cafés, individually and together, almost as mutual muses – a lovely public gender conflation. Of course, were he still impaired, that publicity also kept him working and the money coming in for their ever more complicated ménage.

There is considerable evidence to support this surmise that Beauvoir had indeed managed Sartre’s career – or even more. When he was a prisoner of war, she sent him the books he needed to keep abreast of philosophical trends, so as to not be left behind – to the degree where, as the Fulbrooks point out, ‘at important junctures in their intellectual partnership it was Beauvoir, not Sartre, who was the originating philosophical force’ (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 2008: 102). Letters available only after her death also suggest that Sartre may have been borrowing from her philosophical work. As one critic concludes: ‘It was clear to her by now that any philosophical projects undertaken by Sartre would call for a great deal of advice and effort from her if they were to reach an acceptable standard of sophistication’ (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 2008: 47). Her own public statements in later interviews also clearly classify their public images as constructs. In one later interview, for example, she quips:

I think, as you suggested in your question, it has been said that it was Sartre who influenced me. This is because in France it is always assumed that it is the man who influences the woman; it is never the other way around. (cited in Simons and Benjamin, 1979: 337–338).

She does not finish that thought, but she is clearly insinuating that she may well have been living a relationship ‘the other way around’.

Both ended up working outside of institutional France as public intellectuals (and avoiding competition from a younger generation of philosophers returning from the front). He became the playwright and philosopher; she, the novelist and philosophical essayist, who backed off from the public role that her two very public wartime texts, Les Bouches inutiles and Pyrrhus et Cineas, could have grounded. Again, she hedges later in life about what that choice implies:

while I say that I’m not a philosopher in the sense that I’m not the creator of a system, I’m still a philosopher in the sense that I’ve studied a lot of philosophy, I’ve taught philosophy, I’m infused with philosophy, and when I put philosophy into my books it’s because that’s a way for me to view the world and I can’t allow them to eliminate that way of viewing the world [. . .] (Simons, 1989: 20)

No wonder, then, that her mood by 1947 was testy at best, and that she decamped to the USA on a small grant, where she was astonished by the food, light, and colour, and where she met Nelson Algren for their fabled relationship.

Beauvoir’s play may have been an attempt at writing that paid off financially, as well as an acknowledgement that a fight for an institutional status within the university would have only further complicated her already complex life. Her ‘pact’ with Sartre allowed her instead to evade the double bind of Catherine and Clarice in her play, where she could understand her choice as a Heideggerian appeal (or call), aimed at a society that might listen, even if had ‘made her’ a woman, as the Second Sex noted: ‘The condition for the appeal is being able to make your voice heard, that is, that there is no silencing’ (Gothlin, 2006: 139). That choice also resonates throughout her Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté – where making a ‘choice’ posits its own ethics, defining an arche and a telos by picking a life-script.

Again, Beauvoir’s late reflections to interviews help to reconstruct this as a plausible motivation for her writing in this era. For example, when she was introduced by Sartre to Jean Grenier early in 1943, Grenier

asked her whether she was an existentialist. She recalls her embarrassment at the question, notwithstanding the fact that she had read Kierkegaard and was familiar with the expression existential philosophy which, she says, had been applied to the writings of Heidegger. (Mahon, 1997: 1)

Such a statement reflects a truth from the history of philosophy underlying existentialism’s origin story. Note, however, that her phrasing also evades the fraught question of a ‘French’ philosophy closely related to the German occupiers’ work. While implicitly setting herself apart from Heidegger, she also would reject identification with the Left’s favourite literary form, the roman à these, a novel with an explicit didactic purpose (Simons, 2003: 107), ‘because literature should show the ambiguity of life and should not attempt to prove propositions or teach lessons’ (Vintges, 1996: 75).

A second conformation of her search for a new route between the new French philosophy represented by Sartre and the roles available to women can be found in how Beauvoir disowned another of her wartime texts ‘for being too subjectivistic and idealistic’ (Sirridge, 2003: 140). This text was another kind of philosophical experiment that was a direct assault on France’s classical heritage: Pyrrhus et Cinéas, based on materials from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (in the 1944 edition) and staged as a direct response to Michel de Montaigne, who is cited in the text’s epigraph (de Beauvoir, 1944: 12). Critics have long noted that both her play and this essay show a decided ‘difference from Beauvoir’s later work’ (for example, Bergoffen, 1997: 69; Sirridge, 2003). They read that difference as Beauvoir explains it: as ‘too subjectivist and idealistic’, not a well-argued philosophical tract. Yet how both this essay and her play are staged (one literally, one allegorically) suggests that they may indeed be subjective – in the sense of overly self-disclosing of a subject position as a relation to power. If Les Bouches inutiles offers a meditation on the construction of women’s identity as embraced by cultural Catholicism, her Pyrrhus is a direct assault on canonical French letters. ²⁰

Beauvoir’s version of the story of Pyrrhus of Epirus (318-272 BCE), based on material from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (ca. 75 CE), recasts the whole notion of a ‘pyrrhic victory’ of public memory – another version of the Hobson’s choice of her medieval Catherine and Clarice. In contradicting Montaigne, it is a direct assault on the French canon (see Arens, 2008). France’s most famous essayist sided with Cinéas, the advisor to Pyrrhus (a general and king, aside from his role as commander to Alexander the Great’s army in Italy, and also his second cousin). During Pyrrhus’ (ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to take Rome. Cinéas, student of Demosthenes, gifted orator and politician himself, served as Pyrrhus’ ambassador to the unconquered Romans. As the army pushed up the Italian peninsula towards Rome, with little hope of success in taking the city, Plutarch’s Cinéas engages Pyrrhus about the wisdom of continuing battles that are likely to be futile. Why increase bloodshed instead of embracing the good things in life at home, Cinéas asks, setting up a stark contrast between war and peace (see Plutarch, 1920: 90, 113).

Pyrrhus, however, pushes on, no matter that he never reaches Rome (and likely does not even believe he can). Montaigne had sided with Cinéas, agreeing with him that peace is better than war. Beauvoir affirms Pyrrhus and his continuing war – no matter that he cannot win, Pyrrhus is first and foremost a general. He will not win the war, but he must wage it, as a gifted individual who had to do what he was destined to do, failing or succeeding. In her own declaration of war against Paris’ Pantheon, Beauvoir would also have understood the irony of Pyrrhus’ end, a refashioning of Montaigne’s tale in light of history: the great general was actually killed in an assault on Sparta, when an old woman threw a tile down from a rooftop onto his head, stunning him and thereby providing an opportunity for a soldier to kill him.

When later asked about her essay, Beauvoir dismissed this early success: ‘she attributed its success to a French public starved for philosophy’ (Bergoffen, 2004: 80). But that remark hides how well her material actually suited 1944 France, as a nation that did not fight (following Cinéas’ advice that would have denied Pyrrhus the fulfilment of his own destiny), while it was operating in bad faith by asserting resistance (Vichy’s claim). Thus Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus echoes men’s leadership in Les Bouches inutiles, just as her Cinéas does women’s resistance – neither manages either to win a war or to win an ideological moral high ground. But Rome was simply one battle that Plutarch’s general lost, rather than the many he won – as she herself did with the publications she could claim as her own. The point was being one’s self.

Again, there is evidence that my reading of her situation is not wilful, given that her Montaigne reference would have been evident to an audience versed in the French classics. Beauvoir’s rereading rests on another historical fact: in Plutarch’s parallel lives, Pyrrhus’ story has a counterexample, when it is juxtaposed to that of a Roman general. Where Pyrrhus was a close relation to Alexander the Great, this Roman general of low birth, Marius, was a great military talent who mustered Roman legionnaires out of the plebian social ranks not traditionally deemed fit for service. That legion saved Rome from the barbarians. Out of Marius’ plebian Roman legions would come Julius Caesar, born from among the people to topple aristocratic Rome; out of Pyrrhus’ talent, hubris, and hereditary power would come only a rising of the old order, asserting its ‘rights’. Ultimately, then, Beauvoir may be understood as using Plutarch against both Montaigne and Sartre: hegemonic French philosophers may win the battle of existentialism as the dominant postwar French philosophy, but that hallmark achievement of the philosophical patriarchy may by no means be the last word.

Evidence from their letters again suggests that Sartre was complicit (or at least compliant) with her career strategies. For example, Sartre (1983: 41) addresses her in a letter as ‘Ma petite épouse morganatique’, a salutation which both underscores his sense of regal entitlement and acknowledges her position of illegitimacy vis-à-vis his own heritage. A monarch’s morganatic wife was a spouse deemed not of the proper aristocratic status to be wed to a monarch; she might be allowed to marry him, but her offspring would be excluded from succession. Sartre, the monarch, salutes here an intellect of another estate – one worthy of him but outside his line of succession.

A second such in-joke from her correspondence also points in this direction: her nickname, ‘Castor’ (meaning ‘Beaver’). In the introduction to the translation of Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre (published 1992, only after her death), Hoare immortalizes an anecdote explaining the title of one of the collections of Sartre’s letters to de Beauvoir, the Lettres à Castor. Their friend René Maheu purportedly realized that the name ‘Beauvoir’ sounded very like the English ‘Beaver’ (he had been a cultural attaché in England), she says, and so he coined the nickname to refer to her hair (de Beauvoir, 1992: x). Her translators accept this etymology and translate the collection’s title as ‘Letters to (the) Beaver’. Yet that anecdote that may have stemmed from Beauvoir herself – it seems not to be corroborated in sources other than this anecdote. She may also have dropped a bit of sexual identity politics into this discussion. Just as she acknowledged her own affair with Algren in a scintillatingly bright US by inserting it into a story about her Parisian peers, a Beauvoir who had frequented the Shakespeare and Company bookstore (Fullbrook and Fullbrook, 2008: 44) and who had spent time in the United States would very likely have known that ‘beaver’ in colloquial English has a distinct sexual reference. The implication: male French intellectuals and heads of household have mistresses and can have affairs, but she, too, has paramours.

For the classically educated French reader, there is again a second reference connected to the name ‘Castor’: it refers to one of the Gemini twins Castor (Greek: ‘beaver’) and Pollux (Latin) or Polydeuces (Greek), the fraternal twin sons of Zeus (the dios kouroi) and brothers of Helen of Troy. Pollux was the genetic son of Leda and Zeus (incarnated as a rapist-swan); Castor was sired in the same night by Leda’s husband Tyndareus, a mortal father. Thus the twins were only half-brothers: Castor was mortal, and Pollux half-divine. Both were celebrated as boxers and horsemen, honoured yearly in Rome with large cavalry equestrian parades and as the gods to whom travellers, athletes, and sailors would have appealed at moments of crisis. If Beauvoir is this (non-divine) Castor, then Sartre becomes the (semi-divine) Pollux – a fine allegory for the dual public position that both maintained, and a nod at the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, a publication series of French classics founded by Jacques Schiffrin in 1931, but which did not include their works.

Another sly wink or two based on classical texts might be built into the nickname, as well, alluding to her use of German philosophy as well as to her sexual identity. The story of Castor is also found in Germania (Latin: De Origine et situ Germanorum), written by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus around 98 CE to report on the Germanic tribes at the edge of the Roman Empire. Tacitus (1942: Chapter 43) equates the Gemini with the Germanic Alcis, twin gods of Indo-European origin worshipped in sacred groves by cross-dressing priests with domination over young men and raised into the heavens as a constellation.

A ‘Castor’ reference thus necessarily implicates sexual preferences, as well as the stars of intellectual France, immortalized in Gallimard’s series of leather-bound masterworks in critical editions, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, founded in the 1930s. And Pléiade is a name not only referring to a constellation, but also to a canonical group of sixteenth-century French poets, including Ronsard and du Bellay. The Castor and Pollux that were Beauvoir and Sartre had no lesser ambitions.