For the breadth of her interests, the range of her writings and the influence she has had worldwide, Simone de Beauvoir deserves better than the coverage so far given her in her centenary year, writes David Tresilian This year is the centenary of the birth of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), and it also marks some 60 years since the publication of what may be her best-known work, Le Deuxième sexe, a long philosophical and historical essay about women in European society. Yet, after a flurry of articles published in France to mark these occasions earlier this year, Beauvoir and her anniversary seem to have been forgotten, something that contrasts strikingly with events mounted to mark the centenary of the birth of her life-long partner, the philosopher and polymath Jean-Paul Sartre, three years ago. Among these was a major exhibition held in Sartre's honour at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (reviewed in the Weekly in April 2005). The lack of any comparable event to mark the centenary of Beauvoir's birth is a missed opportunity, since it could have served to introduce new audiences to this important writer's work, putting it back into general circulation. It is not as if there is insufficient material. Beauvoir was a well-known figure in post-war France, riding on the back of popular interest in Sartre's philosophy of "existentialism," which she adapted for her own purposes in Le Deuxième sexe, and she played a major role in the renovation of French intellectual life that took place after the dismal constrictions of the 1930s and the German occupation of much of the country during the Second World War. Her novel Les Mandarins, a portrait of post-war France from the vantage point of intellectual Paris, won the Prix Goncourt, the leading French literary prize, in 1954, and it is often compared to Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté as a major statement from the period. Her journalism brought her fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and her many volumes of autobiography, starting with Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée in 1958 and ending with Tout compte fait in 1972, constitute both an insider's record of French intellectual life from the 1940s to the 1970s and an intriguing attempt at feminist life-writing. La Vieillesse, a long essay on old age, appeared in 1970, and it was followed in 1981 by Beauvoir's last major publication, La Cérémonie des adieux, a record of the last decade she and Sartre spent together during the 1970s, a period which saw his protracted physical decline. Both books, the former addressing the "scandal of old age," the latter describing Sartre's decline in sometimes painful detail, are notable for their frankness and their willingness to broach social taboos such as protracted illness and death. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Beauvoir was involved, like Sartre, in most of the political and social struggles that have defined contemporary France. There was, for example, her support for decolonisation in the 1950s and for Algerian independence during the Algerian War. She was among the signatories to the "Manifeste des 121," a 1960 petition signed by various French public figures opposing De Gaulle's policies in Algeria, then still a French département, and she worked with Sartre on the Russell War Crimes Tribunal, an international body named after the British philosopher Bertrand Russell set up to investigate US actions in Vietnam. She also accompanied Sartre on his many trips abroad, often at the invitation of foreign governments or writers associations, during which the pair came to represent a significant strand of French intellectual life to the world outside: in 1960 she accompanied him to Cuba, for example, at the invitation of the government led by Fidel Castro, and in 1955 and 1963 there were trips to China and the USSR, respectively, during which meetings were arranged with Mao and Khrushchev. In Spring 1967, there was a visit to Egypt at the invitation of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, then chairman and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, during which Beauvoir and Sartre were received by Nasser. She provided an account of the occasion some years later in Tout compte fait (see extract on page 2). However, during the 1960s and 70s Beauvoir was also developing her own interests and her work on behalf of women. A graduate, like Sartre, of the Ecole normale superièure in Paris and a teacher of philosophy by training, Beauvoir found herself not necessarily in sympathy with Sartre's "second philosophy," that expressed in his Critique de la raison dialectique, and she may have been bemused by his concurrent and progressive enthusiasms: his "canonisation" of novelist and playwright Jean Genet in Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, for example, originally intended only as an introduction to Genet's work, or his vast, unfinished, and allegedly unreadable "total biography" of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, published as L'Idiot de la famille in 1972. Though she may have been writing ahead of her time in including discussion of the early work of both Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan in Le Deuxième sexe, writers usually associated with the intellectual trends of "structuralism" and then "post-structuralism" that swept French universities in the 1960s and 1970s, Beauvoir, like Sartre, mostly did not find common cause with these since her intellectual attitudes were those of an earlier generation. Yet, she continued her research on women during this period, as well as continuing her analysis of French and European social attitudes that found its way into La Vieillesse, and she even accepted a government commission to report on the status of women following the election of François Mitterand as French president in 1981. According to her American biographer Deirdre Bair, this meant the study of "the entire social construct, from legal and reproductive rights to the economic status of women in everything from business to the arts to professional sports." Such varied activities make it natural that Beauvoir should be remembered in her centenary year. However, even the limited notice that has thus far been taken of this anniversary in France has not been without ironies of its own. While an international conference on Beauvoir's work was held in Paris in January this year, this attracted only academics and its impact on the wider public will have been negligible. A better indication of Beauvoir's current standing in France has come in the shape of the various "dossiers" dealing with the writer and her work that have appeared in the mainstream French press, particularly in current affairs magazines like Le Point, L'Express and Le nouvel Observateur. The last named of these in particular, a traditionally left-leaning publication to which Beauvoir herself once contributed, ran a series of articles on Beauvoir in January, in which she was introduced as "la scandaleuse," the cause of scandal. "The companion of Sartre declared war on patriarchy," the magazine's dossier began, "but she was also a victim of passion. A manipulator of others, but also herself vulnerable, she was stubborn and submissive, easy-going and jealous and quite often unhappy. What was really hidden under that austere turban" that Beauvoir used to wear? As one writer later commented in the French monthly Le Monde diplomatique, one would hardly know from the way Beauvoir was presented that this was a woman who had sought to break down the "traditional and reactionary opposition between emotion and intellect and the body and the mind," together with the commonplace "distinction between domains 'naturally' belonging to men and women, abstract thought for men and emotion for women." Instead, Beauvoir was put across not as the woman who had shown, perhaps in a more sustained way than had been done before, the ways in which woman has been constituted as man's "other" in European culture in a relationship of dominance and subordination, but rather as a wily manipulator of powerful men, as if the "real woman" was not the intellectual or the author of a string of significant works, but rather the one who suffered from the kind of petty jealousies sometimes staged in television soap operas. Returning to Le Deuxième sexe today after a period of 60 years it is still possible to be struck by its contemporary air and by its author's wit and ear for male hypocrisies. This is so even with the many years that separate this work from the present: it is easy to forget that Beauvoir published her "book about women" only one year after women had been given the right to vote in France. "I have long hesitated to write a book about women," she begins. "The subject is an irritating one, above all for women, and it is not new." However, she goes on, in the face of criticisms that "femininity" is under threat from social change, it must be pointed out that "woman", like other identity labels, is a function of power and situation. "If today there is no longer any femininity, it is because there never really has been any" except in the sense that femininity has been created through a subordinate relationship to masculinity and through the subordination of women to men. "What defines the situation of women is that having free will and liberty like any other human being, they discover themselves and make choices for themselves in a world in which men oblige them to take up the position of the other." As long, Beauvoir writes, as women see themselves as "others" and are not able to define themselves as selves ("not regard themselves as authentic subjects"), their subordination will continue. Beauvoir has been criticised for her verbosity, for her "leaden pen", and for her apparent veneration of Sartre, which stands intriguingly in relation to her feminism. The former quality has meant that there is still no full English translation of Le Deuxième sexe, the original US publisher doubting that English-speaking readers would be able to make it through two fat volumes. It has also meant that the impact of her other writings, including La Vieillesse and La Cérémonie des adieux, has been attenuated by their extraordinary length, as if Beauvoir never fully emancipated herself from the academic exercises of her youth, adopting the off-putting manner of a French school teacher at the expense of writing for a general audience. After her glory days in post-war Paris, years that witnessed the publication of both Le Deuxième sexe and Les Mandarins, Beauvoir, like Sartre, saw her young or student audience melt away towards the newer structuralist and post-structuralist authors. In her case, this meant that the feminist work, though respectfully gestured towards, was perhaps less fully read, with younger people turning towards the insights offered by the feminist writers of the 1960s and later, among them, in the French case, Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray. Now that this wave too has passed, the current anniversary of Beauvoir's birth could have been an opportunity for a retrospective of half a century of French feminism and its place in French intellectual life, in a way similar to that in which the 2005 Sartre exhibition was an opportunity to gain an overview of this extraordinary man's career and to situate it in 20th-century French life. However, for the time being at least this is an opportunity that seems to have been missed. In 1967 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Egypt at the invitation of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, then chairman and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, during which they visited Aswan, Luxor and Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza. They were received by Nasser, met members of the country's intellectual community, and were entertained by writer Tawfiq al-Hakim at the Pyramids. Beauvoir included an account of the visit in her 1972 memoir Tout compte fait , an extract from which appears below. "We had been invited to go to Egypt by Heykal, Nasser's friend and spokesman and the editor of Al Ahram... Dusk was falling as we landed [in Cairo]. We were welcomed by Heykal, a short, broad- shouldered, jolly man, very brown and energetic, and by the elderly Tawfik al-Hakim (his name means the philosopher's success), whose amusing Journal d'un substitute [ Diary of a Country Prosecutor ] had been published in Les Temps modernes fifteen years before: he was primarily a playwright, and he was very well known in Egypt. On his white head he wore a beret. He was said to be a misanthrope, but he cheerfully went about with us whenever it was not too tiring. [Journalist] Lutfi el-Kholi was also at the airport with his young and agreeable wife Liliane, who belonged to the state tourist organisation -- she was to be our guide and interpreter. We were also introduced to Dr [Louis] Awad and his wife. After a short press conference we got into Heykal's car and he took us to Shepheard's Hotel, with the Nile only a few steps away. The river looked much the same as any other, but this was the true Nile, and it seemed fabulous that I was actually seeing it with my own eyes.[...] "We took part in the many discussions on Egypt's current problems. We me the editorial staff of Al Talia ; the minister of culture; Ali Sabry, the head of the Socialist Union, the single party to which all Egyptians automatically belong; some Marxists and a variety of public figures. When we were present, no one questioned the existence of a single party, the absence of trade union activity, or the policy of state-direction. They were essentially concerned with the difficult struggle against the feudal landowners, with over- population, and above all with the existence of a 'new class' which has taken the place of the former bourgeoisie but which is also composed of privileged people. The greater part of industry has been nationalised, but the state needs large numbers of executives and technicians, and to obtain their services it is forced to pay them highly. The more the country develops the larger becomes this category of profiteers; and they have to be tolerated because they are necessary. The members of this 'new class' are individualists and reactionaries who formerly belonged to the petite bourgeoisie. "Towards the end of our stay Nasser received us at his residence in Heliopolis...We talked for three hours, sitting in a large drawing room and drinking fruit juice. Nasser had nothing of the 'white-toothed grin' that some ill-natured photographs gave him: his voice and his expression had a quiet, somewhat melancholy charm. It was said that his friendship for Heykal was explained by the contrast between their natures, the one overflowing with jovial vitality, the other uneasy, worried and turned in upon himself. Nasser listened attentively; and he answered without haste, weighing his words. I asked him about the status of Egyptian women. He was a feminist, and he had encouraged one of his daughters to carry on with her studies to an advanced level. "When the section of the [1962] Charter that called for equality between the sexes was being discussed, someone raised the objection, 'So every woman will have a right to four husbands, then?' Nasser replied that Islam first appeared in what was a widely polygamous society and that in fact the Koran, far from encouraging polygamy, tried to make it impossible by laying down a great number of restrictions. For his part, he would like to see it disappear. He believed in God, he added; but as far as religion was concerned it had thwarted him at every step. Sartre mentioned the eighteen young men who were then in prison [accused of being Communists]: he asked whether it would not be possible to hasten their trial. Nasser had obviously been told of this approach by Heykal; he smiled and said, 'A trial? By all means. But they run the risk of a ten-year sentence. Our idea was that it would be better to keep them in a little longer and then let them go quietly.' 'That would be the best solution of course,' said Sartre." From Tout compte fait , translated as "All Said and Done" by Patrick O'Brian (London, 1974).
