Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. (Wikipedia)
Bare buttocks are not something that usually disturb the French. Pink bottoms leer from almost every chemist’s window in Paris.
The publication this week of a female bottom on the cover of a serious news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, has caused, nevertheless, something of a stir. The bare bottom belonged to Simone de Beauvoir, writer, philosopher and seculargoddess of feminism, who was born 100 years ago today.
One feminist organisation complained that, by illustrating the centenary of Mme de Beauvoir’s birth with a nude photograph taken in 1952, the intelligent, centre-left magazine had “assaulted the dignity of women”.
Sixty years after she wrote one of the most influential feminist books, Le Deuxième Sexe, Simone de Beauvoir has managed to become a “cover cutie”. Are women still regarded as the “second sex” in France?
Florence Montreynaud is one of France’s best known feminist authors. She has written about the unusual lifelong love affair and friendship between Beauvoir and the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
“My first thought on seeing the magazine was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre’s bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur,” she said. “Luckily, perhaps. Then my second thought was ‘what a fine bottom’. No male philosopher I can think of would have had such a lovely bottom. Mme de Beauvoir had a brilliant mind. She also had a wonderful body. Women win on both counts.”
One hundred years after Beauvoir’s birth, the cause of sexual equality has made substantial progress, even in France. It remains, however, a tricky subject, especially there.
Mme Montreynaud says that the apparently “relaxed” relationship between the French sexes cloaks a thoroughly male-dominated world. The advance of Ségolène Royal to the pinnacle of a serious (failed) presidential candidate hides a political system in which only one parliamentarian in eight is a woman.
The presence of a woman, Anne-Marie Idrac, at the head of the state railway company, the SNCF, disguises a business culture in which only one in six of all executives, but eight out of 10 shop assistants, are female.
How much influence did Simone de Beauvoir really have? How important a figure is she to young French women today?
Sartre and Beauvoir, the celebrated pair of anti-American thinkers, friends and sometime lovers, are buried in the same grave in Montparnasse. They have suffered an ironic common fate. Both are now studied more eagerly in left-wing and feminist academic circles in the United States than in France.
All the same, the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth has produced a flurry of new books, radio and television programmes and magazine articles, and an academic conference in Paris this week. The level of interest has not equalled the commemoration of the Sartre centenary three years ago – but it is not far behind.
Serious students of Beauvoir’s thought, both French and American, complain that the centenary has been dominated in the French media by a prurient re-examination of her life and loves, rather than her works.
This somewhat misses the point. Even more than Sartre, who was after all a man and expected to do as he wished, Beauvoir’s life was her work. She became an iconic figure for feminists all over the world, partly because she practised what she preached. Or at least she seemed to do so.
The Nouvel Observateur headline beside the nude photograph – “Simone de Beauvoir, la scandaleuse” – is a deliberate tease, but it is also true.
Huguette Bourchardeau, 73, a former environment minister and author of a new biography of Beauvoir, says: “She had enormous influence on women of my generation and those which followed. When I was young, I was impressed by her theoretical work but also by her way of life … She was like an open window … she struggled to free herself from conformism and to play the card of freedom.”
The Simone de Beauvoir legend is largely – but not entirely – based on her unusual relationship with Sartre. The couple had a bizarre love affair in which they never lived together and probably never slept together in the last 30 years of their lives (until they were buried together upon her death in 1986. …more>>
