Becoming Beauvoir

by Kate Kirkpatrick

  These romantic courtships and confusions unfolded in the context of sweeping educational reforms in France and significant decisions about Beauvoir’s future. Simone graduated from the Cours Désir in 1924. Ten years earlier a teacher in a girls’ lycée wrote that education and employment were becoming necessities for women:

  The majority of girls […] now have the intention of continuing their studies to prepare themselves for some profession. […] As is natural, nearly all desire love in marriage and motherhood. But they know that in our unjust society, dominated by the cult of gold, not every girl will be able to realize the motherly life that ought to be the norm for every woman. […] They understand that instruction will open careers for them, which will enable them if need be to support themselves without masculine aid.42

  For Beauvoir the promise of masculine aid through marriage was much less certain than that of her own abilities – she knew herself to be reliable in a way that masculine ‘aid’ (at least as instantiated by her father) was not. She studied hard, accumulating qualifications rapidly. At 16, in July 1924, she received her premier baccalauréat (a school-leaving certificate that had only recently been conferred to women on the same terms as men) with distinction. When she went to pick up her certificate an examiner acidly mocked her: ‘Have you come to pick up a few more diplomas?’43

  The Cours Désir, although conservative in many respects, was one of the leading institutions encouraging women to complete the first and second baccalauréats. After the first baccalauréat, bright students like Simone were encouraged to stay on for a year to qualify in subjects like philosophy, literature or science, which enabled them to teach in similar schools. This course was intended to make a virtue of necessity: it was a lower-status option than marriage, but at least the women who followed it stayed within the bourgeois circles of their birth.

  The second examination was much more rigorous. The headmistress had recently added philosophy to the curriculum, since it was popular in the lycées and she wanted to boost her enrolments. A priest taught the course, and although Simone loved the subject she found its delivery woefully inadequate. He merely read or dictated passages from philosophical texts, and Simone complained in the Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter that everything ended with ‘the truth according to St Thomas Aquinas’.44 Even so, she was captivated by philosophy and wanted to study more: she had had her first taste of it and all the other disciplines she had excelled in now seemed ‘poor relations’.45

  Simone passed the second baccalauréat but this time without distinction. Georges took her to the theatre to celebrate. He was beginning to take a bit more of an interest in her, perhaps because her face had cleared up and she was growing slim (he placed undue significance on such things), and perhaps because the practical questions of her future were becoming unavoidable.46 He did not approve of her studying philosophy, which he thought was ‘gibberish’. Françoise objected for other reasons: she did not want her daughter to be morally corrupted or lose her faith.

  But Simone had made up her mind. She had read about an elite training school at Sèvres, which was established to educate women as teachers for the state lycées and collèges. Françoise would hear none of it. She had heard rumours about the strict exercise, lax morals and irreligiosity of this place. Simone’s parents had spent years paying for a private education and did not want her to waste their investment by becoming a functionary of the state school system. To top it all off, Sèvres students boarded, which meant they could not be closely supervised by their mothers.

  Georges saw no intrinsic value in philosophy, but he conceded that it might provide a good grounding for a career in law, which had become open to a few women since the war. If Simone qualified for a legal position in the civil service, her income would be guaranteed for life. Not being one to make rushed judgements, Simone read the Napoleonic Code before giving her answer, which was crystal clear: No. Her mother suggested training as a librarian. Again, Simone’s answer was resolute: No.

  She was determined to study philosophy; they were determined that she would not. So Simone resorted to a campaign of silence. Whenever they tried to discuss her future, she said nothing. As time passed, the window for avoiding embarrassment grew smaller and the air grew thicker. Her parents finally capitulated, but not without shouting matches.

  One day, in a magazine, Simone found an image of the future she wanted. There was an article about the first woman docteur d’état in France, Léontine Zanta. The picture accompanying it showed her in a thoughtful pose at her desk, and the article said that she lived with an adopted niece: this woman was both intellectual and responsive to what Beauvoir called ‘the demands of female sensibility’: someday she dreamed of having such things written about her.47

  But if Simone had been just a few years older nothing might have been written about her at all. Five years earlier she would not even have been able to take the qualifying exam. She knew her chosen road was not well travelled by women: at this point only six women had passed the agrégation in philosophy. It was a highly competitive national exam and Beauvoir ‘wanted to be one of those pioneers’ who passed it.48

  Very little of Beauvoir’s writing survives from this early period of her education. But there is one essay, written at the end of 1924, analysing a classic text in the philosophy of science, Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. In it, the 16-year-old Beauvoir wrote that ‘the most interesting part’ of his ‘interesting work’ was the way Bernard valued philosophical doubt. Bernard wrote that ‘the great experimental principle’ is ‘doubt, that philosophical doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative’. He thought that some forms of scepticism were barren, but that there was a kind of ‘fertile doubt’ that recognized the limitations of the human mind: ‘our mind is so limited that we can know neither the beginning nor the end of things; but we can grasp the middle, i.e., what surrounds us closely’.49

  Beauvoir’s philosophy textbook at school – Manuel de Philosophie by Father Charles Lahr – had also discussed doubt. But it warned against taking it too far, since doubt could corrupt or even extinguish religious faith. Already as a student Beauvoir was rejecting a certain way of doing philosophy for enslaving the mind in systems, taking away its freedom.50 This early interest in the philosophy of freedom is very important for understanding Beauvoir’s later personal decisions, her philosophy, and the way her life has been misunderstood. In the 1920s she also read Alfred Fouillée, a nineteenth-century philosopher who disagreed with his better-known compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau about freedom. Fouillée argued that ‘Man isn’t born, but rather becomes, free.’51 He claimed that freedom is an ‘idée-force’ – which is to say an idea that has the power to shape the evolution of an individual. Fouillée was interested in the age-old question of whether human actions are free or determined, whether we make our fates or are destined to them. Against those who think human beings are determined to act in certain ways, Fouillée argued that the human desire for freedom itself enables us to become free.

  Others worried that desire and emotion compromise freedom. But Fouillée claimed that the desire for freedom was unlike all other human desires because the desire for freedom opposed the influence of other desires. The desire for freedom leads human beings to want not ‘the Good’ or even ‘a good decision’, but rather a decision that is uniquely mine.52

  Beauvoir wanted her future to be her decision; she wanted to live a life of freedom – and she wanted to study philosophy. When her mother told the teachers at Cours Désir Simone’s chosen subject, the nuns stoked the fire of her maternal anxiety, saying that one year at the Sorbonne would ruin Mademoiselle de Beauvoir’s faith and character.53 So the family made a compromise: she would start by studying literature.

  In 1925 the most prestigious path to her chosen profession was closed to her: women were not accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, which trained the crème de la crème of the Parisian philosophical elite. She would have
to do a licence at the Sorbonne, then a teaching diploma, then the agrégation. In 1925 she began studying mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature and languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. Both institutions prepared Catholic students for the Sorbonne’s exams – and were intended to limit pupils’ exposure to the dangers of its secular culture.

  Madame de Beauvoir did not know how excellent her choice of institution would be for her daughter. She chose the Institut Sainte-Marie for its Catholic respectability, but here Simone was under the tutelage of Madeleine Daniélou, a woman who held more degrees than any other in France. She believed that education was the key to liberation; she was married to a member of the French parliament who shared her ideas (Charles Daniélou). Françoise, who had more free time now that her daughters were older and Georges was so rarely at home, dedicated her time to reading and learning, and she followed Simone’s studies. Françoise was intelligent, and the more she read the more she admired Madame Daniélou’s curriculum.

  Simone found this attention bittersweet: she knew her mother wanted their relationship to be one of friendship, and to have the closeness that she had never had with her own mother. But she attempted to achieve this proximity by force rather than by invitation, provoking resentment and withdrawal. According to Hélène, Françoise opened and read all of Simone’s letters, even when she was 18, and threw away those she found unsuitable.54 Simone’s already miniscule handwriting grew even tinier – as if she wanted the words in her notebooks to be invisible to her mother’s prying eyes.

  The sisters felt stifled, which made it all the more surprising, one day, when Jacques came back to the rue de Rennes and Madame de Beauvoir loosened her reins. He hadn’t been to visit for almost a year, but he had just bought a sporty car and wanted to show it off. He was a man in need of an audience, and Simone listened eagerly to his opinions on writers she hadn’t yet read and the gossip about the writers and artists who lived in Montparnasse. Hélène quickly realized that he wasn’t there to see her, and she saw by her sister’s blushes that Jacques’ interest was reciprocated. When Jacques suggested taking Simone out in the car Hélène was shocked that Françoise gave her permission. Hélène resented being left behind, but it meant that she was home to witness her mother’s ‘ecstasy’ after the cousins departed. Françoise hoped Jacques might marry Simone, dowry or no dowry.

  What followed was, to all appearances, a courtship – the only traditional courtship in Simone de Beauvoir’s life. With Jacques she drove around Paris, walked in the Bois de Boulogne, read banned books, visited galleries, discovered music. Then, all of a sudden, Françoise stopped them going out alone. She hoped the absence might make Jacques’ heart grow fonder, but she was also beginning to be suspicious: Simone had begun to discover nightclubs and cafés, and her clothes smelled of tobacco and alcohol.

  That year Simone passed her exams with good marks, and her philosophy instructor encouraged her to continue at the Institut Sainte-Marie and to follow as many courses as she could at the Sorbonne. She had passed exams for three Certificates of Higher Studies – in mathematics, French literature and Latin. To put this achievement in perspective, the average licence (comparable to a bachelor’s degree) was composed of four certificates, and the average student would earn one certificate per year.

  Meanwhile, Jacques had failed his law examinations so would have to repeat the year’s work. He was lazy and starting to drink a lot, but Simone overlooked these defects in character: she didn’t want to admit he was stringing her along. Their relationship was not physical: they never even kissed. He was often absent – and even when present, aloof – but Beauvoir attributed his distance to defects in herself rather than him. As a mature woman it is hard to imagine her reading her diaries from this period without disappointment. (She drew heavily on them in writing her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and in her mature philosophy.) Jacques did speak of marriage vaguely, saying things like, ‘It seems I will have to marry soon.’ But an actual proposal never came. Beauvoir later wondered why she wanted it so badly, reflecting that her reasons were probably instrumental: through marriage she might finally earn her family’s love and respect.

  Her heart was divided: in her diaries she contrasted her imaginary life as Madame Jacques Champignuelle with what she called ‘a life of freedom’. She spent the summer of 1926 struggling to be happy, even in the country with her relatives. When she returned to Paris in September she wanted to see Jacques, but Françoise forbade it.

  That summer, at the age of 18, she made her first attempts at writing a novel, Éliane, but she only wrote nine pages.55 Although philosophy was becoming her passion she did not want to create a grand philosophical system, but rather to write ‘the novel of the inner life’:56 she wanted to show what was happening within the rich worlds of her characters. This project was inspired in part by reading the philosopher Henri Bergson, who celebrated a ‘bold novelist’ in his Time and Free Will. He described (and Beauvoir quoted in her diary) the way literature can tear ‘aside the cleverly woven web of our conventional self’. When she read him she had a ‘great intellectual rapture’ because she saw in his philosophy not the ‘logical constructions’ but ‘palpable reality’.57

  In her diary Beauvoir wrote that she wanted to ‘think life’, to transpose her questions into fiction, and over the next two years she continued to refine her efforts in several short stories. Her commitment to attentive descriptions of experience was typical of the kind of phenomenology she would become interested in as a philosopher. Phenomenology – the study of the structures of consciousness from a first-person point of view – would also shape the methodology of her feminism, and she would reshape it for feminist ends. But in 1927 she wanted to write ‘essays on life’, which ‘would not be a novel, but philosophy, linking them together vaguely with a fiction’.58

  In The Prime of Life (1960) Beauvoir wrote that she was not the philosopher – Sartre was.59 But her diaries show that in the summer of 1926 she had an experience that shocked her, made her feel ashamed, and led her to reflect philosophically on something that would become a central theme of her mature work. She wouldn’t meet Sartre until three years later, and over time this theme would come to play a significant role in his work, too.

  She was making a pilgrimage to Lourdes with her aunt when she saw the physical suffering of the sick who sought healing. She was overwhelmed, feeling ‘disgust at all the intellectual and sentimental elegance before the invalids’, and that her own sorrows were nothing compared with their physical pain and distress. She felt ashamed in that moment, and thought that a life of complete self-giving – even ‘self-abnegation’ – was the only appropriate response.60

  But then, after reflection, she concluded that she was wrong. In her diary she urges herself not to be ashamed of living: she has been given a life and it is her duty to live it in the best possible way. To give herself away completely, in fact, would be ‘moral suicide’. But it would also be easier than deciding how much of herself to give and how much to keep. She called what was needed ‘equilibrium’: in which people gave themselves without ‘annihilat[ing] the consciousness of themselves in order to serve others’.61 She wanted to live a life of self-giving without self-loss.

  Six days later she returned to this theme in her diaries, discussing two poles of possibility: devotion and egoism. Given her childhood experiences it is tempting to read these poles along parental or gendered lines. Her mother’s abject devotion and her father’s unrepentant egoism are not mentioned in the diaries, but given what she would later write about her parents it is clear that one thing she inherited from her childhood home was an intense sense of injustice. In the diaries, Beauvoir writes that she wants to be devoted to others because she has ‘a liking for beings’. She wanted her emotions to agree with her ideas, so she asked herself: could a moral code be built on appreciation for others? Whether or not it was sufficient for others, she decided, it was sufficient for her.62

  Certainly, I am very indi
vidualistic, but is this incompatible with the devotion and disinterested love of others? It seems to me that there is one part of me that is made to be given away, another that is made to be kept and cultivated. The second part is valid in itself and guarantees the value of the other.63

  At 18 she was dissatisfied by philosophical discussions that ‘remained in a vacuum’, and was already reflecting on the distance between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in real life.64 Literature, she thought, bridged the gap: ‘the writer pleases me when he rediscovers life, the philosopher when he rediscovers the writer who will serve as an intermediary with life’.65 Beauvoir wanted to serve as such an intermediary, and in particular to show how human beings are ‘dualities’ that can be seen ‘from within’ and ‘from without’, both intensely inner and yet engaged in the world with others. She tried writing another novel in September, and this time finished a 68-page manuscript called Tentative d’existence – ‘An attempted existence’.66

  During the autumn of 1926 Beauvoir continued to wrestle with her affection for Jacques. At this stage she sincerely believed ‘a reciprocal love’ was possible between them. What Beauvoir wanted, in her own words, was ‘a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life’. She thought that love should ‘not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances’.67

  Although she was soon to change her mind, she thought she might marry someday, and that under the right circumstances marriage might be a ‘great and beautiful thing’. But her mother annoyed her: she didn’t think things with Jacques were moving quickly enough and worried about ‘a precise conclusion’: a proposal.68 Françoise schemed, sending Simone on errands so that her path would cross Jacques’s. She thought this would make Simone happy, but in fact it made her squirm. In November she wrote in her diary: ‘How little I myself choose, how much life imposes itself upon me, my life to which after all I have to resign myself.’69