Simone de Beauvoir Was Buried Beside Sartre, Wearing Another Man's Ring

She refused to call herself a philosopher, wrote a book at Sartre's suggestion that became feminism's founding text and was banned by the Vatican, and lived inside a pact that named one man "essential" and another "contingent." She was buried with the contingent one's ring.

Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986, at seventy-eight. Her coffin was carried through the streets of Montparnasse to the cemetery where Jean-Paul Sartre had been laid to rest six years earlier, and more than five thousand people, most of them women carrying red carnations, walked behind it. She was lowered into the grave beside Sartre. On her finger was a silver ring given to her in Chicago in 1947 by the American novelist Nelson Algren, the lover she had once filed under the category "contingent." A French magazine marked her passing with a line that stuck: the writer to whom all women owe something.

The ring is not a footnote. It is the central contradiction of her life made into jewelry. For fifty-one years she had been Sartre's partner in an arrangement the two of them designed in 1929, an arrangement with a place for everything, one "essential" love at the center, "contingent" loves around the edges, all disclosed, nothing hidden. She spent her career being called Sartre's disciple, the midwife to his philosophy, the woman who lived in his shadow. And she chose to be buried wearing the token of the man the arrangement had classified as secondary.

The pact that was not his idea

She was nineteen and studying philosophy in Paris when she wrote in her diary, "Don't be 'Mlle Beauvoir'. Be me." It was 1927. She had lost her faith at fourteen, and her family had lost its money in 1919, which had the useful effect of making the bourgeois marriage expected of her improbable. Without a dowry, she would have to work. She chose philosophy, and she kept diaries, and she filled her life with as many experiences as she could, already convinced that her vocation required her to live differently and to use herself as raw material.

Two years later she sat the agrégation, France's brutal competitive exam for philosophy teachers. At twenty-one she was the youngest candidate ever to pass it. She finished second. The man who finished first, Jean-Paul Sartre, was taking the exam for the second time. She was only the eighth woman in history to pass it, and the result guaranteed her a salary and therefore her independence.

That summer she and Sartre made the pact that would organize the rest of her life. They would be, in their word, "essential" lovers, the necessary relationship at the center of everything, and they would allow each other "contingent" loves, the accidental ones that came and went, on the single condition that they told each other everything. They never married. They never shared a home. They never had children. She had vowed as a girl never to become a housewife or a mother, and she kept that vow.

The standard story for most of a century was that Sartre designed the pact and Beauvoir accepted it, that he was the philosopher and she the novelist who dramatized his ideas. The diaries and letters that came to light after her death tell a different story. As the philosopher Kate Kirkpatrick shows in Becoming Beauvoir (2019), Beauvoir had already "come to the conclusion that she would love multiple men in the ways she thought them loveable" before she and Sartre ever discussed such an arrangement. The pact was, if anything, her idea dressed in his language. In her memoirs she had let the opposite impression stand, partly because a sexually independent woman was already scandal enough in 1929 without her also being the architect of the arrangement.

She called Sartre "the incomparable friend of my thought." They read each other's work in draft and argued over every page, and the question of who influenced whom is now unanswerable in any clean direction. What is clear is that she insisted, all her life, that she was not a philosopher. She called herself an author. "Her philosophical voice," as the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "she insisted, was merely an elaboration of Sartre's." Decades of scholarship, mostly by feminist scholars, eventually secured her a place in philosophy against her own word.

The book she wrote as a favor

The idea, as she and her biographers tell it, was Sartre's: he suggested she write on what it had meant to her to be a woman. She had never considered herself a feminist. "The idea of feminism and the sex war made no sense to me," she admitted, "until I began researching it." Her starting position was the one many gifted women of her generation held, that she was an exception, that she was not really a woman in the troublesome sense. "I did not think of myself as a woman," she said. "I was me." Then she read, and the reading broke the exception open. She worked through biology, psychoanalysis, historical myth, the literature of "the eternal feminine," and the actual lives of women under laws that, in France, still barred them from opening a bank account or working outside the home without a husband's permission. Between October 1946 and June 1949 it grew into a two-volume book. She called it The Second Sex.

Its most famous sentence appeared in the introduction: "On ne nait pas femme: on le devient." The first English translator, H. M. Parshley, rendered it in 1953 as "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The line landed as a talisman in the nature-versus-nurture argument, the thesis that femininity is not given but made, learned through socialization, imposed by a civilization that treats man as the default human being and woman as the Other. The full English text the world read for half a century was, however, a cut version. Parshley had quietly removed around fifteen percent of the French original, dropping passages he found insufficiently interesting, and the disfigured book was all most English readers knew until Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first complete translation in 2009.

The scandal came before the translation, and it came fast. In May 1949 Les Temps Modernes, the journal she co-edited, previewed a chapter called "The Sexual Initiation of the Woman." The first volume sold twenty-two thousand copies in a week. The second volume, with its frank pages on female sexuality, detonated. The Catholic novelist François Mauriac used his column in Le Figaro littéraire to call on the youth of France to condemn pornography and, in a private letter to one of her colleagues that soon circulated, wrote the sentence that perhaps best measures the hypocrisies of the moment: "Your employer's vagina has no secrets from me." Albert Camus, her friend, in her account "accused me of making the French male look ridiculous." Professors, she said, hurled the book across the room. In her own telling, the mail turned savage. "Unsatisfied, frigid, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything, even an unmarried mother." People snickered at her in restaurants and pointed. The Vatican placed The Second Sex on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1956, where it stayed until the Church abolished the Index altogether in 1966.

Looking back in 1963, she was calm about all of it. "It is possibly the book that has brought me the greatest satisfaction of all those I have written," she said. "If I am asked what I think of it today, I have no hesitation in replying: I'm all for it."

What the scandal obscured, and what the cut translation slowed, was the argument's architecture. Her earlier philosophy had been a doctrine of radical individual freedom, the existentialist line that each person must invent themselves and choose their values. The war, the Occupation (she was dismissed from her teaching post by the Nazis in 1941), and now the research for The Second Sex pushed her toward a harder truth: freedom is not equally distributed. Some people are more trapped by their "situation" than others, and a woman, she wrote, is "the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other." She had already put the ethical version of this in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947): "to will oneself free is also to will others free." The Second Sex was the same insight applied to half the species.

The contingent love who was not contingent

In January 1947 she sailed for America on a lecture tour. In February, on a friend's tip, she looked up a novelist in Chicago named Nelson Algren. He showed her the underside of his city, the Polish bars, the cheap rooming houses, the streets he wrote about. By the time she left for Los Angeles she was already writing to him, and she came back.

On May 10, 1947, Algren gave her a silver ring. She wrote to him in English, a language she handled with a charm that sometimes slipped into baby talk, and she addressed him as a wife addresses a husband: "my beloved husband," "your loving wife." Across the Atlantic, twice a week for years, she told him about Paris and Sartre and the journal and the politics and the cafes, and she told him she loved him. "I write to you with the little red bright stylo you have given to me," she wrote, "and I have your ring at my finger." More than three hundred of these letters survived and were published in 1998 as A Transatlantic Love Affair.

The arrangement with Sartre had a name for a man like Algren. He was a contingent love. The trouble was that he did not experience himself as contingent. He wanted marriage, and a life in the same city, and he would not learn French and she would not leave Paris. She explained the wall between them with an honesty that is almost cruel in its clarity. "I could not live just for happiness and love," she told him. "I could not give up my writing, in the only place where my writing and work may have a meaning." And in the same letter: "I tried to explain that I cannot give my life to you," she wrote, and "I could never give everything to you, and I just feel bad about it."

She gave him instead a novel. The Mandarins (1954), which won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, is dedicated to Algren, who appears in it as the character Lewis Brogan. She also wrote about the affair, plainly, in her memoir Force of Circumstance (1963), where she used the word "contingent." Algren read it and felt he had been had. "How can love ever be contingent?" he demanded in a 1965 review. "Contingent upon what?" He never forgave the taxonomy. He raged at her in print and then fell silent, and they did not speak again before he died.

She kept the ring. In the biographies, Algren "seems to occupy the place of an 'essential love' far more than Sartre," as the Stanford Encyclopedia cautiously puts it, and yet the pact with Sartre was never broken. She would not choose. She could not give Algren a life in one city, and she would not give Sartre the satisfaction of being the only essential man, and so she lived in the gap between the two, and when she died the gap closed around a piece of silver from Chicago.

The feminist she became at sixty-four

For twenty years after The Second Sex she refused the label that the book had earned her. She was not, she said, a feminist. She believed in equality between the sexes, but for most of her career she did not believe in a separate women's movement. The women who read her disagreed. They wrote her letters by the thousand, and the book sold steadily, and second-wave feminism was built on a sentence she had written.

The shift came late and it came publicly. On April 5, 1971, she put her name to a manifesto in Le Nouvel Observateur signed by 343 French women who admitted to having had an illegal abortion. Her opening line was the one that mattered: "Je déclare que je suis l'une d'elles," I declare that I am one of them. The manifesto dared the state to prosecute 343 prominent women at once, and it is generally credited with forcing the law that legalized abortion in France in 1975. The next year, 1972, in another interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, she finally said it: she was a feminist. She was sixty-four. She went on to help found the journal Questions Féministes and to install a feminist section in Les Temps Modernes, and she marched, and she wrote on old age (The Coming of Age, 1970) and on the torture of Algerian women by the French army, and she lived the rest of her life as the public figure the book had made her.

The last irony belongs to the obituaries. When Sartre died in 1980, she was barely mentioned in the tributes, though she had been his partner for fifty-one years. She wrote Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), the only major book of hers he never read before publication, an unflinching account of his last years, his decline, the strokes, the drink. When she died six years later, Sartre dominated her obituaries too. The woman who had refused to call herself a philosopher, and who had spent her life being introduced as someone else's, was buried as the mother of post-1968 feminism, next to the man she had called essential, wearing the ring of the man she had called contingent.

Read the full life: Becoming Beauvoir: A Life, by Kate Kirkpatrick (2019), the biography that used the diaries and letters released after Beauvoir's death to dismantle the "Sartre's disciple" story and restore her as a philosopher in her own right. For the older, fuller, warts-and-all account, Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (1990) remains indispensable, and Beauvoir's own four-volume autobiography, beginning with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), is the primary record she wrote herself.