Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor,[1] and Françoise (born) Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.[2]
Beauvoir was intellectually precocious from a young age, fueled by her father’s encouragement: he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!”[3] After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg. She first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or beaver).[1] The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.[4]
[edit]Middle years
[edit]Sartre
Sartre was dazzlingly intelligent and was just under 5 feet (1.5 m) tall.[5] During October 1929, the two became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him.[6] One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease".[7] Near the end of her life, Beauvoir said, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry." So they became an imaginary married couple.[8] Beauvoir chose to never marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre.[9] She never had children.[9] This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes and to travel, write, teach, and to have (male and female - the latter often shared) lovers.[1][10]
[edit]School teaching
She started her teaching career at a secondary school in Marseilles in 1931 and moved to the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen[11][12]
[edit]Ephebophilia debate
A number of de Beauvoir's young female lovers were underage, and the nature of some of these relationships, some of which she instigated while working as a school teacher, has led to a biographical controversy and debate over whether de Beauvoir had inclinations towardsephebophilia.[13][14][15][16] A former student, Bianca Lamblin, originally Bianca Bienenfeld, later wrote critically about her seduction by her teacher, Simone de Beauvoir, when she was a 17-year-old lycee student in her book, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée.[17] In 1941, de Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had, in 1939, seduced her 17-year-old lycee pupil Nathalie Sorokine.[18] De Beauvoir would, along with other French intellectuals, later petition for an abolition of all age of consent laws in
