Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

Muse couples #6

Article

No. 18 • June 2020

In the lead-up to the release of our Summer of Love issue, we are sharing the love story of an iconic couple every day. Today: the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre.

text: Daan Heerma van Voss

Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps the mother of modern feminism, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism. They met in 1929 at the École Normale Supérieure. She was twenty-one, he was eighteen. From the early days of their romance, it was clear that neither of them desired a conventional ‘bourgeois’ relationship.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in their first picture together at a fair, Porte d’Orleans in June, 1929 in Paris, France. (Photo by JAZZ EDITIONS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)Photograph: Jazz Editions/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Fig 1. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in their first picture together at a fair, Porte d’Orleans in June, 1929 in Paris, France. (Photo by JAZZ EDITIONS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)Photograph: Jazz Editions/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

They formulated what they themselves called a ‘pact of transparency.’ Both would engage in affairs, relationships, and flings, but they would always return to each other. They were allowed everything, did everything, told everything. During the war, Sartre was sent to the front. His absence was not easy for De Beauvoir, though she used the time well; she wrote her first book in 1938 and her second in 1943, and went on to publish The Second Sex in 1949, her major work, in which she argued for the economic independence of women.

In his own way, Sartre also fought for independence, namely existential independence. As one of the architects and leading figures of existentialism, Sartre argued that every human being is fully responsible for the course of their life, which consists of millions of choices, large and small. At any moment of any day of your life, you could radically change direction. And they both did so regularly, Simone and he, but always side by side. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are buried next to each other in Paris.