The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 1)

How Beauvoir had sex with her students and lied about it afterwards

Early in January 1940, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre that mentioned a sexual encounter she had had the previous day. She told Sartre she had not enjoyed the experience:

Yesterday at 11 we went home to Bienenfeld’s place. Embraces. If I’m to tell you everything, in addition to the rufous odour of her body she had a pungent fecal odour which made things pretty unpleasant. So far as friendship with her goes, no problem—but our physical relations couldn’t be more distasteful to me. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 252)

If you are discomforted by this passage, you’re not alone. It appears in correspondence that formed part of a collection of letters from Beauvoir to Sartre first published, along with her wartime journal, in 1990. The revelations contained within sent shockwaves through the worlds of Beauvoir scholarship and academic feminism. Her letters and journal showed Beauvoir in thrall to Sartre, whom she revered as a genius, consistently prioritising his needs and wants above her own. Her biographer, Deirdre Bair, had this to say about the revelations:

I can understand the feeling of betrayal, the pain…women felt when they learned how de Beauvoir, throughout the more than 50 years they were together, put all her needs, goals and desires second to Sartre's every impulse, how she evaded hard truths about herself like her bisexuality or the sad realities of much of her daily life, continually running errands for Sartre. (Bair, 1990, p. 32)

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the disclosures was the sexual affairs Beauvoir had with three young women, all at one time her students, and the possibility that at least part of her motive in cultivating these liaisons was to enable Sartre to pursue his own affairs with the same women. To put it crudely, there is the suspicion that Beauvoir was pimping for Jean-Paul Sartre. (This claim has been made by Bianca Lamblin, Nelson Algren and Mme Nathalie Sorokine.)

The Pact

To understand what’s going on here, you’ve got to know about the pact the two philosophers established in 1929, largely at Sartre’s behest, that provided the ground rules that underpinned their relationship for more than forty years. We know about this pact, because Beauvoir talked about it—a lot.

It had two main features. The first was a distinction between essential and contingent loves. Here’s how Beauvoir describes this aspect:

[Sartre] explained the matter to me in his favourite terminology. “What we have”, he said, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 22)

Happily, though, while Sartre sounds like every man trying to sell the advantages of polyamory to a reluctant partner, this isn’t what is going on here (supposedly):

We would never become strangers to one another, and neither would appeal for the other's help in vain; nothing would prevail against this alliance of ours… I did feel a flicker of fear, though I regarded it as mere weakness and made myself subdue it. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 23)

The second part of the pact had to do with honesty and transparency. Never lie and tell each other everything:

I was used to some reserve, and at first this rule of ours embarrassed me. But I soon came to realise its advantages. I no longer needed to worry about myself: all my actions were subjected to a kindly enough scrutiny, but with far greater impartiality than I could have achieved myself. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 23)

So what to make of all this? In intellectual and leftist circles, Beauvoir’s and Sartre's relationship was for a long time seen as a model of freedom and authenticity. Certainly, their rejection of the values of traditional marriage was unusual and radical at the time. However, it was not a relationship of equal partners—in the words of Michel Contat, Sartre was the prince royal, Beauvoir was merely his consort. (Contat, 2006, p. 117)

Sartre was the first of the two of them to make use of the sexual freedom that was on offer. Quelle surprise. Although his attempt to seduce the bored wife of a colleague was apparently not wildly successful, it did set the tone for the remainder of their relationship. This dynamic would soon evolve into a more complex web of liaisons, with Beauvoir herself taking an active role. The most notable of these entanglements involved three of Beauvoir's former students—Olga Kosakiewicz, Bianca Bienenfeld and Nathalie Sorokine. These relationships would not only test the integrity of their “eternal alliance”, but also come to raise troubling questions about power, consent and exploitation.

Olga

Olga Kosakiewicz, a seventeen-year-old White Russian émigrée, developed a schoolgirl crush on her teacher after Beauvoir praised her work in class. Olga pursued a friendship with Beauvoir, which began in earnest when Beauvoir suggested meeting outside of class. In Beauvoir’s eyes, Olga was “still a child” (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 224), but despite the nine years between them their friendship blossomed, with Olga’s feelings quickly reaching “a burning intensity” (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 217). Beauvoir’s feelings were also strong, and it wasn’t too long before Beauvoir introduced Olga to Sartre, a fateful decision that had predictable consequences.

At first, the three of them got along well together, but, as time went on, Sartre became infatuated with the young Russian girl:

My passion for her burned my humdrum impurities like the flame of a bunsen burner. I became scrawny like a cuckoo; farewell my creature comforts. (Francis & Gontier, 1987, p. 147)

This made for a very complex situation. Beauvoir and Sartre began to see themselves as part of a trio. They arranged their time equitably so they all got one-on-one time with each other, and also scheduled “plenary sessions” where they would be together as a three. However, the “splendid edifice” they had built didn’t really make anybody happy. Beauvoir was uneasy from the start, primarily because she could never love Olga in the way she loved Sartre or the way that Sartre loved Olga.

Sartre, for his part, became irrationally consumed with jealousy. He began to scrutinise Olga’s behaviour for signs that he had fallen out of favour, and would enlist Beauvoir in forensic analyses of Olga’s every word and gesture. Obviously, this didn’t best please Beauvoir, who came to the realisation that Olga inspired feelings in Sartre that she was incapable of inspiring. This was a significant blow to Beauvoir’s emotional equilibrium, producing an agony that “went far beyond mere jealousy” and leading her to ask whether the whole of her happiness rested on a “gigantic lie” (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 261).

Olga, of course, was in an impossible position. She was fond of Sartre, thought he had something of the mediaeval knight about him, but didn’t want to pursue a physical relationship, which provoked frustration and jealousy in him. At the same time, she worried that if she provoked a confrontation with Sartre, it might jeopardise Beauvoir’s feelings for her. Plus, she was financially dependent on them both, so couldn’t just up and leave. Thus, in Beauvoir’s words, the three of them found themselves being led a merry dance by this “quietly infernal machine” they had set in motion.

But this is rather disingenuous. The responsibility for the mess lies squarely with Beauvoir and Sartre, not with Olga. She was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush. They were much older, glamorous, already well-known, and well-connected socially. What did they expect to happen if they brought Olga into their relationship? Also, the power dynamic was inequitable, as Beauvior knew perfectly well:

Though we valued her youth more highly than our own experience, her role was, nevertheless, that of a child—a child up against an adult couple united by unfailing emotional bonds. However devotedly we consulted her interests, it was we who controlled the destiny of the trio. We had not established any real equality in our relationship with her, but had rather annexed her to ourselves. (Bair, 1990, p. 194)

Olga also understood, or came to understand, how the relationship was founded on unequal power, stating later in an interview that the contingent loves were like mesmerised snakes: “We did what they wanted because no matter what, we were so thrilled by their attention, so privileged to have it (Bair, 1990, p. 200).”

There is one further dimension to the relationship that is morally relevant here. In her 1990 biography, Deirdre Bair mentions the close physical friendship between Beauvoir and Olga, but notes that both women insisted that it was never sexual. However, the publication of Beauvoir’s letters and diary in the same year, provided a strong indication that this simply isn’t true. For example, in one journal entry, Beauvoir compares the sexual performance of women unfavourably with that of men, and lists Olga among her disappointments (Beauvoir, 2009, p. 200); in a letter to Sartre, she relates telling Nathalie Sorokine (more of whom later) that she had previously had sexual relations with Olga (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 212); and in another letter, she states that having sex with Sorokine was not like it was with Olga (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 255).

By today’s standards, the ethics of this situation appear suspect. There is nothing in the letters or diary to suggest that either Beauvoir or Sartre paid any regard to the modern worry—justified or not—that the freedom to consent is undermined in situations of gross power imbalance. Nor is there anything to suggest that Beauvoir was troubled by the fact that the recent origins of what we now know was sometimes a sexual relationship lay in the classroom.

However, something does need to be said here in defence of Beauvoir. There were genuine affectional ties between Beauvoir and Olga that survived the breakdown of their ill-fated experiment in polyamory, and their friendship continued well into the 1970s. During the years of WW2, in particular, they were very close, and, according to Beauvoir, came to depend upon each other in many different ways (see Bair, 1990, p. 231). Thus, although Sartre's two-year obsession with Olga undoubtedly caused Olga distress, as corroborated by a contemporaneous observer (see Bair, 1990, p. 194), the long-term impact of these early experiences remains ambiguous. Olga’s enduring friendship with Beauvoir suggests that, at least in the medium term, the consequences of this tumultuous period were not uniformly bad.

However, not all of Beauvoir's student entanglements ended quite so propitiously. The case of Bianca Bienenfeld, the second of the three students with whom Simone de Beauvoir became involved, presents a far more troubling narrative.

Part 2 is here.

References

Blair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Simon & Schuster.

Contat, M. (2006). Sartre and his other women. Journal of Romance Studies, 6(1-2), 115-124.

Beauvoir, S. (1965). The Prime of Life. Penguin Books.

Beauvoir, S. (1992). Letters to Sartre. Arcade Publishing.

Beauvoir, S. (2009). Wartime Diary. University of Illinois Press.

Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex. Vintage Books.

Francis, C., & Gontier, F. (1987). Simone de Beauvoir : a life, a love story. St. Martin's Press.