The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 3)

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

This is the final part of a three part series. First part is here. Second part, here.

Nathalie

Hazel Barnes raises the possibility that one reason for Beauvoir’s increasing disenchantment with Bianca Bienenfeld was the appearance of a new young woman on the scene. (Barnes, 1991, p. 22) The pattern will be familiar by now. Nathalie Sorokine, seventeen years old, a student of Russian descent, became infatuated with her glamorous philosophy teacher, and set out to cultivate a friendship with her. She’d “inadvertently” bump into Beauvoir on the Paris Métro, and then walk to the lycée with her, discussing philosophy. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 347)

After Sorokine's success in her baccalaureate, Beauvoir supported her ambition to study at the Sorbonne by helping with tuition fees. As their relationship progressed, Beauvoir found herself increasingly drawn to the young Russian. By July 1939, their relationship had become physical, as indicated by a letter Beauvoir wrote to Sartre later that year:

Sorokine turned up and, as in the month of July, pulled me first onto the bed, then… into her arms and towards her mouth; finally, after about an hour, she even drew my hand to specific parts of her body. [October 11, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 111)

Sorokine was sexually naive, and Beauvoir was reluctant to become involved in a full-blown physical affair, but not reluctant enough to keep Sorokine out of her bed. In fact, Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre towards the end of 1939 suggest a gradually deepening intimate relationship between Beauvoir and her young student.

Unsurprisingly, some commentators have sought to downplay Beauvoir's active role in the relationship's development. Let’s take Kate Kirkpatrick’s account in her biography, Becoming Beauvoir, as illustrative of this tendency, and see if it stands up to scrutiny.

Kirkpatrick makes it seem almost as if Sorokine forced Beauvoir into a sexual relationship:

In December Beauvoir told Nathalie that it wouldn’t work for them to have a physical relationship. But then, on 14 December 1939, Sorokine tried to caress the clothed Beauvoir instead of working on Kant. That night she wrote to Sartre, ‘There is nothing to be done, she wants to sleep with me.’ She didn’t want to, she wrote in her diary, ‘but that’s what she really wanted – and the situation is disgusting and impossible’. (Kirkpatrick, 2019, p. 170)

Let’s look at what really happened.

The first point to make is that by December they were already in a physical relationship—if kisses, embraces, and hands being drawn to specific parts of Sorokine’s body, count as physical—and what Beauvoir actually reports saying to Sorokine is that the physical aspect wasn’t working out, so perhaps they’d better put a stop to it. Here’s the relevant passage in her December 14th letter to Sartre:

[S]he seized her notebook on Kant and said: ‘Let’s work, but let’s stay here.’ Then, five minutes later, she burst into tears: “We’re not working—I’ll never make any progress.’ I told her I wasn’t fooled. That it was these physical relations which made her edgy, and that in fact the whole thing was a mess and perhaps we’d better put an end to them. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 211)

The statement that Sorokine tried to caress the clothed Beauvoir instead of working on Kant is similarly misleading. Here’s Beauvoir’s account of the incident:

We were supposed to work, but we began by tender embraces and when the hour to work came she still held me in her arms. Then, after five minutes, she said nervously: ‘I’d like us to either work or talk.’ I tried to stand up, but she clung to me and kissed me. It was more passionate than ever: she removed a pin from my blouse and a shoe from my foot, in a symbolic disrobing, and attempted clumsy caresses through my clothes. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 211)

Technically, yes, Beauvoir was fully clothed, and Sorokine tried to caress her through clothing, but this wasn't some lecherous, unwelcome pawing, batted away by an outraged Beauvoir; it was in the context of kissing, tender embraces, and a symbolic disrobing. The word "attempted" surely references Sorokine's inexperience and hesitancy, rather than any rebuttal or rejection or failure to caress.

It is true that Beauvoir wrote in her diary that she didn’t want to sleep with Sorokine, but it’s not clear she meant that in a general sense, rather than just there and then. Here’s the relevant passage:

She threw herself into my arms saying… that she loved me in a physical way and that she did not want to feel ashamed about anything with me—I hesitated, I did not want to sleep with her, but that’s what she really wanted—and the situation is disgusting and impossible. (Beauvoir, 2009, p. 191)

The use of the past tense in the phrase, “I hesitated, I did not want to sleep with her”, at the very least leaves open the possibility that this lack of desire was only a temporary state, applying to that particular moment.

In fact, if one reads to the end of the letter Beauvoir sent Sartre on December 14th (the event we’re talking about actually occurred on December 13th, not the same day, as Kirkpatrick states), it’s pretty clear that by this point Beauvoir was enamoured with the young Russian, and more than happy to continue the relationship. In fact, she says as much herself:

I’ll have to sleep with her, there’s no help for it. I'm quite put out—and pretty well smitten—by this little personage. Well, so what? (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 212)

It’s no surprise then that about a month later, and not for the first time, she found herself in bed with Sorokine again. This time things went a lot further:

There were embraces—one-sided. Then she said we had to turn on the lights, so she could read me her diaries—and she read me some charming little passages on the education of her will. But we didn’t get far—having remained in bed and unclad and the embraces started up again, this time with reciprocity. It’s certainly not what it was with Kos. But I’ve a very keen taste for her body, and find these moments extremely pleasing. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 255)

It’s absolutely clear that by this point Beauvoir was sexually involved with Sorokine, it’s not just kissing and cuddling. So how should we assess her actions in this case?

Well, assuming we take Beauvoir’s account, as related through her letters and diary, at face value, it is not obvious that she was perpetrating a horrible wrong in these interactions with Sorokine. There was certainly no coercion: Sorokine, by now eighteen years old, was clearly a willing participant in these exchanges. There was no significant deception: it's obvious from reading Beauvoir's letters that she was very taken with the young woman. There is no complicating Jean-Paul Sartre factor: he was absent from Paris at this time, and later on, Sorokine found it easy enough to dismiss his attentions. Sure, there is the modern worry about asymmetrical power, but it would be unreasonable to expect Beauvoir's attitudes towards consent to have been shaped by 21st-century moral imagination. In this case, unlike in the cases of Olga and Bienenfeld, Sorokine doesn't seem to have been sufficiently mesmerised by the milieu surrounding Beauvoir's celebrity such that one might reasonably expect Beauvoir to have considered that perhaps mesmerised snakes cannot consent properly (if, indeed, it is true that they cannot).

It is ironic, therefore, that it is in the case of Sorokine, rather than in either of the previous two cases, that Beauvoir got herself in trouble with the authorities.

The trouble started in December 1941, when Sorokine’s mother filed a complaint about Beauvoir with the Vichy ministry of education. Thanks to the work of Ingrid Galster we now know the details of this complaint. (Galster, 2001)

The origin of the complaint is a little murky, but it seems that a young man, a Monsieur Dupas, was, in one way or another, the catalyst. He had dated Sorokine for a year, and wanted to marry her, but Sorokine wasn’t interested, and decided to ditch him. According to Beauvoir, this angered Mme Sorokine, who considered Dupas to be an ideal suitor, so she asked Beauvoir to use her influence with her daughter to ensure the ill-suited couple stayed together. Beauvoir refused to get involved, and Mme Sorokine punished her for this refusal by reporting Beauvoir to the authorities for inciting a minor to debauchery.

Although Mme Sorokine’s complaint does not make explicit reference to Dupas, it seems very likely that the source of her information about Beauvoir’s relationship with her daughter was the jilted young man. The complaint alleges among other things that Beauvoir had, in effect, groomed her daughter for a sexual relationship, seduced her, and then behaved in such a way so as to ensure Sorokine’s material and psychological dependence. It also alleges that Beauvoir had hoped to procure a lover for Sartre by introducing him to Sorokine, and that these were events that had played out before with previous students, namely, Olga and Bienenfeld.

The authorities took these allegations seriously—rightly so, given the level of detail provided—and began an investigation, during which they interviewed Beauvoir, Sartre, Sorokine, Olga Kosakiewicz, Wanda Kosakiewicz (by this point, Sartre’s lover) and Jacques-Laurent Bost. Not a single person among Beauvoir’s immediate circle admitted that the allegations might be true. They all lied, to put it bluntly, presumably, given the apparent level of coordination, at the behest of Beauvoir and Sartre.

Sorokine stated that she was great friends with Beauvoir, but was “normal”, had never had sex with a woman, and the only reason Beauvoir spent a lot of time in her hotel room was because her own room was too cold. Yes, she had told her ex-boyfriend that she’d slept with Beauvoir, but only as a ruse to get him out of her life.

Sartre, for his part, confirmed that Beauvoir and Sorokine were friends, but denied that Beauvoir had ever had any sexual interest in women (a barefaced lie, obviously).

Olga Kosakiewicz confirmed that she had been a student of Beauvoir’s, with whom she continued to enjoy a warm friendship, but she denied that Beauvoir had ever shown any sexual interest in her. She was certainly not aware of any sexual contact between Beauvoir and Nathalie Sorokine. Similarly, Jacques-Laurent Bost denied that he had ever been Beauvoir’s lover—again, just a barefaced lie—and insisted that he knew nothing of any relations between Beauvoir and Sorokine.

Needless to say, Beauvoir also lied to the investigators, telling them that although Sorokine had developed heightened feelings for her teacher, she had never encouraged them, instead directing her towards “normal” sexual relations. She added that Mme Sorokine was obviously very angry about the situation with Monsieur Dupas, but as far as she was concerned she had done the right thing in advising Sorokine to break up with her now ex-boyfriend. She confirmed that she had been Sartre’s lover for six years, but outright lied when she said she had never been sexually intimate with Bost.

In the face of this pattern of denial and deception, it is not surprising that the inquiry found the accusation that Beauvoir had incited a minor to debauchery to have been not proven. Put simply, there wasn’t enough concrete evidence that Beauvoir had diverted Sorokine from a “normal” life, or that they were having sex with each other, for the inquiry to find in favour of the complainant.

However, this was not the end of the matter. At the beginning of April 1942, The Pétainist rector of the University of Paris, Gilbert Gidel, wrote to the Paris Academy recommending Beauvoir’s exclusion from the Academy’s roster of instructors. At a time when Vichy France was focused on rebuilding its “moral fabric”, he could not countenance the continued employment of a teacher who had lived as Sartre’s concubine for six years, who taught homosexual writers such as Proust and Gide, who resided in a hotel, and graded in Parisian cafés, and who was suspected of improper conduct with her female students. Just over a year later in June 1943, Beauvoir’s licence to teach was revoked, and although it was restored after liberation, she never taught again.

Conclusion

Simone de Beauvoir's complex and often problematic relationships with three of her young female students—Olga Kosakiewicz, Bianca Bienenfeld, and Nathalie Sorokine—reveal a stark contrast between her public reputation and private actions. In particular, her willingness to introduce these young women to Jean-Paul Sartre, in the full knowledge, surely, that he would attempt to seduce them, is deeply troubling. More broadly, the unequal power dynamics that characterised these relationships, together with her willingness to deceive lovers, friends and the authorities, often at the whim of a man she considered essential, represent a significant challenge to her standing as a feminist icon. Is there anything that can be said in her defence or is her legacy inevitably tarnished by the way she conducted her private affairs?

In an article written in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Beauvoir’s letters and wartime diary, Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir’s biographer, conceded that Beauvoir systematically ignored all the principles of equality that she had championed, but insisted we shouldn’t judge her too harshly for what were effectively private choices. She flagged up what she considered to be a double-standard in the way that men and women are treated:

We don't impose… [a] standard of perfection upon male writers; we don't discredit their work when we learn how reprehensible or disappointing their lives may have been. No one has suggested, for example, that we reject the existential philosophy of Sartre because of his notorious womanising or his self-serving behaviour during World War II, but they do seem to believe we should reject de Beauvoir's because she went along with it. (Bair, 1990, p. 32)

She has got a point, of course, and it bears fleshing out just a little. There is the danger that we’ll judge Beauvoir more harshly than we would a man given identical circumstances just because Beauvoir is a woman. To borrow some terminology from the sociology of crime, in the terms of patriarchal norms, Beauvoir is doubly deviant: she’s not only sleeping with her students, she’s a woman sleeping with her female students (so maybe, triply deviant), and women just shouldn’t do that sort of thing.

It’s worth emphasising, therefore, that Sartre is every bit as culpable as Beauvoir in these events. The focus here has been Beauvoir, but it could just have easily been Sartre, and all the problematic elements would have remained in place, even if they had differed in their specifics.

But there is something not quite right with Bair’s defence of Beauvoir. Sartre’s reputation doesn’t rely upon the contribution he made to feminist theory. Yes, he’s sleazy, but he hasn’t made his name as an opponent of sleaziness. A more apt comparison would be discovering that Mahatma Gandhi regularly engaged in bar brawls. Such a revelation would undoubtedly tarnish his legacy as a pacifist icon.

Crucially, though, it wouldn’t touch the arguments Gandhi made for pacifism. Those remain in place, and stand or fall on their own terms, regardless of whether or not he was able to live up to them. The failure of a writer to match up to their own standards might lead us to question whether those standards are realistic, but the issue of empirical warrant will never be settled on the basis of the life of a single person.

The same principle applies to Simone de Beauvoir's legacy. Her personal life was undeniably flawed— perhaps irreparably damaging our view of her personal ethics—but the merit of her seminal work, The Second Sex, is orthogonal to the question of her individual failings. Its enduring value lies not in the perfection of its author, but in its message of female emancipation, the novelty of its arguments, and its lasting impact on feminist theory and women's lives globally. Beauvoir’s personal failings are a legitimate topic of conversation, especially given how she put her own life at the forefront of her literary output. Her failings undoubtedly complicate our view of her as an individual and diminish her standing as a feminist icon, but they do not undermine the significance of her ideas and intellectual contribution to the feminist cause.

References

Bair, D. (1990, November 18). Do as she said, not as she did. The New York Times Magazine, 32.

Barnes, H. E. (1991). Simone de Beauvoir's journal and letters: A poisoned gift? Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 8(1), 13-29. 10.1163/25897616-00801003

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.

Galster, I. (2001). Beauvoir est exclue de l'université retour sur une affaire classée. Contemporary French Civilization, 25(1), 109-130.

Joseph, G. (1991). Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944. A. Michel.

Kirkpatrick, K. (2019). Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Klaw, B. (1999-2000). Simone de Beauvoir and the other woman: A philosophy of the jealous. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 16(1), 20-32.

Lamblin, B. (1996). Disgraceful Affair. Northeastern University Press.

Lamblin, B. (1998-1999). A disgraceful triangle. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 15(1), 145-155.

Rowley, H. (2007). Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Vintage Books.

Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939 (S. d. Beauvoir, Ed.). Scribner's.