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The Mandarins by French existentialist philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir is a long, complex novel based on the author’s political, idealogical, and personal experiences after World War II. The book is part philosophical text, part love story with subtle details changed to disguise it as fiction. It explores the varied experiences of French left-wing intellectuals after the war and their convoluted relationships with one another. De Beauvoir received the Goncourt Prize for this novel in 1954 and considered it her favorite of all her books.
The story is set in France during 1944, after the liberation from Nazi Germany. The plot revolves around a leftist intellectual circle that has been inspired by Albert Camus, who’s one of its members. De Beauvoir tells the story with alternating chapters – half are told in third person and tell about an underground newspaper editor named Henri Perron (inspired by Camus), while the other chapters are told in first-person narrator Anne Debreuilh, who many read as de Beauvoir herself.
In the novel, Robert is a character similar to Jean-Paul Satre. He and de Beauvoir started the SRL, or Socialisme et Liberté movement. One of Henri’s friends is a Communist who believes that Russia has nothing wrong with it and that those countries are good for slaves. However, Henri disagreed because he believed they had slave labor camps just like Hitler did in Germany during World War II. Near the end of this book, both men reunite after realizing how important it was to maintain political space for intellectuals who didn’t agree with Communism or Capitalism.
The story is about a French philosopher named Sartre who falls in love with an American writer. The author was involved with the real-life American writer Nelson Algren. In this book, she wrote about her relationship with him and some of her thoughts on America and its culture.
Beyond the romance, Anne also struggles with her relationship to her adult daughter and other people. She has a unique relationship with Henri Perron, as well as another writer named Scriassine. They all have conversations about politics, ideology and philosophy and how it will affect their future.
The Mandarins has many diverse aspects, but all of them revolve around the life of Left-wing intellectuals in France following World War II. De Beauvoir includes travel writing, philosophy and romance novels along with scenes that depict straight action as well as her cutting portraits of prominent literary figures at the time. Her work is considered seminal because it depicts its post war shift towards liberal politics and dismantling of resistance to Nazi occupation.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher best known for her book, The Second Sex. In it she discusses the differences between socially-constructed gender and physiological gender, as well as how they relate to women’s oppression in society. She also wrote a novel about her experiences with partner Jean-Paul Sartre, called She Came to Stay. De Beauvoir won several awards for this work including the Prix Goncourt and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Her philosophy is still taught today because of its early feminist perspective on gender issues and existentialism.
