Critics generally agree that Beauvoir's novel Les Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, is an important work of historical fiction, chronicling the lives and loves of left-wing intellectuals in Paris during the years following World War II. In this essay I argue that Les Mandarins is as much about the war as about the postwar, and that its meaning for contemporary readers was deeply linked (even if not in a fully recognized way) to memories of the troubled period of the Occupation. I develop the concept of “ambivalent memory,” as it refers in particular to two of the most problematic aspects of that period: the role of the Vichy government in the persecution of Jews, and the ambiguities and disagreements concerning the Resistance. More generally, the novel raises questions about memory and its inevitable obverse, forgetting. It is from our own contemporary perspective, heavily informed by concerns over memory and World War II, that this aspect of Les Mandarins comes to the fore.
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Memory Troubles
Remembering the Occupation in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins
Susan Rubin Suleiman
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 4–17 (14 total)
From Shame towards an Ethics of Ambiguity
Ruth Kitchen
For Sartre, shame is not an ethical but an ontological experience. With this in mind, the article examines the philosophical connection between shame and ambiguity through analysis of the experiences of abortion and the Nazi Occupation. The article demonstrates how Beauvoir develops Sartre's ontological notion of shame into an ethical philosophy of ambiguity as a result of wartime experiences. It demonstrates how encounters with shame, abortion, ambiguity and Occupation life in Beauvoir's 1945 novel Le sang des autres elucidate and are developed by Sartre and Beauvoir's philosophies of shame and ambiguity. The paper proposes that Sartre's and Beauvoir's thought was shaped by living through the Nazi Occupation and reveals how the memory of wartime shame is activated in contemporary ethical dilemmas in later literary works of both writers.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 55–79 (25 total)
Different Oppressions: A Feminist Exploration of Anti-Semite and Jew
Linda A. Bell
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew was published shortly after the end of the Nazi occupation of France. Written in France, by a Frenchman, it is about French anti-Semites and French Jews. While this may seem to restrict the application of what Sartre has to say, I felt from my first encounter with the book that his observations and analyses have enormous potential in helping us to understand sexism and even heterosexism as well as racism, including possibly different forms of anti-Semitism.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 1997
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (20 total)
Book Reviews
K. Steven Vincent Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism by Jonathan Beecher
Thomas Kselman Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France by Sarah A. Curtis
Hollis Clayson Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century by Philip Nord
Alice Bullard The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 by Peter Zinoman
Michael Miller Cette vilaine affaire Stavisky. Histoire d’un scandale politique by Paul Jankowski, trans. Patrick Hersant
Philip Nord Les Orphelins de la République: Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940-1945) by Olivier Wieviorka
Daniel G. Cohen The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 by Pieter Lagrou
Warren Motte French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire by Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize
Christopher S. Thompson “Être Rugby”: Jeux du masculin et du féminin by Anne Saouter
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2002
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 120–151 (32 total)
The End as Present in the Means in Sartre's Morality and History: Birth and Re-inventions of an Existential Moral Standard
Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone
The question whether, in the interim, the "socialist morality" allows adequate restraint on revolutionary action, cannot fairly be answered in abstraction from history, in this case our epoch. We submit that the group of projects called corporate "globalization" - imposing free trade, privatization, and dominance of transnational corporations - shapes that epoch. These projects are associated with polarization of wealth, deepening poverty, and an alarming new global U.S. military domination. Using 9/11 as pretext for a "war on terror," this domination backs corporate globalization. If Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria made Sartre and Beauvoir assign moral primacy to overcoming oppressive systems, then U.S. global occupation should occasion rebirth of that commitment. Parallels among the three occupations are striking. France's turning of colonial and metropolitan working classes against each other is echoed by globalization's pitting of (e.g.) Chinese against Mexican workers in a race to lower wages to get investment. Seducing first-world workers with racial superiority and cheap imports from near-slavery producers once again conceals their thralldom to their own bosses. Nazi and French use of overwhelming force and even torture are re-cycled by the U.S. and its agents, again to hide the vulnerability of their small forces amidst their enemies.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–27 (27 total)
In Memory of Eleanor Rathbone, so-called ‘MP for Refugees’
Susan Cohen
, the Nazi occupation of Austria in March, that transformed the escalating European refugee crisis into a catastrophe, and propelled Eleanor into a more vigorous campaign that focused on the welfare and rescue of refugees, especially Jews, in and from
Temporal Vertigo and Time Vortices on Greece’s Central Plain
Daniel M. Knight
identified – dated – to Ottoman landlord agreements, Nazi occupation and life under the military junta. All these episodes of the past are, for people like Dimitris, part of the assemblage of his everyday life. 9 Pertinent to considering the meeting ground
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 32–44 (13 total)
Gabriel Josipovici at 75
A Celebration and Personal Contribution
Jeremy Lane
leave her home in Egypt and make her way, with Gabriel her infant son, to France and an uncertain future during the years of Nazi occupation in the Second World War. We are all migrants, it could be said. Migrancy has been the condition of all humanity
Anchoring Retro Spirou et Fantasio and Spin-off Albums
Annick Pellegrin
part, is set during the Nazi occupation of Brussels. Yann explained that the title was a reference to the 1953 French crime film La Môme vert-de-gris [ Poison Ivy ] but it also clearly reflects both Spirou's job (he is a ‘groom’, that is to say, a
In European Comic Art
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 13–33 (21 total)
Collaboration in Focus
Photographic Evidence in the French Purge Trials, 1944–1949
Abigail E. Lewis
In 2008 a photography exhibition featuring color photographs from occupied Paris sparked public outrage in France regarding the photographs’ unclear status as evidence of life under Nazi occupation. For critics, the sunny technicolor hues that
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 73–98 (26 total)