Simone de Beauvoir ‘s modernity discussed in Morocco, a testimony

  I had the pleasure of being invited to the French Cultural Institute of Fès, Morocco, by its director Mr Jean Dedolin and by the person in charge of the library, Mr Hassan Id Ibrahim. I was in the beautiful city of Fès  February 12-14 to testify on Simone de Beauvoir’s modernity.

    It was an honour to be so warmly received at the University Dhar Mehraz from Fès by professor Abderrahman Tenkoul, Dean of the Faculté des Lettres, by his colleagues and students. The audience, equally composed of women and men, was sensitive to Beauvoir’s avant-garde role in supporting human rights. I mentioned  her struggles against torture, for the independence and former French colonies and for the improvement of women’s condition  victims of oppression, as well as her denunciation of the disgraceful way elderly people are treated around the world, as she wrote so well about in her essay Old age.

   Some Moroccan academics declared that they considered Beauvoir was more influential than Sartre in these days because she had dealt with more questions related to people’s daily life. In fact most people agreed that her body of work remained modern in this twenty-first century. As for myself, I preferred not to compare the two writers, since they seem to me to have been both influential , each in their own way.

    A the French Fès Institute, some people asked me about the personal relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, their complicity through writing. They seemed to be impressed by the respect they both had for each other. The audience, which was composed of students in French, academics, writers and members of members of  Moroccan women’s groups, wanted to know how Sartre and Beauvoir talked to each other about their own writings.

    Some women mentioned her book A very easy death and asked me how I had felt when last year a photograph showing Simone de Beauvoir naked was published on the cover of the weekly magazine « Le Nouvel Observateur » . I replied that I had been very shocked by this most disgraceful and disrespectful cover the same moment of the celebration of the centennial anniversary of her birth. Besides, I added, this magazine had been very close to her and her ideas for years. This cover had had one result: the French intellectuals succeeded in not mentioning the global influence of her writings and her life since they were only making useless comments on Beauvoir’s body and on the opportunity of publishing this picture.

    This conspiracy of silence on how serious her writings are was on purpose. French philosophers and writers cannot accept the idea that in the twenty first century it is a woman, not a man, who, through her thinking, her braveness, and her actions, has succeeded in being the most influential both now and in the twentieth century.