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Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement, Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committedClaudine Monteil, Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1             In this essay I examine Beauvoir’s difficult and contentious relationship with the USSR.   In 1956, she had the courage to provide the Hungarian people a forum to tell detailed stories of their resistance to the brutal Communist invasion in a remarkable special issue of Les Temps Modernes. My essay provides quotations from this issue, and in this essay I give the details of the evolution of her relationship with the Hungarian rebels and with the French left. 

            The title of the Beauvoir’s articles, such as “The Years of Intellectual Terror (1949-1953)”, are in themselves polemics, and reveal that she was quite depressed during this era.  At the time when the French left needed to be united on the question of the Algerian war, internal fights divided the opposition. Beauvoir, who was viciously attacked by many on the Left when The Second Sex was published, was attacked yet again, sometimes brutally, by the Communists.              I spoke with Beauvoir about these attacks on her political work, and she reminded me that since in the 1970s we were also dismissed and denigrated because we were fighting for women’s rights. “One gets used to it. We just need to continue,” she said.

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Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement, Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committedClaudine Monteil, Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1) 

            Beauvoir’s work was very popular in the United States after World War II.

          Academics, philosophers and writers were acquainted with existentialism, the philosophy of freedom. Sartre, as a man and as writer (no women writers were invited at the time) had gone to the US and met writers and the media.  Beauvoir had travelled to the U.S. before she finished writing The Second Sex. In my essay, I analyze how her relationships with her intellectual companion and lover Nelson Algren, and the AfroAmerican writer Richard Wright  (whose writings she published in translation in Les Temps Modernes) made her both an intriguing and puzzling figure during the Cold War.

         Ironically, the United States was the literary market in which her work was the most popular. Her book, The Old Age (La Vieillesse) sold hundreds of thousands of copies in a few weeks.  In the context of the Cold War, I also analyze Beauvoir’s essay, “A Transatlantic Affair: letters to Nelson Algren”” a collection of day-by-day letters to Nelson Algren.  

            Further, I quote diplomatic reports mentioning how Beauvoir’s popularity surprised French diplomats in embassies abroad. And, having been a friend of hers, I explore how her relationship to the United States became less contentious and more serene as a result of her connections to the international women’s movement.  

in Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement, Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committedClaudine Monteil, Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1 

            I made a trip to China in 1979, shortly after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the cultural revolution when the Chinese government was starting to open up to the western world.  Shortly after my return, I had had the occasion to discuss Beauvoir’s essay on China, La Longe Marche, with her. In my critique, I analyze her political, economic, and sociological perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, and include details of  the meeting she and Sartre had with Mao Zedong.             My essay includes analysis of the French diplomatic reports, from a geostrategic point of view, of the perceived motivation for the Chinese invitation of Beauvoir and Sartre at a time when France and China had not yet established diplomatic relations. 

I also provide details of my meetings with the Dutch movie director Joris Ivens, a friend of Chou En Laï, who filmed parts of the Long March, and his wife who I befriended in the student movement. I also pay tribute to Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s recollections on directing movies with Joris Ivens in China in the 1970’s, and her surprisingly revealing conversations with Chou-En-Laї about the French student movement.              The fact that three of my books on the lives and work of Beauvoir and Sartre have been quickly translated into Chinese, confirms the interest and reverence that Chinese intellectuals have for them.  Beauvoir’s intellectual commitment and political activism against the possible colonialism of China by the Western world provides new insights to a more nuanced understanding of  modern China.  

in Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement, Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committedClaudine Monteil, Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1)             In the interest of raising young people’s consciousness about the dangers of fascism and Nazism, I relate how Simone de Beauvoir supported my intention to participate in a seminar the Italian journalist and former congresswoman Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi was organizing at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes.  The title of the seminar was “Elements for an Analysis of Fascism.”  I had the privilege of becoming a close friend of Macciocchi and during the next few years we would see each other almost every day at the University or in Paris.  

            Bright and lively, the petite, blond Macciocchi often dazzled and baffled her audience with her wit and erudition.  As a 17 year-old, she joined the Italian resistance with a friend of her youth, the movie director Luchino Visconti, and carried a gun to fight Mussolini’s supporters.  She later joined the Italian Communist Party which was less doctrinaire in the Stalinist tradition than the other branches of the Party in Europe.             Macciocchi had primarily been a Communist congresswoman from the region of Napoli and had written a highly respected book on the terrible condition of her citizens.  One of her special interests was the exploitation of women who went blind because they were forced to work to saw in dark, stifling rooms. The essay entitled “Lettres de l’intérieur du part” (“Letters From the Interior of the Party”), was written to the  philosopher Louis Althusser and was published by Maspero in 1970. It had inspired my generation of students from the 1970’s.  

            Like a lot of political writing of the time, another of Macciocchi’s essays, About China, is criticized today because it was seen as too favourable to the cultural revolution. This, along with other essays was got Macciocchi into trouble with the Italian Communist party.              In 1974, the university Paris VIII-Vincennes was renowned for its exceptional intellectual vitality. I was eager to attend Macciocchi’s seminar in which she had critiqued films such as “The Jew Suss ,” produced under the Mussolini and Hitler regimes for fascist propaganda purposes.  She wanted to show young students born after World War II how fascist thinking and propaganda work.  These films were discussed almost frame by frame to clearly show the intellectual traps and psychological manipulation of fascism with the participation of historians and resistants.   

            For young feminists, this seminar was extremely important because fascism is linked to the worst form of patriarchy in society.               Macciocchi’s seminar provoked outrage and protests among the most prejudiced leftist male students. They insulted Maccicochi with both political and sexual  slurs, and threatened her physically.  This protest was so violent that I and several other feminist students sometimes had to protect her.  Beauvoir supported Macciocchi’s seminar and let her know how important she thought her teaching was.              I recall these attacks on Macciocchi’s seminar and Beauvoir’s support in vivid details.  Macciocchi’s seminar, attended by former resisters, anti-fascist philosophers and historians, was also attended by the Italian movie director Paolo Pasolini, her old friend and companion in the struggle against fascism. Pasolini was assassinated in November 1975  by a group of young  Italian fascists.  I was with Macciocchi when she learned of Pasolini’s murder, and was keenly aware of how traumatic his death was for her.  Her seminar was taking a tragic tool  which she and I never forgot. 

in Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement, Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committed,

Claudine Monteil, Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1     

         I have spent these last two years rereading issues of the monthly literary review Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times) a journal published by Beauvoir and Sartre since 1945, which enabled its French audience to discover writers and human rights activists from all over the world.  In collaboration with Sartre, Beauvoir was the review’s primary its editor.  She and Sartre looked at the world from a global perspective at a time when people did not have the opportunity to travel as much as they do now.       

         Over the years that I knew Beauvoir, I had many conversations with her about fascism and totalitarianism. Because my generation was born after World War II, she considered it of outmost importance to educate us about the way nazism and fascism functioned, especially in the way that it manipulated people’s minds.  She  was especially concerned that future generations  might be better able to recognize, understand, and combat totalitarian movements.  

         It was from this perspective that she and Sartre decided to publish an illuminating report of Dr G. M. Gilbert, a professor of  psychology at Princeton University who interviewed the Nazi Commandant Hermann Göring while he was a prisoner of the Allies before and during the Nuremberg trial.           

        Dr. Gilbert analyses Göring’s character and psychology, his childhood fascination with  violence, and his views regarding Jews.  Most revealing was Göring’s behind the scenes recollection of dynamics between Hitler, Chamberlain and the French representative Daladier at the Munich conference in 1938.  The Munich accord as related by Göring to Dr Gilbert is in itself a lesson in history and diplomacy!  

       This article is reported in the first part of my essay “A Woman Engaged in the Struggle for Human Rights”.

in Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement,
Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committed
Claudine Monteil,
Editions L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1

   My research confirms that French government officials had been carefully following Beauvoir and Sartre’s activities on their trips abroad, when they gave lectures and met prominent citizens, officials, and heads of State. Beauvoir is described in a less critical tone than Sartre. Her meetings with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba are carefully reported in a critical way.

   In the reports Beauvoir is referred to as “Miss de Simone de Beauvoir” even though she is not a very young woman a the time. In reality Beauvoir’s speeches on the conditions of women after World War II were not considered a subject worthy of attention.

  But in one of her lectures in the United States after the war, before the publication of The Second Sex, I quote the comments of a French Consul who was surprised and baffled by the fact that a woman philosopher could be so bright and was welcomed in such a warm way by her American audience. In this lecture she defines existentialist philosophy as a positive and optimistic way to look at the world—a concept readily accepted by her American audience.

  My essay presents quotes from diplomatic reports that are often ironic and unexpected.

60th anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex :My new essay: Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modernité et engagement,Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committedClaudine Monteil,Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1 

  This fall we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex, the germinal work of modern feminism written in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir.  Because I was close to Beauvoir during the last sixteen years of her life and worked with her on key issues for women’s rights both in France and around the globe, I have written an essay, published today, to review her engagement in these issues, to evaluate the modern relevance of her published work, and to highlight the issues she fought for during her lifetime as a consummate feminist activist. 

   This essay, entitled Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, Modernité et engagement,( Simone de Simone de Beauvoir, modern and committed), (Ed L’Harmattan ISBN 978-2-296-10025-1), presents a political and literary analysis of her works and her life in the context of current geostrategy and globalization. My book presents new documents and details from government archives, primarily from the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (equivalent of the State Department in the US) which reported on the numerous trips and interactions of Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre with political activists internationally.  My research in these archives provides insight, perspective and analysis of Beauvoir and Sartre’s activism and support of revolutionary governments, especially Cuba and China, and offers surprising points of view, anecdotes and information that has not been available before. 

  I explore how Beauvoir’s primary concerns: denunciation of dictatorships and totalitarianism, torture, women’s oppression in many countries, the condition of the elderly and the availability of health care, are still as relevant in the 21st century as they were during her lifetime. Simone de Beauvoir was a human rights activist ahead of her time, and my research explains why her books are still widely translated, especially in developing countries where she remains very popular.  I also examine her philosophical and engagement with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, with psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on women’s issues, and her rivalry with French communist writers, in particular Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon. Simone de Beauvoir is still the most modern writer on women’s issues and I argue that she should remain an inspiration to feminists in the 21st century.

       The main points of my essay can be accessed on my blog {http://www.claudinemonteil.com/blog/}.  If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to send me an email. 

  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.

 For those of you who read Italian, I have the pleasure to inform you that “The Beauvoir Sisters” has just come ou in italian under the title “Le Sorelle Beauvoir”, editore Castelvecchi,  ISBN 978-88-7615-265-8.

       We are also preparing the centenial of Hélène de Beauvoir’s birth in 2010. A painter, Simone’s younger sister lived seven years in Milan when her husband was the director of the French cultural center. They owned a house in Trebiano, near La Spezia, and had a special love for Italy.

      I will keep you informed about the conference which will take place in Sardaigna in 2010 and where a special tribute to Helen and her body of art will be given. 

    I’d like to recommend a new website by Rebecca Chalker, a U.S. feminist and international activist on women’s rights and reproductive health issues whom I have been happy to meet with Simone de Beauvoirs’sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir. French feminists always speak higly of her accomplishments for women’s rights, health and bodies issues.  

     The website, www.clitoraltruth.com, provides information about a new online seminar that Professor Chalker is conducting, a feminist critique of the cultural history of sexuality, and about her latest book on women’s bodies.   

        Rebecca Chalker is Adjunct Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City and Visiting Lecturer in Women’s Studies at Florida State University in Tallahassee.  She has also spoken at the Beauvoir Society conferences at Trent University in Canada, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. 

      She has spoken at the World Congress of Sexology in Washington, D.C. (1983), Heidelberg (1987), Yokohama, Hong Kong, Paris, and Havana.  Rebecca presented five workshops at the 4^th United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing (1995).  Since 1978, she has given numerous presentations on women’s health and rights at the American Public Health Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Interstitial Cystitis Association, and as spoken frequently to women’s groups on college campuses, and in private lectures and public forums.  Her articles have appeared in Ms. magazine, The Village Voice, Cahiers de Sexologie Clinique (22:132, 1997), and in other peer-reviewed medical journals.

     It is always very inspiring to speak with her and Rebecca Chalker’s visits to France are always great occasions for French feminists to share with her on women’s issues in the context of globalisation. I hope you will enjoy as much as I do her new website.