Simone de Beauvoir passed France's hardest philosophy exam at 21, runner-up to Sartre
In 1929 the jury for the agrégation in philosophy narrowly put Jean-Paul Sartre first and Simone de Beauvoir second. At 21 she was the youngest person ever to pass and only the eighth woman. That same autumn the two began a partnership that lasted 51 years without marriage, children or a shared home.
Beauvoir was born in Montparnasse on 9 January 1908 into a bourgeois family that was running out of money. Her father, a lawyer who longed to act, encouraged her intellect; her mother was a devout Catholic whose expected dowry vanished when her own father went to prison. By 1919 the family lived in a fifth-floor flat with no running water or bathroom. Beauvoir later said the clash between her father's freethinking and her mother's strict morals made her an intellectual.
As a girl she took communion three times a week and meant to become a nun, but began doubting at 14 and stayed an atheist for life. She passed baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy at seventeen, studied at Catholic institutes and the Sorbonne, and wrote a thesis on Leibniz. A classmate, René Maheu, gave her the lasting nickname Castor, meaning beaver. Sartre, eager to meet her, sent her a picture of Leibniz bathing with mermaids.
She taught at lycées in Marseille, Rouen and Paris from 1929 until 1943, when her writing could support her. She called marriage an alienating institution; her bond with Sartre was sexual but not exclusive. Her record has dark spots: she urged the execution of the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach in 1945, and she is criticised today for harmful relationships with three former students, two of whom were also involved with Sartre.
The Second Sex, published in 1949, dissected women's oppression and became a founding text of modern feminism, even though she did not see herself as a philosopher. Her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, her memoirs of a dutiful daughter appeared in 1958, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times before her death on 14 April 1986.
Source: Simone de Beauvoir
