Beauvoir dans tous ses etats

Abstract

The twenty chapters of this very diverse collection include interviews, short articles, reception studies, reviews of books and conferences, conference papers and archival material relating to Beauvoir. Its interest stretches considerably beyond the field of Beauvoir studies: no historian of Vichy or scholar of sexual mores could fail to be fascinated by the full text of the 1941 letter by Natalie Sorokine's mother denouncing Beauvoir for ‘excitation de mineure à la débauche’, a complaint which, despite the ensuing investigation's resulting in a ‘non-lieu’, contributed to her losing her teaching job in 1943. Chapter 6 gives a detailed account of six of the twelve surviving scripts written by Beauvoir for programmes on the history of the music hall, commissioned by Radio Nationale (Radio-Vichy) and broadcast between January and April 1944, just as collaborationist propaganda minister Philippe Henriot took control of the station which he used to air his twice-daily tirades. The author's determination to avoid both hagiography and denigration is nowhere more apparent and more necessary than in this chapter, where her rigorous even-handedness succeeds in recreating a sense of the moral complexity of Beauvoir's position as she found herself jobless in 1943 and offered work writing relatively anodyne ‘cultural’ broadcasts for a station which was nonetheless an important part of Vichy's propaganda machine. It is unfortunate that the approach in this collection to other work on Beauvoir is so often so combative. In the case of Bair's biography and the work of Kate and Edward Fullbrook, many of the same criticisms are repeated more often than is necessary between the covers of a single volume. While Beauvoir herself would probably have approved of the uncompromising commitment evinced throughout to open debate, in places the vehemence of the views expressed leads to difficulty. Thus, a rather grudging review of the French translation of Toril Moi's groundbreaking Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman lashes out, in passing, at the alleged heterogeneity of that work (p. 271); given the diversity of Galster's collection, this is a case of the biter bit. A more serious objection to this chapter, however, is that the hasty postscript contains a comment on Moi which borders on the defamatory (p. 273). In similar vein, a later observation casting doubt on the intellectual seriousness of all the American scholars, ‘[l]es Américaines’, attending a 2003 conference (p. 320), in the absence of any supporting evidence is quite unjustified. There is plenty to fascinate the Beauvoir scholar in this impassioned collection, even though some of the material feels like preparatory work for the new biography which the author (pp. 14, 331) and this reviewer regret she has not yet been able to write.