Abstract
This article discusses the trajectory of Simone de Beauvoir’s concern with the issue of torture. It argues that Beauvoir’s interest in torture extends back at least to World War II and that her activities and writings against torture during the French-Algerian War of 1954–1962 were pivotal in prompting her to reject ethical philosophical language and to embrace, in its place, a new concept of politics based on need. It further suggests that exploring the development of Beauvoir’s ideas about torture helps elucidate her belated turn to feminism and that in Beauvoir’s disarray and disillusionment regarding the use of torture by the French during the French-Algerian War and her compatriots’ complaisance with regard to this, there are lessons of sorts, though not necessarily entirely comforting ones, for Americans and others facing similar situations.
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Notes
Regardless of the very real import of Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre for the development of her thought, a relationship that on several levels was both reciprocal but non-exclusive, I would argue that any moment we could isolate in Beauvoir’s life would find her seeking and proposing her own solutions to dilemmas that were often central to both thinkers. I am not here concerned with the larger issue of influence between the two, but rather with a more specific area of Beauvoir’s divergence from Sartre. On the question of influence between the two more generally, the work of Margaret Simons has been fundamental (e.g., Simons 1999). See also the collected essays in Daigle and Golomb (2009) and Edward and Kate Fullbrook (1994).
Several recent works have focused on precisely how common was implied or actual complicity within occupied France of many of the intellectuals who remained there. See, for example, Riding (2011) and Spotts (2008). Attention to acts of both collaboration and compromise by French intellectuals during these years is important; at the same time, it is also important to keep in mind the genuine efforts of resistance as well. Beauvoir, who spent much of these years working to establish herself as a writer and whose novel Le Sang des autres [The Blood of Others] was received as a Resistance novel, herself agreed to work for Radio Vichy, which she found acceptable because she was unemployed (having been suspended from her teaching position) and in need of funds and because she would only contribute to a “neutral, colorless program: reconstructions of traditional festivals, from the Middle Ages to modern times” (de Beauvoir 1962, p. 428).
See, for instance, the words with which Beauvoir closed her meditations on her mother’s death: “There is no such thing as a natural death…. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation” (de Beauvoir 1966, p. 92).
Edward Fullbrook has shown that She Came to Stay was read by Sartre in a draft form as he embarked on Being and Nothingness (cf. de Beauvoir 2004d, pp. 2–3). However, the novel still owes much to Sartre’s perspective rather than to the more Beauvoirian analysis that I discuss in the present article. Though beyond the scope of the present article, Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel during these years was also an important aspect of her intellectual development. My point above is that, at this time, Beauvoir’s invocation of Hegel supported a Sartrean view.
“Œil pour œil” appeared first in Les Temps Modernes (1946), 1(5), and then was reprinted, with some alterations, in L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (1948).
As Vintges (1996) has argued, Beauvoir “was influenced by Kant’s style of reasoning,” but not by his specific ethical conclusions, in her insistence (as is discussed below) that in seeking our own freedom we must simultaneously be seeking the freedom of all other persons. However, she rejected any recourse to abstract laws. Here, however, as we see, Beauvoir concurs with one of Kant’s conclusions.
On the specific question of evil in Beauvoir, see Schott (2003). However, Schott overlooks the discussion of absolute evil in “An Eye for an Eye” and this, I think, detracts from her argument. Morgan (2008) criticizes Schott’s argument that Beauvoir is unable to justify her understanding of absolute evil. Neither Schott nor Morgan seems to consider that the logic of action in Beauvoir is not opposed to the logic of history, as all action takes place within history.
Beauvoir was thus right, I think, to deem “Pyrrhus and Cineas” “summary” and for criticizing it for depicting the project (in her existentialist sense) as the product of the isolated individual rather than as formed, like individuals themselves, within and by social relationships. Consider the abstractness of a brief reference to what is the focus of the present article, which also expresses a more early-Sartrean sense of individual liberty (and which finds some echoes in “An Eye for an Eye”): “The disappointment of the mother who does not succeed in completely fulfilling her child corresponds to the exasperation of the executioner who is challenged by a proud soul. However hard he tries, if his victim wants to be free, she will remain free even during torture, and struggling and suffering will only elevate her. One can kill her only because she was carrying her death in her. From what point of view can we say that it is an evil that this death occurred today rather than tomorrow? How can one harm a man? Did it harm Socrates to make him drink the hemlock? Did it harm Dostoevsky to send him to the penal colony?” (de Beauvoir 2004a, p. 124). While providing a sketch of some of the ideas elaborated in the Ethics, such as that, at least during war, violence must be chosen, “Pyrrhus and Cineas” is at times simply at odds with the more developed and considered analysis of the later text.
Murphy argues, I think basically correctly, that “[w]hen seen in the context of her Ethics, [Beauvoir’s writings on Algeria] present a radical analysis of her war activities and suggest a postcolonial ethics.”
In a 1980 interview, Sartre commented that, until then, “few people have studied … the dimension of obligation,” by which he was designating what he meant by ethics, neglecting to mention that Beauvior could be considered among those few people. Even should Sartre have disagreed with Beauvoir’s ethical thinking or have considered “the dimension of obligation” somehow unrelated to her efforts in this area, it is remarkable that he would fail to mention it specifically. See Sartre and Lévy (1996, p. 69).
Readers have often been frustrated by Beauvoir’s reluctance to embrace the mantle of philosopher, granting this instead solely to Sartre in their relationship. In her view, Sartre was truly a philosopher because he had developed a system of philosophy, whereas she had not. Yet she was not unaware of the role of gender in restraining her ambitions. In later years, she relented only slightly in her public estimations of her philosophical importance, at least to Sartre, conceding that she may have sensitized Sartre to the importance of situatedness. Or, more precisely, she re-acknowledged her influence on this issue, which she had already suggested in The Prime of Life (1962, p. 434).
Page citations list the English translation first (de Beauvoir 1976), followed by the original French (de Beauvoir 1947), with translation altered as necessary. Beauvoir utilized the language of “man” when speaking of humanity in general as well as of any person not specifically female (the generic human). I have retained her usage when quoting from her writings.
On Beauvoir’s ethical philosophy, see Arp (2001); Bergoffen (1997) esp. Chapter 3; Kruks (1990, 2012); and Vintges (1996). One can debate whether or not the third level of freedom identified is present in “Pyrrhus and Cineas.” It seems to me present but not always distinctly, such that it is not entirely distinguishable from a simple expansion of concrete freedom, still understood in the essay as individual freedom even as it impinges on and engages that of others. Accordingly, in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” Beauvoir described how the process of achieving freedom for self and others consists not in achieving freedom together in the sense of a mutual or collective effort, for example, nor in aiming at the linked freedom of self and others, but in individuals becoming the instrument of others’ freedom in enacting separate projects that will also create departures for others’ projects. In the Ethics, even though Beauvoir did not explicitly designate a third type or level of freedom, it can still be seen to operate as conceptually distinct from concrete liberty or freedom.
Beauvoir understood subjectivity as situated, which entails that subjectivity is relational, contextual, and structurally determined. On Beauvoir’s influence on Sartre in connection with questions of situatedness, see Caputi (2006) and Kruks (1995). While suggesting her influence on this issue, Beauvoir would go on subsequently to deny any influence on Sartre, later in her life acknowledging (again) that her insight into subjectivity as situated had some effect on Sartre, who would go on to compile several volumes of his essays, which he entitled “Situations.” Challenging Sartre’s original notion of freedom in Being and Nothingness, she says, “[I]n the first version of Being and Nothingness, he talked of freedom as though it were quasi-total for everybody—or at least as though it were always possible to exercise one’s freedom. But I insisted on the fact that there are situations where freedom cannot be exercised, or where it is simply a mystification. He accepted that. Later he ascribed great significance to the situation a person finds himself in” (Schwarzer 1984, p. 109). But then see an earlier interview (in 1973), where Beauvoir describes her influence on Sartre as rather minor (Schwarzer, pp. 57–58). It is quite likely she maintained both views—in other words, that her influence on Sartre was real but minimal.
Beauvoir was aware of Levinas’s early philosophical work, of which she was critical in The Second Sex.
From an interview with Francis Jeanson in 1965, included in Jeanson 1966, pp. 287–288. Beauvoir’s expression of dislike for The Ethics of Ambiguity is not negated by her suggestion, recorded by Deirdre Bair, that this work would be among those that “she considered the important starting point for any interpretation and evaluation of her oeuvre” (1990, pp. 269–270). Indeed, this is much like what I am contending in the present article.
Although dealing with a distinct problem, it is not without reason that the title of Beauvoir’s play, Les Bouches inutiles (1945), is translated into English as Who Shall Die? (de Beauvoir 1983).
Shelby’s essay is largely a revised version of “Intersubjectivity, Politics, Violence: Simone de Beauvoir and Colonialism” (2004), unpublished manuscript. The earlier text notes the reference to colonialism in The Ethics of Ambiguity but does not develop an analysis of the work from that angle. On the parallel development of Sartre with respect to colonialism, see Arthur (2010).
Thus, again from her memoirs: “‘I am French.’ The words scalded my throat like an admission of hideous deformity. For millions of men and women, old men and children, I was just one of the people who were torturing them, burning them, machine-gunning them, slashing their throats, starving them; I deserved their hatred because I could still sleep, write, enjoy a walk or a book” (1965, p. 384; cited in Murphy, p. 284).
Perhaps this sense of the limits of responsibility is linked to what many observers have regretted as Beauvoir’s personal cruelty toward many of those who gravitated to her and Sartre. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of this article.
Sétif, for example, had been only incompletely known to her. Of her visit in 1946 to North Africa, Beauvoir reported conversations pertaining to French-Tunisian relations to which she seems perhaps to have been somewhat indifferent. Whenever possible during the trip, she explored her surroundings without hosts and guides, though upon fending off an attempted rape and hearing of another European woman who was not as lucky she curtailed much of this exploration. Her memoirs record not a developed anticolonial perspective at this time, at least relating to North Africa, but rather certain superficial views of the region. Interestingly, but consistent with the primacy of socialism for her at this time, she noted that she “pitied [her] sex” only upon encountering the banishment of women from the public market to cavernous spaces (de Beauvoir 1965, p. 58).
But, she continued, Algerian children still laughed and played, and this was decisive, exposing the lie of the oppressors: for the children yet projected a future. The child, Beauvoir stated, who has no more right to happiness than anyone, is still “the living affirmation of human transcendence,” embodying hope, eagerness, generosity, project.
Just as she admitted to having heard very little about the full scope of the Sétif massacre, Beauvoir explained in her memoirs that her knowledge of the Soviet Union was quite limited. “As for our relations with the Communist Party and the socialist countries, there I followed Sartre in his fluctuations” (de Beauvoir 1974, pp. 26–27).
See de Beauvoir 1974, p. 431.
Beyond examples she gave in the Ethics, in her memoirs Beauvoir discussed justifications during and after World War II of infant mortality and child poverty in Portugal for the sake of “English democracy” and of British limitation of immigration to Israel on the basis of “England’s higher interests” (1965, p. 68).
Beauvoir considered her “moral period” to have lasted for only “several years,” starting in the course of World War II (de Beauvoir 1962, p. 433). She included “Pyrrhus and Cineas” within the moral period, but it is fair to include the Ethics as well.
There were many who brought to public attention the use of torture by French forces during war. Among these were Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jules-Henri Simon, and François Mauriac. Accounts by victims of torture—such as Henri Alleg, Djamila Bouhired, and Djamila Boupacha—were also important. For a detailed exposition of the French army’s use of torture during the war, see Branche (2001). For discussions of the impact of these revelations, see also Lazreg (2008) and Le Sueur (2001).
Beauvoir was not clear as to the source of the guilt, resentments, and unresolved hostilities.
While obviously not rising to the level of that of members of the Jeanson network, who funneled money out of France to the FLN as the famed “porteurs de valises,” Beauvoir after a point in the war was to some real extent involved in illegal activity, allowing members of the Jeanson network to use her car and her apartment, in one instance helping to find a safe place to house a fugitive. But beyond that, with Sartre she marched in demonstrations against the war, among them the November 18, 1961 March for Peace in Algeria, organized by the League for Anti-Fascist Movements, which she had helped to found. She gave speeches and lectures and (usually but not always with Sartre) held press conferences vocalizing opposition to the war.
She had also come to the aid of a former student of hers who, then living in Algeria, became involved with the ALN, the Algerian Army of National Liberation. Jacqueline Guerroudj had become a teacher in Algeria. In December 1957, Guerroudj and two others were condemned to execution the following January for their involvement in a bombing. Beauvoir intervened on Guerroudj’s behalf and helped spare her the death penalty. One of Guerroudj’s accomplices, however, was not so fortunate and was executed.
Les Temps Modernes published the Manifesto in its August-September 1960 issue—with the text of the declaration replaced by two pages of empty white space, followed by the full list of signatories. The printer, it was explained, refused under the present circumstances to risk breaking the law by printing the declaration itself. The issue was nevertheless seized by authorities (as was the October issue) and the manifesto’s signatories were prohibited from appearing on radio or television. Times were indeed tense. The offices of Les Temps Modernes, like those of Esprit and Vérité-Liberté, had been searched. Sartre and Beauvoir, who were returning to France in November after an extended period of travel abroad, violated the government’s injunction by holding a press conference in Havana, Cuba for both radio and television. They were prepared, even eager, to be arrested upon their return. Members of the military, including reservists and veterans, were especially worked up, shouting “Shoot Sartre” during a parade at this time. But the case did not move forward and de Gaulle, hoping to put aside the controversy generated by this contemporary “Voltaire,” finally ended the matter, it being officially declared that no further indictments were to be made. However, some signatories of the manifesto, such as Laurent Schwartz, Jean Pouillon, and Bernard Pingaud, did lose, or were suspended from, their positions.
In her memoirs, Beauvoir recounted weeping when news reached her of the extraordinary level of support for the September 1958 referendum for a new constitution. She took it, as Francis and Gontier noted, as a repudiation of her and Sartre’s vision for France and considered it “an enormous collective suicide” (Francis and Gontier, p. 280). It was the level of support, not the fact of the referendum’s passing, that made Beauvoir feel a stranger in France. She and Sartre also vehemently opposed de Gaulle’s 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination, with Beauvoir publicly giving speeches to students in particular, exhorting them to vote “No.”
Khanna (2008, p. 80) observes with regard to the book on the Boupacha case: “Against the impossibility of law we see justice maintained as an impossible yet perceivable ethics.”
In her article for Le Monde, Beauvoir was forced to replace “le vagin” with “le ventre” in her description of Boupacha’s rape with the bottle, despite the fact that she was there quoting Boupacha’s complaint. Earlier in the article, though, Beauvoir was allowed, when quoting Boupacha, to refer to electrical shocks administered to her “sexe.” It is as though words too specific to Boupacha’s femaleness were considered off-limits. It might be noted, too, that Boupacha also reported rape with a toothbrush, which Beauvoir did not mention.
In her extensive monograph on the French military’s use of torture during the French-Algerian War, Raphaëlle Branche includes a discussion of French authorities’ reaction to charges of rape by soldiers. See Branche (2001), p. 294. Both Branche and Lazreg (2008) see affinities between rape and the nature of the French-Algerian War.
Beauvoir’s plea in Le Monde was included in the publication of the book on the Boupacha case, written in the main by Halimi. As with the Ethics, page citations from Djamila Boupacha (1962) list the English translation first, followed by the French original.
According to Maran (p. 166), Beauvoir and Halimi, working against oppression, generally “had distanced themselves from the concepts of the civilizing mission and did not themselves speak in derivative terms,” which was not always the case for intellectuals involved in the Boupacha case or in the effort more generally to halt the practice of torture.
Admittedly, the memoirs had been revised by her for publication. Galster (1996) discusses how Beauvoir’s published memoirs often significantly alter her initial diaries. The publication of Beauvoir’s war diaries has similarly allowed scholars to compare these with the published memoirs of that time period.
Kruks (2005) argues that Beauvoir’s rhetorical strategy (the “use of … patriotic emotions to rouse the readers of her article”), while it may have genuinely reflected her position, was effective in the context of the war but not acceptable in “an ideal world,” because, according to Kruks, it implies the supreme value of a “purity of means at all costs” (p. 194).
Murphy (1995), too, describes tactical maneuvers in Beauvoir’s intervention: “the subtext of Beauvoir’s writings played upon class solidarity and paternalism (the sufferings of a young girl), to attack racist imperialism and misogyny.” Murphy, though, goes on to say that Beauvoir sought to represent Boupacha in a manner that “did not further her victimization” and that the recourse to class solidarity and paternalism were likely necessary in this context (pp. 288–290).
The phenomenon of getting used to it was described by Beauvoir in her memoirs with respect to the torture issue: “Today, in this grim December 1961, like most of my fellow creatures I suppose, I am suffering from a kind of tetanus of the imagination.” She described reading statements of French soldiers who recounted atrocities committed against Algerians, adding: “I read this and moved on to another article. That, perhaps, is the final stage of demoralization for a nation: one gets used to it” (1965, pp. 366–367).
Beauvoir’s characterization of Algerian resistance as universal, if meant to be taken literally, was closer to the truth at the time at which she was writing, near the end of the French-Algerian War, though even then it was inaccurate. Support for the French on the part of many Algerians remained a significant factor throughout the war, even as it declined.
Beauvoir did finally agree to meet with Boupacha (and spoke briefly with her by telephone), but the latter was kidnapped before the meeting could take place. Upon her return to Algeria, Boupacha was soon married off to an FLN fighter. In Halimi’s account, Beauvoir is one who suffered from “clean hands and ‘white’ complexes.” Halimi asks, “For her, was not understanding the nature of the battle more important than the person at stake?” Even more, she recounts the following conversation:
“‘You never even had a chance of embracing her,’ I told her.
“‘It’s not important,’ she replied in surprise” (Halimi 1990, p. 301).
See Fanon’s statements in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1963): “The people … take their stand from the start on the broad and inclusive positions of bread and the land: how can we obtain the land, and bread to eat? And this obstinate point of view of the masses, which may seem shrunken and limited, is in the end the most worthwhile and the most efficient mode of procedure” (p. 50).
Caroline Moorehead, “A Talk with Simone de Beauvoir,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 1974, p. 32, cited in Murphy (1995), p. 283.
But see the interviews of 1964 included in Jeanson (1966). Beauvoir would later comment that her adoption of feminism in her interviews with Jeanson was too much on the level of theory.
This interview of 1972 is included in Schwarzer (1984), pp. 29–48. I am using the translation that appeared in Ms., however, which I prefer.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their careful reading of her manuscript and their many helpful comments and suggestions. The present article is much improved because of their efforts. Many others either read the manuscript or heard a version of it in various forms, providing helpful feedback, including Raphaëlle Branche, Alice Bullard, Patricia Lorcin, Alyssa Sepinwall, and Marie-Pierre Ulloa. The author is also very grateful to Dr. Cécilia Francis of the Department of French, St. Thomas University, for her comments on and encouragement of this research. A post-doctoral fellowship at the Gregg Centre for the Study of War & Society at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, helped support a portion of the research for this article.
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Ptacek, M.M. Simone de Beauvoir’s Algerian war: torture and the rejection of ethics. Theor Soc 44, 499–535 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9260-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9260-9