Gendering resistance and philosophy? Simone de Beauvoir’s Vichy

Bibliographic Data

ID21409796
AuthorsKatherine Arens (0000-0002-6230-526X, The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume55
Issue3
Pages269-292
Publication date2025-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of European Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-2441 • E-ISSN: 1740-2379
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/00472441251358582
OpenAlexW4413120360
LanguageEN
References cited35

Decades of scholarly reception of Beauvoir in (Anglophone) philosophy and literary studies have positioned her within feminism, yet her Les Bouches inutiles ( Useless Mouths [alt: Who Shall Die? ], written 1943) and Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) provide not only political commentary on the Vichy government and canonical French culture, but also evidence of the author’s calculations about her own options as a public intellectual in postwar France. How she adapted her source materials (a medieval French chronicle and a text from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives ) signals her active renunciation or France’s traditional intellectual culture. Using tactics more familiar from the Theatre of the Absurd and 1970s French feminist philosophy, these texts reveal her claims to an intellectual agency far beyond conventional political feminism, enacted through her inversion of Classicism and the national mythmaking of the postwar era – a part of her intellectual biography she often suppressed but never actively denied

Art history · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology) · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre

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