Beauvoir's Long March

In a strategic retreat from the failed radicalism of The Second Sex, Beauvoir apparently drew on lessons from the Chinese Revolution in undertaking a "long march" of her own. Using her memoirs to rally support for social change would demand the sacrifice of the authenticity that she admired in Sade; but this strategy was successful. Fautrier writes that "in the most unexpected manner, readers from the late 1950s to the early 1960s effectively appropriated the forms of life narrated in the memoirs: the open relationship, political commitment, life in the cafes ... Turning them into 'existential models/ they made these forms of life the 'supreme mode of existence.'"20 Chaperon reports that Beauvoir, once a figure of ridicule, had, by 1964, become one of the most admired women in France. Here was the answer to the question that had obsessed me for years: Beauvoir lied about her work in philosophy because she wanted her memoirs to be as successful as Ba Jin's The Family in giving "voice to the resentments and hopes of an entire generation." It had never occurred to mc that Beauvoir might have conceived of her memoirs as a form of political work in a relentlessly conservative era- That's why she put Zaza's story at the center while simplifying the story of her own life, idealizing her relationships to support a more conventional message of sexual freedom and equality, and erasing anything that could be used as ammunition by her political enemies.