11 - Beauvoir on the ambiguity of evil

Summary

Life in itself is neither good nor evil.

It is the place of good and evil,

according to what you make it.

[Montaigne]

For Simone de Beauvoir, both men's and women's lives are fundamentally marked by historical events. In reference to her own life she said: “the Resistance, the Liberation, the war in Algeria . . . these are the things that marked eras, at least for me . . . That's what marked the big epochs in our lives, it's the historical events, the historical involvements one has in these larger events. It's much more important than any other kind of difference.”

From her first writings published during World War Two, Beauvoir’s work is marked by an awareness of these historical crises and the dilemmas that they pose. What is one to do with the knowledge of the Nazi death camps? Is forgetting a betrayal of the dead, or is surrendering to the pain of remembering a betrayal of the living? What action is necessary in the face of the Nazi occupation of France? How can one reconcile the need for terrorist actions with the implacable knowledge that no calculation of means and ends can erase the loss of a human life? Could the Soviet labor camps be compared with the Nazi concentration camps, or did they have some positive meaning or justification? How can one live in an occupied city when the occupiers are one’s own countrymen, as during the Algerian war?