“A Scandalous Woman”? Beauvoir in Paris, January 2008

Extract

Simone De Beauvoir, France's most famous woman intellectual, was born in paris on 9 January 1908. Exactly one hundred years later, Paris gave her a birthday party: an international conference presided over by another famous woman intellectual, Julia Kristeva. The conference, held during 9–11 January in the remains of a Franciscan convent that the city bequeathed to the University of Paris, attracted a large crowd despite the rainy weather and the drafty Gothic hall, where you had to sit in your winter coat. At the opening and closing sessions, two of Nicolas Sarkozy's female ministers made an appearance; in between, the speakers included celebrities who had known Beauvoir (most notably the maker of the film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, who was her young lover in the 1950s and who now edits the journal she and Sartre founded, Les temps modernes), well-known writers and journalists, activists in the women's movement who had worked with Beauvoir in the last years of her life, and old friends, who shared their reminiscences, as well as translators of her works and scholars young and old from all over the world. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, was in attendance throughout the proceedings; all in all, more than fifty people participated in the program. The first Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom was awarded to two women writers known for their courageous critiques of Islamic fundamentalism: the Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Bangladeshi Taslina Nasreen, who could not be there in person but who sent greetings. There were film screenings in the evenings, a “cocktail” at City Hall, and a concluding banquet at La Coupole, where Beauvoir had lunched with Sartre every day for many years.