Explore the radical partnership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, from their 1929 pact to their revolutionary ideas on essential and contingent love.
Sartre and Beauvoir didn't just have an affair—they built a philosophical fortress around their lives, using the language of existentialism to justify a social arrangement that, from the outside, looked increasingly like a hierarchy.
Sartre and de Beauvoir: the couple who made freedom a scandal
The partnership began in 1929 on a bench outside the Louvre in Paris after both completed the agrégation in philosophy, the most grueling academic competition in France. Jean-Paul Sartre placed first, while Simone de Beauvoir placed second, becoming the youngest person to pass at age twenty-one. Sartre proposed a 'two-year lease' that evolved into a fifty-one-year partnership defined by radical transparency and a shared commitment to living out the ultimate experiment in human freedom.
Sartre and de Beauvoir invented a unique vocabulary to define their non-traditional arrangement. They designated each other as their 'essential love,' representing their primary and permanent bond. In contrast, any other people they dated or slept with were classified as 'contingent' loves. This distinction allowed them to maintain a lifelong partnership while rejecting traditional marriage and fidelity, using the language of existentialism to justify their social and romantic hierarchy.
Their relationship remains a scandal because it challenged societal norms through a pact of radical transparency and a rejection of traditional marriage. They chose not to live together or remain faithful in a conventional sense, instead promising to tell each other everything. By building a philosophical fortress around their lives, they used existentialism to justify an arrangement that prioritized human freedom over social expectations, creating a lifestyle that still feels provocative nearly a century later.
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