Sartre and de Beauvoir: Existentialism and the Scandal of Freedom

Paris in the 1930s was a city where ideas felt like they could reorganize reality itself . If you walked into the cafés on the Left Bank, you would find philosophers speaking with breathtaking confidence about authenticity and the courage to live without bourgeois illusions . At the center of this world were Sartre and Beauvoir, but if you looked closely at the numbers, a different pattern emerged—one that the philosophy tried very hard to ignore . When Beauvoir became involved with a young student named Bianca Lamblin in 1938, the age gap was striking: Beauvoir was thirty-one, and Bianca was only seventeen . Sartre, who soon joined the arrangement, was thirty-four . This wasn't a meeting of intellectual equals in a literary salon; it was a relationship that began in a classroom where Beauvoir was the teacher and Bianca was the pupil .

You have to consider the gravity of that environment. A classroom is not a philosophical thought experiment; it is a structured space where authority is explicit . Teachers grade papers, and students naturally try to impress them . When that admiration mixes with the charisma of a world-class intellectual, the line between personal freedom and professional influence starts to blur . Bianca was not an isolated case. Before her, there had been Olga Kosakiewicz, whom Beauvoir met while teaching philosophy when Olga was nineteen and Beauvoir was twenty-seven . Soon, Olga’s younger sister Wanda was also drawn into the circle . What was described inside the group as an "experiment in freedom" began to look more like a small intellectual court with two brilliant thinkers at the center and a rotating cast of younger admirers orbiting them .

Sartre and Beauvoir used a very specific vocabulary to manage these relationships. By labeling their own bond as "essential" and everyone else as "contingent," they created a linguistic hierarchy that allowed them to treat other people as secondary participants in their grand project . It was a beautifully organized system, but as the sociologist Max Weber once pointed out, charisma has a way of rearranging social perception . Students don't just listen to a charismatic teacher—they orbit them . For Sartre and Beauvoir, this orbit likely felt like simple admiration, but admiration has a weight to it . It creates a gravity that bends the relationship toward the person with the most influence .

This shift is what the philosopher Martin Buber called the transition from an "I—Thou" relationship to an "I—It" relationship . In an I—Thou meeting, you recognize the other person as a subject with their own full dignity and autonomy . But in an I—It relationship, the other person becomes an object—something to be interpreted, influenced, or incorporated into your own personal goals . Intellectual life has a peculiar tendency to slide into this second mode, where people become "material" for a philosophy . Within the existentialist circle, seduction was often framed as "liberation," and attachment was called "authenticity" . But as you’re about to see, the people who were being "liberated" often felt something much more painful when the philosophy was put into practice.