The Spiritual Sisters of Simone de Beauvoir / Agnès Poirier

"Was it the weight of war on my too young shoulders?” Claude Lanzmann asked in his memoirs. “Was it the precarious equilib­rium of those years between life and death? This new freedom of mine meant that I needed to prove my own existence with sometimes gratuitous acts.” The experience of war and the feeling of having cheated death for four years were key to postwar Paris intellectuals’ and artists’ unquench­able thirst for freedom in every aspect of their lives. Whether born into the working class or the bourgeoisie, they wanted little to do with their caste’s traditions and conventions or with propriety. Family was an institu­tion to be banished, children a plague to avoid at all costs.
However, these were the hardest notions to do away with, and while Jean­ Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir managed to stick to their initial plan of “no marriage, no children,” or simply “no children” for Arthur Koestler, for the sake of art and life experimentation, others, usually men, decided to carry on the hypocrisy of their elders by marrying and then enjoying a secret and very free other life on the side. It did not make them particularly happy, though, and men like Camus and Maurice Merleau­-Ponty who chose trompe l’oeil existences crushed many lives around them. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-spiritual-sisters-of-simone-de-beauvoir/

Simone de Beauvoir