foucault’s pedophilia
jsyk that 1977 petition he signed calling for the repeal of several articles of the age of consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen was also signed by jean sartre, roland barthes, simonde de beauvoir and alain robbe-grillet. [x]
i have not read the book in this review but i don’t have trouble believing it:
For long periods, the couple became a “trio”, though the arrangement rarely worked out well for the third party: at least two of de Beauvoir’s former pupils found themselves becoming first her lover, then Sartre’s, only for the couple to close ranks against them once the fun wore off.
Was de Beauvoir passing lovers on to Sartre - who enjoyed taking girls’ virginities, though he could muster little enthusiasm for the sex act itself - to ensure the continuance of his relationship with her?
Seymour-Jones certainly thinks so, and she quotes various accounts to back up an increasingly monstrous vision of the couple. “Simone de Beauvoir was able to finish Sartre’s sentences and vice versa,” recounts the writer Olivier Todd. “There was even a kind of mimetism in their rasping voices.”
For Seymour-Jones, de Beauvoir’s affairs with her students were not lesbian but paedophiliac in origin: she was “grooming” them for Sartre, a form of “child abuse”.
►http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672534/Simone-de-Beauvoir-Meet-Jean-Paul-Sartre.html
this was not just theoretical for them
One of de Beauvoir’s students, who she ‘seduced’ and passed on to Sarte, wrote a memoir about the ‘affair’ - worth noting that she was not only 16 at the time, but Jewish: they dumped her during the Nazi occupation and apparently never showed any concern for her safety during the war. de Beauvoir lost her teaching license permanently in 1943 for ‘seducing’ another pupil. God knows how many there were.
