Simone de Beauvoir, in The Mandarins, depicts relationships between men and women in the context of post-World War II political activism in France. As the author writes, "I try to tell the happy revival we felt when the war was over and so many things began again, and the slow disappointment" (Francis and Gontier 264). This study will examine three of the relationships de Beauvoir portrays in the atmosphere of such rising and falling hopes both on the political and the person level. Those relationships are between Anne and her husband Robert, Anne and her lover Lewis, and Henri and Paula.
Although the disappointment de Beauvoir and other French intellectuals of the left experienced with respect to politics is also reflected in her portrayal of the relationships between men and women in this novel, gender relations are far from hopeless in the perspective of the book. Some of the negative criticism heaped upon the author and her book at the time of its publication in 1954 argued that de Beauvoir's depiction of gender relations was revolutionary: "The author considers the institution of marriage to be a farce and takes up the defense of free love. All methods are good, she maintains, as long as they permit the woman to escape from the slavery of motherhood" (Francis and Gontier 266).
However, the novel is hardly a revolutionary work in terms of its portrayal of relations between men and women. In fact, it is a work which honors the marriage of Anne and Robert, whom Anne returns to after ending her love affair with Lewis. The portrayal of the Henri-Paula relationship also shows the damage done to a woman who follows her worst instincts and gives up her heart to a man who does not deserve it. De Beauvoir writes that of the ideas in her book, the main one is that "love and friendship are the most important, and then politics." It is certainly a feminist novel: Anne is the author's "first fictional representation" of the author's ...