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Beauvoir and Sartre at fairground

Lessons on Rebellious Love With Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir


The couple explored many paths, schemes, taboos and traditions, until they found the right way of loving each other: they discovered how to “simply” be with the other.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir formed one of the strongest philosophical and emotional bonds of the twentieth century. Our culture tends to sacralize and search for idols where anomalies and irreconcilable differences lie; thus, despite all the biographies and the documentaries that narrate the nature of their relationship, the most palpable testimony of their romantic discipline can be found in the letters Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone De Beauvoir, 1926-1939.

To call the pact that bound Sartre and De Beauvoir together for most of their lives “an open relationship” is to reduce and vulgarise what they had: it was above all a mutual agreement of respect and admiration, as well as a friendship that would resist the passing of time and would become stronger with all the vicissitudes. A “romance” in the ancient meaning of the term would also prove insufficient to describe their bond: their letters do not reveal the urgency of a seducing lover, but of a companion that presents himself in the most transparent form in the presence of the other, as if he was standing alone.

At the age of 24, Sartre wrote the following letter to Simone (who was around 21), after she refused to marry him:

My dear little girl


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