Beauvoir’s ‘Moral Period’: Le Sang des autres and Tous les hommes sont mortels

Abstract

In a well-known passage of her memoirs, Beauvoir records how, as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War, her life and views underwent a dramatic transformation while she was actually in the process of writing L’Invitée:

I had come to recognise the existence of others, but it was still my individual relationships with separate people that mattered most to me, and I yearned fiercely for happiness. Suddenly, History burst over me, and I broke up into fragments. I found myself scattered to the four corners of the earth, linked by every fibre to each and every other individual. My ideas, my values, everything was turned upside down.¹