Novel
The Mandarins
Les Mandarins
Simone de Beauvoir · 1954
Synopsis
Paris, at the Liberation. Henri Perron, a writer, runs a newspaper; Robert Dubreuilh founds a left-wing political movement; Robert's wife, Anne, a psychoanalyst, leaves for America and has an affair there with an American writer, Lewis Brogan. All wonder what role intellectuals can play in the post-war world, and whether they must give up their position as mandarins in order to commit themselves.
Context
The novel was published by Gallimard on 21 October 1954 and received the Prix Goncourt the same year. It has been read as a roman à clef, but its author rejected that reading, while acknowledging that the American Lewis Brogan owed much to the novelist Nelson Algren, to whom the book is dedicated. The narrative alternates between Anne's first person and a third-person narration centred on Henri, and mixes political and philosophical debates with love stories.
Who it is for
A long novel in which the political debates of the post-war years are the very substance of the narrative and not its backdrop.
Prizes and reception
Prix Goncourt 1954. In English, the translation by Leonard M. Friedman appeared in 1956 under the title The Mandarins.