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Becoming
Beauvoir
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY
How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop
Making Excuses, Gary Cox
Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre,
Gary Cox
Antigone, Slavoj Žižek
For Pamela
in memoriam amoris amicitiae
‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly
recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple.
So much has been left out, unattempted. […] almost without
exception they are shown in their relation to men.’
VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
‘To emancipate woman is to refuse to enclose her in the
relations that she sustains with man, but not to deny them to
her.’
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE SECOND SEX
Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations of Beauvoir’s Works
Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir – Who’s She?
1 Growing Like a Girl
2 The Dutiful Daughter
3 Lover of God or Lover of Men?
4 The Love before the Legend
5 The Valkyrie and the Playboy
6 Rooms of Her Own
7 The Trio that Was a Quartet
8 War Within, War Without
9 Forgotten Philosophy
10 Queen of Existentialism
11 American Dilemmas
12 The Scandalous Second Sex
13 Putting a New Face on Love
14 Feeling Gypped
15 Old Age Revealed
16 The Dying of the Light
17 Afterwords: What Will Become of Simone de
Beauvoir?
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Illustrations
1 Simone surrounded by her paternal family at Meyrignac
2 Françoise de Beauvoir with Hélène and Simone
3 Simone and Zaza
4 Drawing by René Maheu, ‘The universe of Mlle Simone de
Beauvoir’
5 Drawing by Jacques-Laurent Bost
6 Beauvoir and Sartre at Juan-les-Pins
7 Beauvoir at work in Les Deux Magots
8 On air in 1945, the year of the ‘existentialist offensive’
9 With Nelson Algren in Chicago
10 Signing books in Sao Paolo, Brazil
11 Claude Lanzmann, Beauvoir and Sartre at Giza
12 With Sylvie le Bon and Sartre in Rome
13 At home in Paris
14 A scene from activist life: at the Women and the State Debate
Abbreviations of
Beauvoir’s Works
A Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London:
Penguin, 1984.
ADD America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999.
AMM All Men Are Mortal, trans. Euan Cameron and Leonard
Friedman, London: Virago, 2003.
ASD All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London: Penguin,
1977.
BB Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, trans. Bernard
Frechtman, London: Four Square, 1962. First published in
Esquire in 1959.
BI Les Belles Images, Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
BO The Blood of Others, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger
Senhouse, London: Penguin, 1964.
CC Correspondence croisée, Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
CJ Cahiers de jeunesse, Paris: Gallimard, 2008.
DPS Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume I, 1926–27, ed.
Barbara Klaw, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir and Margaret
Simons, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
EA Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York:
Citadel Press, 1976.
FC Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, London:
Penguin, 1987.
FW Feminist Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth
Timmerman, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
LM The Long March, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, London: Andre
Deutsch and Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1958.
LS Letters to Sartre, trans. Quentin Hoare, New York: Arcade,
1991.
M The Mandarins, trans. Leonard Friedman, London: Harper
Perennial, 2005.
MDD Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, London:
Penguin, 2001.
MPI Mémoires, tome I, ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Eliane
Lecarme-Tabone, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard,
2018.
MPII Mémoires, tome II, ed. Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Eliane
Lecarme-Tabone, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard,
2018.
OA Old Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977.
PL The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green, London: Penguin,
1965.
PW Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret Simons with Marybeth
Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader, Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2004.
PolW Political Writings, ed. Margaret Simons and Marybeth
Timmerman, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
QM Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir 1940–1963, trans. Lee Fahnestock and
Norman MacAfee, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993.
SCTS She Came to Stay, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger
Senhouse, London: Harper Perennial, 2006.
SS The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier, London: Vintage, 2009.
SSP The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Random
House, Vintage, 1970.
TALA A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, New
York: New Press, 1998.
TWD The Woman Destroyed, trans. Patrick O’Brian, London:
Harper Perennial, 2006.
UM ‘The Useless Mouths’ and Other Literary Writings, ed.
Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2011.
VED A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York:
Pantheon, 1965.
WD Wartime Diary, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Sylvie le Bon de
Beauvoir, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
WML Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to
Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939, ed. Simone de Beauvoir,
trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1992.
WT When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales, trans.
Patrick O’Brian, London: Flamingo, 1982.
Introduction: Simone de
Beauvoir – Who’s She?
One day in 1927 Simone de Beauvoir had a disagreement with her
father about what it means to love. In an era when women were
expected to aspire to marriage and motherhood, 19-year-old Simone
was reading philosophy and dreamt of finding a philosophy she
could live by. Her father claimed that ‘to love’ meant ‘services
rendered, affection, gratefulness’. She begged to differ, objecting
with astonishment that love was more than gratitude – not
something we owe someone because of what they’ve done for us.
‘So many people,’ Beauvoir wrote in her diary the next day, ‘[have]
never known love!’1
This 19-year-old did not know that she would become one of the
twentieth century’s most famous intellectual women, that her life
would become copiously written about and widely read. Her letters
and autobiography alone would amount to over a million words,2
and she would publish philosophical essays, prize-winning novels,
short stories, a play, travelogues, political essays, journalism – not to
mention her magnum opus, The Second Sex, which has been
celebrated as ‘the feminist Bible’. She would co-found political
journals, successfully campaign for new legislation, object to the
inhumane treatment of Algerians, give lectures around the world and
lead government commissions.
Simone de Beauvoir was also to become one of the twentieth
century’s most infamous women. She was half of a controversial
intellectual power couple with Jean-Paul Sartre. And, unfortunately,
for much of the twentieth century popular perception was that he
contributed the intellectual power and she contributed the couple.
When she died in Paris in 1986, Le Monde’s obituary headline called
her work ‘more popularization than creation’.3 Reading the existing
biographies, Toril Moi wrote in 1994 that ‘one may be forgiven for
concluding that the significance of Simone de Beauvoir derives
largely from her relatively unorthodox relationship with Sartre and
other lovers’.4
In the decades since these words were written a series of
revelations about Beauvoir have come to light, surprising readers
who thought they knew her. But they have also – ironically –
obscured Beauvoir the thinker by perpetuating the illusion that her
love life was the most interesting thing about her. After all, it was
her philosophy that led her to live – and to continuously reflect on
and re-evaluate – the life she lived. In her words: ‘there is no
divorce between philosophy and life. Every living step is a
philosophical choice’.5
When the public figure Simone de Beauvoir picked up her pen she
wrote not only for herself but for her readers. Her best-selling
autobiographies have been described as embodying a philosophical
ambition to show ‘how one’s self is always shaped by others and
related to others’.6 But Beauvoir’s point was more than that ‘No man
is an island’, as John Donne said. For, in addition to being related to
others, Beauvoir’s autobiographies are upheld by a conviction that
being a self does not mean being the same self from birth until
death. Being a self involves perpetual change with others who are
also changing, in a process of irreversible becoming.
Philosophers since Plato have discussed the importance of self-
understanding to living a good life. Socrates claimed that to be wise
one must ‘Know Thyself!’; Nietzsche wrote that the task of each
person is to ‘Become who you are!’ But Beauvoir’s philosophical
rejoinder was: what if, as a woman, ‘who you are’ is forbidden?
What if becoming yourself simultaneously means being seen as a
failure to be what you should be – a failure as a woman, or as a
lover, or as a mother? What if becoming yourself makes you the
target of ridicule, spite, or shame?
Beauvoir’s century saw seismic shifts in the possibilities available
to women. During her lifetime (1908–1986) women were admitted
to universities on the same terms as men and gained the rights to
vote, divorce and contraception. She lived through the bohemian
blossoming of 1930s Paris and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Between these cultural turning points, The Second Sex marked a
revolutionary moment in the way women thought – and eventually,
talked frankly – about themselves in public. Beauvoir’s philosophical
education was unprecedented in her generation, but, even so, when
she was in her late thirties and began to apply her mind to the
question ‘what has it meant to me to be a woman?’ she was shocked
by her own discoveries.
In a century during which ‘feminism’ came to mean many different
things, she wrote The Second Sex because she was irritated by the
‘volumes of idiocies’ that were churned out about women, tired of
the ink that flowed in the ‘quarrel about feminism’.7 But when
Beauvoir wrote her now-famous line – ‘One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman’ – she did not know how much this book would
affect the rest of her life or the lives of those who came after her.
Much ink has been dedicated to the meaning of that sentence, to
what it means to ‘become’ a woman. This book is dedicated to the
question of how Beauvoir became herself. At the age of 18 Beauvoir
wrote that she had reached the conclusion that it was impossible to
truly ‘put her life in order on paper’ because it was a perpetual
becoming; when she read what she’d written in her diary the day
before, she said, it was like reading ‘mummies’ of ‘dead “selves”’.8
She was a philosopher, inclined to reflection and perpetually
questioning the values of her society and the meaning of her life.
Because of the role Beauvoir assigned to the passage of time in
the experience of being human, this biography follows the
chronology of her life. As she grew older, she said, the world
changed and so did her relationship with it. When Beauvoir wrote
her life for the purpose of others reading it, she wanted ‘to show the
transformations, the ripenings, the irreversible deterioration of
others and myself’. Because life unfolds in time she wanted to follow
‘the thread the years have unwound’.9 In this she resembled the
young woman she had been, the teenage reader of Henri Bergson’s
philosophy. A self is not a thing, Bergson wrote – it is a ‘progress’, a
‘living activity’,10 a becoming that continues to change until it meets
its limit in death.
The woman Beauvoir became was partly the result of her own
choices. However, Beauvoir was acutely aware of the tension
between being a cause of herself and a product of others’ making, of
the conflict between her own desires and others’ expectations. For
centuries French philosophers had debated the question of whether
it is better to live life seen or unseen by others. Descartes claimed
(borrowing Ovid’s words) that ‘to live well you must live unseen’.11
Sartre would write reams about the objectifying ‘gaze’ of other
people – which he thought imprisoned us in relations of
subordination. Beauvoir disagreed: to live well human beings must
be seen by others – but they must be seen in the right way.
The problem is that being seen in the right way depends on who
is seeing you, and when. Imagine that you are a woman in your
early fifties and you have recently decided to write your life story.
You start with your girlhood and youth, your coming-of-age as a
woman, and publish two successful volumes in quick succession. In
them, you describe two conversations you had at the age of 21 with
a now famous man who was once your lover. You are also
accomplished and internationally known. But it is the late 1950s, and
women’s life-writing has not yet reached the watershed moment in
the twentieth century when women began to publicly admit that
they had ambitions and felt anger, let alone that they had record-
setting intellectual achievements or sexual appetites that could be
disappointed even by a very famous man. Imagine that your stories
become legendary – so legendary that they come to be a lens
through which people read your entire life, even though they are
just moments in it.
Beauvoir’s public persona has been shaped – to the extent of
being misshapen – by two such stories she told in her memoirs. The
first takes us to Paris, in October of 1929, when two philosophy
students were sitting outside the Louvre defining their relationship.
They had just come first and second place (Sartre first, Beauvoir
second) in a highly competitive and prestigious national exam and
were about to embark on careers as philosophy teachers. Jean-Paul
Sartre was 24, Beauvoir was 21. Sartre (as the story goes) did not
want conventional fidelity, so they made a ‘pact’ according to which
they were each other’s ‘essential love’ but consented to the other
having ‘contingent loves’ on the side.12 It would be an open
relationship, with first place in their hearts reserved for each other.
They would tell one another everything, they said; and to start with
it would be a ‘two-year lease’. This couple would become, as Sartre’s
biographer Annie Cohen-Solal put it, ‘a model to emulate, a dream of
lasting complicity, an extraordinary success since, apparently, it
seemed to reconcile the irreconcilable: the two partners remained
free, equal, and honest with each other’.13
Their polyamorous ‘pact’ has provoked such curiosity that
biographies have been written about their relationship as well as
their individual lives; they are given an entire chapter in How the
French Invented Love; they are called ‘the first modern couple’ in
headlines.14 Carlo Levi described Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life as
telling ‘the great love story of the century’.15 In her 2008 book about
Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship, Hazel Rowley wrote that: ‘Like
Abélard and Héloïse, they are buried in a joint grave, their names
linked for eternity. They’re one of the world’s legendary couples. We
can’t think of one without thinking of the other: Simone de Beauvoir
and Jean-Paul Sartre.’16
In one sense, this book exists because it is difficult to think of one
without the other. After working on Sartre’s early philosophy for
several years I grew increasingly suspicious about the asymmetries
in the ways that the lives of Beauvoir and Sartre have been
considered. Why, when Beauvoir died, did every obituary of her
mention Sartre, while when Sartre died, some obituaries did not
mention her at all?
For much of the twentieth century, and even the twenty-first,
Beauvoir has not been remembered as a philosopher in her own
right. In part this is due to a second significant story Beauvoir
herself told. Earlier in 1929, also in Paris, by the Medici Fountain in
the Luxembourg Gardens, Beauvoir decided to tell Sartre about her
own ideas: about the ‘pluralist ethics’ she had been developing in
her notebook – yet Sartre ‘took it apart’, and she suddenly became
uncertain of her ‘true capacity’ intellectually.17 There is little doubt
that she was one of the star philosophy students of a famously
stellar era; that summer – at the age of 21 – she would be the
youngest person ever to pass the highly competitive agrégation
exams. As well as Sartre, the budding philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty sought Beauvoir out for her conversation, and valued it
enough to engage with her in person and in print for decades to
come. But even later in her life Beauvoir would insist, ‘I am not a
philosopher … [I am] a literary writer,’ she claimed, and ‘Sartre is the
philosopher.’18
This conversation by the Medici Fountain has led later generations
to ask: did Beauvoir – the very woman who wrote The Second Sex –
underestimate or deceptively understate her own ability? Why would
she do either of these things? Beauvoir was a formidable figure:
many of her achievements were without precedent, blazing the trail
for women to come. In feminist circles she has been celebrated as
an exemplary ideal, ‘a symbol of the possibility, despite everything,
of living one’s life the way one wants to, for oneself, free from
conventions and prejudices, even as a woman’.19 However, one of
the central claims of The Second Sex is that no woman ever has
lived her life ‘free from conventions and prejudices’. Beauvoir
certainly did not. And this biography tells the story of how, in many
ways, she suffered from them – and how she fought back.
Close readers of Beauvoir have always suspected that she was
editing her image in her autobiography, but it was not always clear
how or why she did this. After all, the story of the pact showed a
woman who was committed to telling the truth, and the author of
The Second Sex wanted to shine light on the reality of women’s
situations. Did her commitment to scrutiny stop short at herself? If
not, why would she hide significant parts of her life – intellectual and
personal – from view? And why is it important to reconsider the way
her life is remembered now?
The first answer to these questions – there are two – is that we
have access to new material. Beauvoir’s autobiographies were
published in four volumes between 1958 and 1972. Over the course
of her life she wrote many other works that included
autobiographical material, including two chronicles of her travels to
America (1948) and China (1957), and two memoirs of the deaths of
her mother (1964) and Sartre (1981). She also published a selection
of Sartre’s letters to her (1983).20
During her lifetime some in the circle that grew around Sartre and
Beauvoir – known patronymically as ‘the Sartre family’ (la famille
Sartre) or more simply, ‘the family’ – thought they could see what
Beauvoir was doing with the autobiographical project: putting herself
in control of their public image. Many have assumed that she did this
out of jealousy because she wanted to be remembered as first in
Sartre’s romantic life, as his ‘essential love’.
But in the decades since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 new diaries and
letters have been made public that challenge this assumption. After
Beauvoir published Sartre’s letters to her in 1983, she lost some
friends when the details of their relationships were brought out into
the open. And when her war diary and letters to Sartre were
published after her death in 1990, many were shocked to learn that
not only had she had lesbian relationships, but that the women with
whom she had them were former students. Her letters to Sartre also
exposed the philosophical character of their friendship, and her
influence on his work – but this drew less comment.21
Then came her letters to her American lover Nelson Algren, in
1997, and the public again saw a Beauvoir they had never expected:
a tender, sensitive Simone who penned more passionate words for
Algren than for Sartre. Less than a decade later, in 2004, her
correspondence with Jacques-Laurent Bost was published in French,
showing that within the first decade of her pact with Sartre,
Beauvoir had another ardent affair with a man who remained close
to her until her death. It was another shock, shifting Sartre from the
romantic zenith he occupied in the public imagination. Sartre battled
to establish Beauvoir’s centrality to his intellectual life, publicly
acknowledging her rigorous critical influence on his work. But
evaluating Beauvoir’s life seems to require the forcible displacement
of Sartre from the centre.
Over the past decade more new publications and documents have
been released that show Beauvoir in an even clearer light. Beauvoir’s
student diaries – which show the development of Beauvoir’s
philosophy before she met Sartre and her early impressions of their
relationship – reveal that the life she lived was very different from
the life she recounted for the public. Although the diaries were
published in 2008 in French, they are not yet available in full in
English, so this period of her life is not well known outside scholarly
circles. And in 2018 more new material became available to
researchers, including letters Beauvoir wrote to the only lover she
ever lived with or addressed by the familiar second person, tu:
Claude Lanzmann.22 In the same year, a prestigious two-volume
Pléiade edition of Beauvoir’s memoirs was released in France,
complete with extracts from unpublished diaries and working notes
for her manuscripts. In addition to these publications in French, in
recent years the Beauvoir series, edited by Margaret Simons and
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, have found, translated and published or
republished many of Beauvoir’s early writings, from her philosophical
essays on ethics and politics to magazine articles she wrote for
Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
This new material shows that Beauvoir omitted a great deal from
her memoirs – but it also shows some of the reasons behind her
omissions. In the media-saturated internet age, it is difficult to
imagine the extent to which Beauvoir’s publication of autobiography
defied contemporary conventions of privacy. Her four volumes (or
six, counting the memoirs of her mother’s and Sartre’s deaths)
cultivated a sense of intimate familiarity in her readers. But she did
not promise to tell all: in fact, she told her readers that she had
deliberately left some things obscure.23
The most recent new material – her diaries and unpublished
letters to Claude Lanzmann – show that it was not just lovers she
left in obscurity, but the early genesis of her philosophy of love and
the influence of her philosophy on Sartre. Throughout her life she
was plagued by people doubting her ability or originality – some
even suggested that Sartre wrote her books. Even the ‘mammoth
edifice’ that is The Second Sex was accused of resting on ‘two
slender postulates’ that Beauvoir took from Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness; she was accused of referring to Sartre’s works ‘as if to
a sacred text’.24 In some of her writings she explicitly condemns
these belittlements as false. But they afflicted her in life and after
death: in addition to the one that called her a popularizer, another
obituary dismissively declared her ‘incapable of invention’.25
It may come as a surprise to today’s readers to hear this woman
be accused of being unoriginal. But it was (and still is, sadly) an
allegation frequently made against women writers – and often
internalized by them. Beauvoir did have her own ideas, some of
which were very like the ones Sartre became famous for; one year
she published under his byline because he was busy and no one
even noticed. Sartre acknowledged that it was her idea to make his
first novel Nausea a novel rather than an abstract philosophical
treatise, and that she was a rigorous critic whose insights improved
his manuscripts before publication throughout his long career. In the
1940s and 1950s she wrote and published her own philosophy,
criticizing Sartre and eventually changing his mind. In her later
autobiography she defended herself against attacks on her own
abilities, claiming outright that she had her own philosophy of being
and nothingness before she met Sartre (who went on to write the
book Being and Nothingness), and that she did not come to the
same conclusions that he did. But these claims to her own
independence and originality would be widely overlooked, as would
her claims that some of the things people called ‘Sartrean’ weren’t
really original to Sartre.
This leads me to my second answer to the question of why we
should reconsider Beauvoir’s life now. Biography can reveal what a
society cares about, what it values – and by encountering the values
of another person in another time we can learn more about our own.
The Second Sex criticized many ‘myths’ of femininity for being the
projections of men’s fears and fantasies about women.26 Many of
these myths involve failing to take women as agents – as conscious
human beings who make choices and develop projects for their lives,
who want to love and be loved as such, and who suffer when they
are reduced to objects in the eyes of others. Before she met Sartre,
a year before she had an argument with her father about love, the
18-year-old Beauvoir wrote in her diary that: ‘There are several
things I hate about love.’27 Her objections were ethical: men were
not held up to the same ideals that women were. Beauvoir grew up
in a tradition which taught that becoming an ethical self involves
learning to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. But in Beauvoir’s
experience this injunction was rarely applied: people always seemed
to love themselves too much or too little; no example of love from
books or life satisfied her expectations.
It is far from clear whether Beauvoir’s expectations were satisfied
by the loves she went on to have. But it is clear that Beauvoir made
and remade her decision to live a philosophical life, a reflective life
guided by her own intellectual values, a life of freedom. She chose
to do this by writing in several literary forms – and to do this in
lifelong conversation with Sartre. It matters to reconsider Beauvoir’s
life now because Beauvoir and Sartre were united in the popular
imagination by a very ambiguous word – ‘love’ – and ‘love’ was a
concept that Beauvoir subjected to decades of philosophical scrutiny.
Reconsidering Beauvoir’s life also matters because over time
Beauvoir became dissatisfied with the way her life was depicted –
with the way the persona ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ departed from the
narrative of conventional marriage only to be subsumed by another
erotic plot. Even after her death, widespread assumptions about
‘what women want’ and ‘what women can do’ affected the way
Beauvoir’s life is remembered. Whether romantically or intellectually,
she has been cast as Sartre’s prey.
Romantically, the idea that Beauvoir was Sartre’s victim relies
heavily on the assumption that where ‘love’ is concerned all women,
if they’re really honest with themselves, want lifelong monogamy
with men. Over the five decades of the ‘legendary couple’ Sartre
very publicly courted numerous ‘contingent’ women. Beauvoir, on the
other hand, appeared (because they were omitted from her
memoirs) to have few contingent relationships with men, all of which
were over by her early fifties. On this basis some concluded that
Sartre hoodwinked her into an exploitative relationship in which,
despite being unmarried, they played the all-too-familiar parts of
feckless womanizer and faithful woman. Sometimes her life is
described as a casualty of patriarchal norms which suggest, among
other things, that an ageing or intellectual woman was not as
romantically desirable as an ageing or intellectual man. And
sometimes she is the dupe of her own foolishness. As her former
student, Bianca Lamblin, put it: Beauvoir ‘planted the seeds of her
own unhappiness’ by refusing marriage and family.28 Louis Menand
wrote in the New Yorker that ‘Beauvoir was formidable, but she was
not made of ice. Though her affairs, for the most part, were love
affairs, it is plain from almost every page she wrote that she would
have given them all up if she could have had Sartre for herself
alone.’
By contrast, Beauvoir’s student diaries show that within weeks of
meeting Jean-Paul Sartre she assigned him only one irreplaceable
role: she was delighted to have found Sartre, writing that he ‘is in
my heart, in my body and above all (for in my heart and my body
many others could be) the incomparable friend of my thought’.29 It
was friendship rather than love, she later explained in a letter to
Nelson Algren, because Sartre ‘does not care much for sexual life.
He is a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed. I soon felt it,
though I had no experience; and little by little, it seemed useless,
and even indecent, to go on being lovers’.30
Was ‘the great love story of the century’ ultimately the story of a
friendship?
Intellectually, Beauvoir has also been portrayed as a victim of
Sartre, patriarchy, or personal failure. Did Beauvoir internalize
misogyny? Did she lack confidence in her own philosophical ability?
Throughout her public life Beauvoir was accused of ‘popularizing’
Sartre’s ideas. She has been taken – to borrow Virginia Woolf’s
metaphor – as a magnifying mirror, with ‘the magic and delicious
power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’.31 Even
worse, she has been accused of being satisfied with playing this
reflective role.
But it is difficult to know how much Beauvoir’s purported
‘secondary’ status owes to Beauvoir and Sartre themselves and how
much to attribute it to widespread cultural sexism. Even today, we
know that women are: more often described in relational (personal
or familial) terms than professional; more likely to be described with
passive verbs than active ones; subject to negative gender
distinctions (for example, ‘despite being a woman, Simone thought
like a man’) and paraphrased rather than cited in their own voice.
Prominent commentary spanning Beauvoir’s career provides
illustration after illustration of her public definition as Sartre’s
derivative double, or worse:
The New Yorker, 22 February 1947
‘Sartre’s female intellectual counterpart’; ‘the prettiest Existentialist
you ever saw’
William Barrett (philosopher), 1958
‘that woman, his friend, who wrote a book of feminine protest’32
La Petit Larousse, 1974
‘Simone de Beauvoir: woman of letters, Sartre’s disciple’
The Times of London, 1986
‘In both her philosophical and political thinking, she follows his
lead’33
La Petit Larousse, 1987
‘Simone de Beauvoir: Sartre’s disciple and companion, and an
ardent feminist’
Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir’s first biographer, 1990
Sartre’s ‘companion’, who ‘applies, disseminates, clarifies,
supports, and administers’ his ‘philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and
political principles’34
The Times Literary Supplement, 2001
‘Sartre’s sex slave?’35
Because many of Beauvoir’s own words have not been available
until relatively recently even some of her most insightful
commentators have cast her as someone who passively succumbed
to Sartre’s spell. Intellectually, Beauvoir has been described as a
‘closet philosopher’, who renounced philosophy (becoming ‘second to
Sartre’) because she saw intellectual success to be ‘incompatible
with seduction’.36 Romantically, Toril Moi wrote, Beauvoir’s
relationship to Sartre was ‘the one sacrosanct area of her life to be
protected even against her own critical attention’.37 bell hooks writes
that ‘Beauvoir passively accepted Sartre’s appropriation of her ideas
without acknowledging the source’.38 But personally Beauvoir was
critical of Sartre from the early days of their relationship; and
philosophically she did defend her own originality – although it is
true that this would become more pronounced later in her life, after
she saw just how inflated and one-sided claims of Sartre’s influence
on her became.
Alongside concerns that she was an exploited victim, Beauvoir has
also been depicted as an exploitative vixen. The posthumous
publication of Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre and her diaries from the
Second World War revealed that she had sexual relationships with
three young women in the late 1930s and early 1940s, all of whom
were her own former students. In some cases, Sartre would later
have relationships with them too. It is bad enough, the objection
goes, that she preyed upon women many years her junior and in
dynamics of unequal power; but did Simone de Beauvoir ‘groom’
young women for Sartre? The couple of the pact clearly valued
truth-telling – it was a central part of the public mythology of their
relationship. So when details of their trios came to light they
provoked shock, disgust and character assassination: ‘It turned out
that these two advocates of truth-telling constantly told lies to an
array of emotionally unstable young girls.’39
But the disdain they provoked was, again, suspiciously
asymmetrical: whether because Beauvoir was a woman or because
she was the woman who would go on to write The Second Sex, it
seemed so much more surprising that she could be guilty of such
behaviour. When Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary was published in English
in 2009 one disgusted reviewer entitled her review ‘Lying and
Nothingness’, expressing shock that Beauvoir had written ‘page after
dishonest page’ in her memoirs.40 In the eyes of some readers this
Beauvoir cared only for herself, and her novels were vanity writ
large. When Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre were published in English in
1991, Richard Heller called her ‘vapid’ and lamented the ‘dispiriting,
narcissistic quality of the material’.41
Readers may be tempted to give up on Beauvoir when they
encounter the way she described these women. One of her lovers –
with whom Beauvoir remained friends until her death – wrote a
memoir after the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s letters to
Sartre. Although it was decades after the events the letters depicted,
she felt used and betrayed after reading them. Who should be
believed – and when? What sense can be made of these accusations
against the same woman who later wrote a rigorous ethics
demanding that women should be treated with the respect befitting
their dignity as free and conscious human beings? After all, it is
because of Beauvoir that the word ‘sexism’ was added to the French
dictionary.42 She has been admired by feminists like Toril Moi and
bell hooks as ‘the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth
century’, ‘the one female intellectual, thinker-writer who had lived
fully the life of the mind as I longed to live it’.43
The answers to these questions matter because Beauvoir’s
authority has been invoked by many feminists to sanction their
claims – whether or not she would have agreed with them. ‘Simone
de Beauvoir’ has become an iconic feminist and post-feminist
consumer product: ‘a trademark of [her]self, a person turned into a
brand’.44 But brand perception is notoriously fickle. While some
feminists celebrated her perceptive analysis of women’s oppression,
Beauvoir’s criticisms of ideals of love, in particular, enraged some of
her contemporaries, who retaliated by belittling and insulting her.
When she published an excerpt from The Second Sex in May 1949,
claiming that women did not want a battle of the sexes but rather
(among other things) to feel ‘both desire and respect’ from men in
sexual life, the prestigious author François Mauriac asked with
derision: Is ‘a serious philosophical and literary review really the
place for the subject treated by Mme Simone de Beauvoir’?45 When
Pascal asked whether there was a conflict between love and justice,
he was doing philosophy. When Kant and Mill discussed the place of
love in ethics, they were doing philosophy.46 But when Beauvoir
extended discussions of love and justice to intimate relationships
between men and women, she was called ‘Madame’ – to draw
shameful attention to her unmarried status – and accused of
lowering the tone.
In hindsight, it looks like Beauvoir was on the receiving end of an
ad feminam offensive: If her critics could reduce her to a failure as a
woman, highlighting her deviance from femininity; or a failure as a
thinker, because she was unoriginal and owed everything to Sartre;
or a failure as a human being, highlighting her deviance from their
own moral ideals, then her ideas could be summarily dismissed
rather than seriously debated.
As a matter of principle, clearly, both men and women can fall foul
of the ad hominem fallacy, an argumentative strategy that diverts
attention from the topic at hand by attacking a person’s character or
motives instead. But Beauvoir was not just accused of having poor
character and unsound motives; she was accused of being against
nature, of being a failure as a woman. Recent research in
psychology suggests that women who achieve positions called
agentic – that is, positions in which they show agency, including
competence, confidence, and assertiveness – are often punished by
‘social dominance penalties’. If women break out of gender
hierarchies by competing for or achieving high-status, traditionally
masculine positions, they are often perceived to be arrogant or
aggressive, and penalized by being ‘taken down’ or brought down to
size – sometimes entirely unconsciously – in order to maintain
gender hierarchy.47
Beauvoir transgressed this hierarchy in practice and in theory: her
ideas had the power to disrupt the lives of both men and women
and she tried to live her own life according to them. In this sense,
Beauvoir’s story – on her own and with Sartre – raises questions not
only about what is true about this woman and this man, but about
what we can claim is true about men and women more generally. In
today’s intellectual landscape, increasingly little is held to be
universally true of the broad categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the
categories themselves have come into question. In part, this has
been possible because of Beauvoir’s thoughts. But, as we shall see,
Beauvoir was often penalized for having the audacity to think them.
Beauvoir’s own philosophy – from her student diaries to her last
theoretical work on Old Age – distinguished between two aspects of
becoming a self: the view ‘from within’ and the view ‘from without’.
To get close to Beauvoir’s view ‘from within’, for some parts of her
life we are almost entirely reliant on her memoirs. There are reasons
to doubt what she tells us in them, so where new material provides
evidence of omissions or contradictions between accounts I have
highlighted this as much as possible.
I have also drawn attention to the way that Beauvoir’s
understanding of her own becoming changed as she aged. We know
that human beings’ views of themselves change over time;
psychological studies have shown repeatedly that self-concepts shift
and our memories are selected to correspond to them.48 We also
know that humans present themselves in a variety of ways
depending on their audience. For some parts of Beauvoir’s life we
have private letters and diaries – but letters are always written for a
particular reader, and even diaries can be written with one eye on
posterity. Voltaire wrote that all we owe to the dead is truth:49 but
between the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, and
the stories they tell about us, where is the truth?
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
A violation of the terms of the armistice by private
individuals acting on their own initiative, only confers the
right of demanding the punishment of the offenders, and, if
necessary, indemnity for the losses sustained.
{363}
SECTION III.
On Military Authority over Hostile Territory.
ARTICLE XLII.
Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed
under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation
applies only to the territory where such authority is
established, and in a position to assert itself.
ARTICLE XLIII.
The authority of the legitimate power having actually passed
into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all
steps in his power to re-establish and insure, as far as
possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless
absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.
ARTICLE XLIV.
Any compulsion of the population of occupied territory to take
part in military operations against its own country is
prohibited.
ARTICLE XLV.
Any pressure on the population of occupied territory to take
the oath to the hostile Power is prohibited.
ARTICLE XLVI.
Family honours and rights, individual lives and private
property, as well as religious convictions and liberty, must
be respected. Private property cannot be confiscated.
ARTICLE XLVII.
Pillage is formally prohibited.
ARTICLE XLVIII.
If, in the territory occupied, the occupant collects the
taxes, dues, and tolls imposed for the benefit of the State,
he shall do it, as far as possible, in accordance with the
rules in existence and the assessment in force, and will in
consequence be bound to defray the expenses of the
administration of the occupied territory on the same scale as
that by which the legitimate Government was bound.
ARTICLE XLIX.
If, besides the taxes mentioned in the preceding Article, the
occupant levies other money taxes in the occupied territory,
this can only be for military necessities or the
administration of such territory.
ARTICLE L.
No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be inflicted
on the population on account of the acts of individuals for
which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible.
ARTICLE LI.
No tax shall be collected except under a written order and on
the responsibility of a Commander-in-chief. This collection
shall only take place, as far as possible, in accordance with
the rules in existence and the assessment of taxes in force.
For every payment a receipt shall be given to the taxpayer.
ARTICLE LII.
Neither requisitions in kind nor services can be demanded from
communes or inhabitants except for the necessities of the army
of occupation. They must be in proportion to the resources of the
country, and of such a nature as not to involve the population
in the obligation of taking part in military operations
against their country. These requisitions and services shall
only be demanded on the authority of the Commander in the
locality occupied. The contributions in kind shall, as far as
possible, be paid for in ready money; if not, their receipt
shall be acknowledged.
ARTICLE LIII.
An army of occupation can only take possession of the cash,
funds, and property liable to requisition belonging strictly
to the State, depots of arms, means of transport, stores and
supplies, and, generally, all movable property of the State
which may be used for military operations. Railway plant, land
telegraphs, telephones, steamers, and other ships, apart from
cases governed by maritime law, as well as depots of arms and,
generally, all kinds of war material, even though belonging to
Companies or to private persons, are likewise material which
may serve for military operations, but they must be restored
at the conclusion of peace, and indemnities paid for them.
ARTICLE LIV.
The plant of railways coming from neutral States, whether the
property of those States, or of Companies, or of private
persons, shall be sent back to them as soon as possible.
ARTICLE LV.
The occupying State shall only be regarded as administrator
and usufructuary of the public buildings, real property,
forests, and agricultural works belonging to the hostile
State, and situated in the occupied country. It must protect
the capital of these properties, and administer it according
to the rules of usufruct.
ARTICLE LVI.
The property of the communes, that of religious, charitable,
and educational institutions, and those of arts and science,
even when State property, shall be treated as private
property. All seizure of, and destruction, or intentional
damage done to such institutions, to historical monuments,
works of art or science, is prohibited, and should be made the
subject of proceedings.
SECTION IV.
On the Internment of Belligerents and the Care of the Wounded
in Neutral Countries.
ARTICLE LVII.
A neutral State which receives in its territory troops
belonging to the belligerent armies shall intern them, as far
as possible, at a distance from the theatre of war. It can
keep them in camps, and even confine them in fortresses or
localities assigned for this purpose. It shall decide whether
officers may be left at liberty on giving their parole that
they will not leave the neutral territory without
authorization.
ARTICLE LVIII.
Failing a special Convention, the neutral State shall supply
the interned with the food, clothing, and relief required by
humanity. At the conclusion of peace, the expenses caused by
the internment shall be made good.
ARTICLE LIX.
A neutral State may authorize the passage through its
territory of wounded or sick belonging to the belligerent
armies, on condition that the trains bringing them shall carry
neither combatants nor war material. In such a case, the neutral
State is bound to adopt such measures of safety and control as
may be necessary for the purpose. Wounded and sick brought
under these conditions into neutral territory by one of the
belligerents, and belonging to the hostile party, must be
guarded by the neutral State, so as to insure their not taking
part again in the military operations. The same duty shall
devolve on the neutral State with regard to wounded or sick of
the other army who may be committed to its care.
{364}
ARTICLE LX.
The Geneva Convention applies to sick and wounded interned in
neutral territory. The Convention establishing these
regulations was not signed by the delegates from the United
States, nor by those of Great Britain. The reasons for
abstention on the part of the latter were stated in a
communication from the British War Office, as follows: "Lord
Lansdowne … considers it essential that the revised Articles,
together with the Preamble and final dispositions, should be
submitted to the most careful examination by the high military
authorities and by the legal advisers of Her Majesty's
Government, before he can pronounce a definitive opinion on
the three points raised. Subject to such reserves as may
result from this examination, Lord Lansdowne is of opinion
that the Project of Convention is in general of such a nature
that it may, in principle, be accepted as a basis of
instructions for the guidance of the British army, but he is
unable, until that examination has been completed, to offer an
opinion as to whether it is desirable to enter into an
international engagement. Lord Lansdowne would therefore
suggest, for Lord Salisbury's consideration, that instructions
should be given to Sir Julian Pauncefote to reserve full
liberty for Her Majesty's Government, to accept only such
Articles as, after mature examination by their military and
legal advisers, they may approve of." Probably the delegates
from the United States were similarly instructed by their
government.
Added to the Convention relative to Laws and Customs of War
were three Declarations, separately signed, as follows:
1. "The contracting powers agree to prohibit, for a term of
five years, the launching of projectiles and explosives from
balloons, or by other new methods of a similar nature."
2. "The contracting parties agree to abstain from the use of
bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such
as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover
the core, or is pierced with incisions."
3. "The contracting parties agree to abstain from the use of
projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of
asphyxiating or deleterious gases."
The first of these Declarations was signed by the delegates
from the United States, but not by those from Great Britain.
The second and third were signed by neither British nor
American representatives. In the discussion that preceded the
adoption of the second Declaration by a majority of the
Conference, Captain Crozier, of the American delegation,
presented the objections to it, on which he and his colleagues
were in agreement with the British representatives. He said
"there was a great difference of opinion as to whether the
bullets of small calibre rifles sufficed to put men 'hors de
combat,' which was admitted on all sides to be the object
which rifle fire was expected to achieve. He considered the
proposition before the Conference to be unsatisfactory, since
it limited the prohibition to details of construction which
only included a single case, and left all others out of
consideration. He would not enter into a recapitulation of all
the advantages of small calibre rifles, since they were
perfectly well known; but he felt sure that certain Powers
might adopt calibres even smaller than those at present in
use, and, in this case, he maintained that they would be
compelled to secure increased shock by some new method of
construction of the projectile. He considered that it would be
perfectly easy to devise such projectiles while keeping within
the terms of the proposed interdiction, and he thought that
the result might be the ultimate adoption of a bullet of an
even less humane character than those aimed at by the
Resolution. He declared that he had nothing to say for or
against the Dum-Dum bullet [see, in this volume, DUM-DUM
BULLET], of which he knew nothing except what had been stated
during the meetings of the First Commission, but that he was
not disposed to make any condemnation without proofs, and
these proofs had not been forthcoming."
As for the third Declaration, it was opposed by Captain Mahan,
who spoke for the Americans, because "he considered the use of
asphyxiating shell far less inhuman and cruel than the
employment of submarine boats, and as the employment of
submarine boats had not been interdicted by the Conference
(though specially mentioned with that object in the Mouravieff
Circular), he felt constrained to maintain his vote in favour of
the use of asphyxiating shell on the original ground that the
United States' Government was averse to placing any
restriction on the inventive genius of its citizens in
inventing and providing new weapons of war."
PEACE CONFERENCE:
Convention for the adaptation to maritime warfare of the
principles of the Geneva Convention of August 22, 1864.
ARTICLE I.
Military hospital-ships, that is to say, ships constructed or
assigned by States specially and solely for the purpose of
assisting the wounded, sick, or shipwrecked, and the names of
which shall have been communicated to the belligerent Powers
at the commencement or during the course of hostilities, and
in any case before they are employed, shall be respected and
cannot be captured while hostilities last. These ships,
moreover, are not on the same footing as men-of-war as regards
their stay in a neutral port.
ARTICLE II.
Hospital-ships, equipped wholly or in part at the cost of
private individuals or officially recognized relief Societies,
shall likewise be respected and exempt from capture, provided
the belligerent Power to whom they belong has given them an
official commission and has notified their names to the
Hostile Power at the commencement of or during hostilities,
and in any case before they are employed. These ships should
be furnished with a certificate from the competent
authorities, declaring that they had been under their control
while fitting out and on final departure.
ARTICLE III.
Hospital-ships, equipped wholly or in part at the cost of
private individuals or officially recognized Societies of
neutral countries, shall be respected and exempt from capture,
if the neutral Power to whom they belong has given them an
official commission and notified their names to the
belligerent Powers at the commencement of or during
hostilities, and in any case before they are employed.
ARTICLE IV.
The ships mentioned in Articles I, II, and III shall afford
relief and assistance to the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked of
the belligerents independently of their nationality. The
Governments engage not to use these ships for any military
purpose. These ships must not in any way hamper the movements
of the combatants. During and after an engagement they will
act at their own risk and peril. The belligerents will have
the right to control and visit them; they can refuse to help
them, order them off, make them take a certain course, and put
a Commissioner on board; they can even detain them, if important
circumstances require it. As far as possible the belligerents
shall inscribe in the sailing papers of the hospital-ships the
orders they give them.
{365}
ARTICLE V.
The military hospital-ships shall be distinguished by being
painted white outside with a horizontal band of green about a
metre and a half in breadth. The ships mentioned in Articles
II and III shall be distinguished by being painted white
outside with a horizontal band of red about a metre and a half
in breadth. The boats of the ships above mentioned, as also
small craft which may be used for hospital work, shall be
distinguished by similar painting. All hospital-ships shall
make themselves known by hoisting, together with their
national flag, the white flag with a red cross provided by the
Geneva Convention.
ARTICLE VI.
Neutral merchantmen, yachts, or vessels, having, or taking on
board, sick, wounded, or shipwrecked of the belligerents,
cannot be captured for so doing, but they are liable to
capture for any violation of neutrality they may have
committed.
ARTICLE VII.
The religious, medical, or hospital staff of any captured ship
is inviolable, and its members cannot be made prisoners of
war. On leaving the ship they take with them the objects and
surgical instruments which are their own private property.
This staff shall continue to discharge its duties while
necessary, and can afterwards leave when the
Commander-in-chief considers it possible. The belligerents
must guarantee to the staff that has fallen into their hands
the enjoyment of their salaries intact.
ARTICLE VIII.
Sailors and soldiers who are taken on board when sick or
wounded, to whatever nation they belong, shall be protected
and looked after by the captors.
ARTICLE IX.
The shipwrecked, wounded, or sick of one of the belligerents
who fall into the hands of the other, are prisoners of war.
The captor must decide, according to circumstances, if it is
best to keep them or send them to a port of his own country,
to a neutral port, or even to a hostile port. In the last
case, prisoners thus repatriated cannot serve as long as the
war lasts.
ARTICLE X.
The shipwrecked, wounded, or sick, who are landed at a neutral
port with the consent of the local authorities, must, failing
a contrary arrangement between the neutral State and the
belligerents, be guarded by the neutral State, so that they
cannot again take part in the military operations. The
expenses of entertainment and internment shall be borne by the
State to which the shipwrecked, wounded, or sick belong.
ARTICLE XI.
The rules contained in the above Articles are binding only on
the Contracting Powers, in case of war between two or more of
them. The said rules shall cease to be binding from the time
when, in a war between the Contracting Powers, one of the
belligerents is joined by a non-Contracting Power.
ARTICLE XII.
The present Convention shall be ratified as soon as possible.
The ratifications shall be deposited at The Hague. On the
receipt of each ratification a "procès-verbal" shall be drawn
up, a copy of which, duly certified, shall be sent through the
diplomatic channel to all the Contracting Powers.
ARTICLE XIII.
The non-Signatory Powers who accepted the Geneva Convention of
the 22d August, 1864, are allowed to adhere to the present
Convention. For this purpose they must make their adhesion
known to the Contracting Powers by means of a written
notification addressed to the Netherland Government, and by it
communicated to all the other Contracting Powers.
ARTICLE XIV.
In the event of one of the High Contracting Parties denouncing
the present Convention, such denunciation shall not take
effect until a year after the notification made in writing to
the Netherland Government, and forthwith communicated by it to
all the other Contracting Powers. This denunciation shall only
affect the notifying Power.
In faith of which the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed
the present Convention and affixed their seals thereto.
[Signed by the representatives of Belgium, Denmark, Spain,
Mexico, France, Greece, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Persia,
Portugal, Roumania, Russia, Siam, Sweden and Norway, and
Bulgaria]
----------PEACE CONFERENCE: End--------
PEARY'S EXPLORATIONS.
See (in this volume)
POLAR EXPLORATION, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898—.
PEKING: A. D. 1900.
The siege of the Foreign Legations and their rescue.
Occupation of the city by the allied forces.
Looting and outrage.
March through the "Forbidden City."
See (in this volume)
CHINA: A. D. 1900 (JUNE-AUGUST);
and (AUGUST 4-16, and 15-28).
PEKING: A. D. 1900-1901.
Seizure of grounds for a fortified Legation Quarter.
See (in this volume)
CHINA: A. D. 1900-1901 (NOVEMBER-FEBRUARY).
PEKING SYNDICATE, Chinese concessions to the.
See (in this volume)
CHINA: A. D. 1898 (FEBRUARY-DECEMBER).
PELAGIC SEAL KILLING, The question of.
See (in this volume)
BERING SEA QUESTIONS.
PELEW ISLANDS:
Sale by Spain to Germany.
See (in this volume)
CAROLINE AND MARIANNE ISLANDS.
PENNSYLVANIA: A. D. 1897.
Great strike of coal miners.
Conflict at Lattimer.
See (in this volume)
INDUSTRIAL DISTURBANCES: A. D. 1897.
PENNSYLVANIA: A. D. 1900.
Strike of anthracite coal miners.
See (in this volume)
INDUSTRIAL DISTURBANCES: A. D. 1900.
PENNSYLVANIA, University of:
Expeditions to explore the ruins of Nippur.
See (in this volume)
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: BABYLONIA:
AMERICAN EXPLORATION.
PENNY POSTAGE, British Imperial.
See (in this volume)
ENGLAND: A. D. 1898 (DECEMBER).
PENSIONS, Old-Age.
See references (in this volume) under
OLD-AGE PENSIONS.
PEONES.
See (in this volume)
PORTO RICO: A. D. 1898-1899 (AUGUST-JULY).
PEOPLE'S PARTY, The.
See (in this volume)
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1896 (JUNE-NOVEMBER);
and 1900 (MAY-NOVEMBER).
{366}
PERRY'S EXPEDITION TO JAPAN,
Proposed monument to commemorate.
See (in this volume)
JAPAN: A. D. 1901.
PERSIA: A.D. 1896.
Assassination of the Shah.
The Shah of Persia, Nâsr-ed-din, was shot, on the 1st day of
May, when entering the mosque of Shah Abdul Azim, by one Mirza
Mahomed Reza, said to be of the Babi sect. Nâsr-ed-din had
reigned since 1848. He was succeeded by his son,
Muzaffar-ed-din, who was forty-three years old at his
accession.
PERSIA: A. D. 1897-1899.
Recent exploration of the ruins of Susa.
See (in this volume)
ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: PERSIA.
PERSIA: A. D. 1899 (May-July).
Representation in the Peace Conference at The Hague.
See (in this volume)
PEACE CONFERENCE.
PERSIA: A. D. 1900.
Russian railway projects.
See (in this volume)
RUSSIA IN ASIA: A. D. 1900.
PERSIAN GULF, Railways to the.
See (in this volume)
TURKEY: A. D. 1899 (NOVEMBER);
and RUSSIA IN ASIA: A. D. 1900.
PERU: A. D. 1894-1899.
Overthrow of an unconstitutional government.
Legitimate authority restored.
The death of President Bermudez, in March, 1894, brought about
a revolutionary movement in the interest of ex-President
Caceres. Constitutionally, the First Vice-President, Dr. del
Solar, would have succeeded the deceased President, until a
new election was held; but the Second Vice-President, who was
a partisan of Caceres, and who had the army with him, seized
control of the government. In May, Caceres was proclaimed
Provisional President, and in August it was claimed for him
that he had been elected by Congress; but the election was not
recognized by his opponents. A formidable rebellion was
organized, under the lead of ex-President Pierola, who had
been in exile and now returned. Civil war raged for nearly a
year, Pierola gaining steadily. In February, 1895, his forces
reached the capital and laid siege to it. On the 17th of March
they entered the city, and there was desperate fighting in the
streets of Lima for three days, nearly 2,000 of the
combatants being killed and more than 1,500 wounded. Chiefly
through the efforts of the Papal delegate, the bloody conflict
was finally stopped and terms of peace arranged. A provisional
government, made up from both parties, was formed, under which
a peaceable election was held in the following July. Pierola
was then elected President. Caceres and his partisans
attempted a rising the next year (1896), but it had no
success. In the northern department of Loreto, on the border
of Ecuador, an abortive movement for independence was set on
foot by an ambitious official, who gave the government
considerable trouble, but accomplished nothing more. In 1899,
President Pierola was succeeded by Eduardo L. de Romana,
elected in May. A rebellion attempted that year by one General
Durand was promptly suppressed.
PERU: A. D. 1894.-1900.
The dispute with Chile concerning Tacna and Arica.
See (in this volume)
CHILE: A. D. 1884-1900.
PESCADORES ISLANDS:
Cession by China to Japan.
See (in this volume)
CHINA: A. D. 1894-1895.
PHILADELPHIA: A. D. 1897.
Opening of the Commercial Museum.
A Commercial Museum which has acquired great importance was
opened in Philadelphia on the 2d of June, 1897. "In both aim
and results the institution is unique. Other countries, also,
have their commercial museums, which are doing excellent work.
Their scope, however, is much more limited; the Museum of
Philadelphia differing from them in that it is an active, not
merely a passive, aid to the prospective exporter. The foreign
museums, situated in London, Bremen, Hamburg, Stuttgart,
Vienna, Havre, Brussels, and various other commercial centres,
do not extend active aid, but content themselves with more or
less complete displays of samples of domestic and foreign
competitive goods sold in export markets. The theory of their
organization is, that the manufacturer, contemplating a
foreign business campaign, will be enabled to pursue it
intelligently through the study of these samples. The
initiative is left to the exporter himself, who must discover
what opportunities exist for him abroad; and it is also left
to him to take advantage of his opportunities in the way that
may seem best to him. The display of manufactured samples is
only a small part of the work of the Philadelphia Museum. This
institution shows not only what goods are sold in foreign
markets, but also where those markets are, what commercial
conditions obtain in connection with them, what particular
kinds of goods they demand, how these markets may be best
competed for, and where the raw material may be most
profitably purchased. It furnishes information, furthermore,
as to business connections as well as the credit ratings of
the agents or firms recommended. To secure specific
information it is not necessary to visit the institution
itself; for reports of trade opportunities abroad are
distributed by the Museum to its members; and these reports
are provided with photographs of many of the articles which,
at that particular time, are in demand, in certain parts of
the world. Under these circumstances, the exporter is
practically provided with a staff of expert, foreign
representatives, without any expense to himself beyond the
merely nominal fee for membership. While its activities are
dependent to a certain extent upon the income derived from
subscribers, the Museum is not a money-making institution.
Indeed, its income from this source does not cover half the
expenditures. It is enabled to carry on its work only by
reason of the generous, annual appropriation provided for it
by the City Councils of Philadelphia. But a very large income
is required to maintain a staff of 150 employees in
Philadelphia, as well as 500 regular and several thousand
occasional correspondents scattered throughout the world. The
only advantage which the city itself derives from the Museum
is that resulting indirectly from the presence of foreign
buyers attracted to Philadelphia by the Museum's work."
W. P. Wilson,
The Philadelphia Commercial Museum
(Forum, September, 1899).
PHILADELPHIA: A. D. 1899.
National Export Exposition and International
Commercial Congress.
See (in this volume)
INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL CONGRESS.
{367}
----------PHILIPPINE ISLANDS: Start--------
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS:
Number, area, shore line, and population.
"In regard to the number and areas of the islands in the
archipelago there must necessarily be a certain inaccuracy,
because the group has never been properly surveyed, and the
only method of determining the number and areas is by counting
and measuring on the charts. The following figures are
probably the best ever compiled. They are drawn from
enumeration and mensuration on maps recently obtained by the
United States commissioners to the Philippines and which are
without doubt the most complete and the most thorough ever
made. The following is quoted from the introduction to these
maps, which are being published by the United States Coast and
Geodetic Survey. All the islands or groups having an area of over
20 square miles have been measured, and the areas are here
given in square miles and square kilometers. Many different
statements have been made in regard to the number of the
islands composing the archipelago. The cause for this must be
attributed to the scale of the charts on which the count was
made and the difficulty of distinguishing between rocks and
formations of sufficient area to dignify them by the name of
islands. Thus on a small-scale Spanish chart of the entire
group 948 islands were counted; on various large-scale charts
of the same area there were found 1,725. The principal
islands, with the extent of shore line of some of them and
their area, are given on the following lists. The areas were
carefully measured, but are subject to the inaccuracy of the
length of general shore line.
Name. Square Miles. Square
kilometers.
Babuyan 36
93
Bagata, or Quinalasag 27
70
Balabae 38
98
Basilan 350
907
Batan 21
54
Bantayan 26
67
Bohol 1,430
3,727
Bucas 41
106
Burias 153
422
Busuanga 328
850
Calayan 37
96
Calamian 117
303
Camiguin (Babnyanes group) 54
140
Camiguin 71
184
Catandunanes 680
1,761
Cebu 1,742
4,512
Dalupiri 20
53
Dinagat 259
671
Dumaran 95
246
Fuga 21
54
Guimaras 176
456
Leite (Leyte) 2,713
7,027
Linapacan 40
104
Luzon 47,238
122,346
Mactan 20
52
Malhou (Homonkon) 35
91
Marindugna 287
743
Masbate 1.200
3,341
Mindanao 36,237
93,854
Mindoro 3,972
10,987
Negros 4,854
12,571
Olutanga 71
184
Panaon 57
148
Panay 4,708
12,194
Panglao 24
62
Pangutaran 32
85
Polillo 231
598
Samal 105
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