Le Sang des autres Reading Order

Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1945) is the first novel Beauvoir published under her own name and the work in which she most explicitly addresses the existentialist and political questions that La Deuxième Sexe would later examine in philosophical form. Set in France from the 1930s through the Resistance, the novel is narrated by Jean Blomart, a bourgeois young man who has joined the working-class movement and the Resistance, and who spends a night at the bedside of his dying lover Hélène wondering whether his political choices — which put his comrades in danger — are morally justified. The novel's central question is the problem of moral responsibility in a world where one's actions always have consequences for others: Blomart cannot protect Hélène, cannot protect his Resistance network, cannot avoid making choices that will cost lives. This is the 'blood of others' of the title — the blood that one's choices, however carefully made, inevitably spill. Beauvoir was working within the existentialist framework she shared with Sartre but bringing to it a specifically feminist and interpersonal sensitivity: where Sartre's focus is on individual consciousness and freedom, Beauvoir is consistently interested in the web of relationships through which freedom is exercised and constrained. Le Sang des autres was written during the Occupation and reflects Beauvoir's direct experience of Resistance life; it appeared in 1945, the year of Liberation, and was immediately recognised as one of the key literary documents of the Resistance.