Les Mandarins Reading Order

Les Mandarins (The Mandarins, 1954) by Simone de Beauvoir is the novel that won the Prix Goncourt and established Beauvoir as a major novelist in her own right, distinct from Sartre. Set in the years immediately after the Liberation of Paris, the novel follows a group of left-wing intellectuals — writers, politicians, psychoanalysts — as they navigate the euphoria of liberation, the disillusionment of the Cold War, the revelations about the Soviet labour camps, and the question of what committed left-wing intellectual life looks like in practice. The two main characters are Henri Perron, a resistance writer who edits a political newspaper and must decide whether to publish information about the Soviet camps (at the risk of damaging the left), and Anne Dubreuilh, a psychoanalyst whose love affair with an American writer named Lewis (modelled on Beauvoir's real relationship with Nelson Algren) provides the novel's emotional centre. Les Mandarins is a roman à clef of great transparency: Dubreuilh is Sartre, Perron is Camus, and Scriassine is Arthur Koestler, among other correspondences. Beauvoir was not writing a satirical portrait but an attempt to capture the specific texture of a moment — the post-war Parisian left intellectual world — from the inside, with all its comradeship, political passion, moral difficulty, and erotic possibility.