The Mandarins

The Mandarins is a 1954 novel by Simone de Beauvoir. The novel is perhaps de Beauvoir's most celebrated, and in 1954 it won her the Prix Goncourt.

The Mandarins is about life & works of French Intellectuals mainly during the time after 1945. It's a kind of chronicle of existentialism. The book describes (slightly veiled) the struggles between Jean-Paul Sartre (here called Robert Dubreuilh) on the one side, and Albert Camus (called Henri Perron) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (called Victor Scriassine) on the other side. Then, it also tells the story of Anne Dubreuilh, wife of Robert Dubreuilh, who's an "alter ego" of Author de Beauvoir herself. Anne lost her Catholic faith in early years but still preserved some principles of her conservative upbringing. This leads to her conflict between freedom and dutifulness. She tries to flee from the monotony of everyday life with the American Lewis Brogan (i.e. Nelson Algren), but it ends in resignation.

The whole story has a more pessimist atmosphere. It's about the moral conflicts coming from the question whether one's supposed to always tell the truth and the problem of authors' engagement per se. So, Dubreuilh and Perron are just Mandarins, restricted to the power(lessness) of Literature. Anne's soliloquys are interspersed by long, existentialistically painted dialogues. The Author confronts the reader with philosophical axioms by Sartre and the change from "I" to "he". At the end, there's the feeling of isolation, solitude and especially the realization that all the characters are irreconcilable.

The British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch described the book as "endearing because of its persistent seriousness".