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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Mandarins
Translated by Leonard M. Friedman
With an introduction by Doris Lessing
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005
Harper Perennial
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1993 (as a Flamingo Modern Classic) and 1984 (reprinted five times)
First published in France in 1954 by Librairie Gallimard
under the title Les Mandarins First English translation published in Great Britain by Collins 1957
Copyright © Librairie Gallimard 1954
English translation copyright © Collins 1957 Introduction copyright © Doris Lessing 1993 PS section copyright © Jon Butler 2005 except ‘Equals Not Sequels’ by Kathy Lette © Kathy Lette 2005
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © MAY 2018 ISBN 9780007405589
Version: 2018-05-16
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To Nelson Algren
CONTENTS
P. S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
After the War: The Intellectual ‘Mandarins’ of Paris Life
If You Liked This, You Might Like …
by Doris Lessing
Even before The Mandarins arrived in this country it was being discussed with the lubricious excitement used for fashionable gossip. Everyone knew the novel was about the political and sexual lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and their friends, a glamorous group for several reasons. First, they were associated with the French Resistance, and of all the heroic myths of the Second World War the Resistance was the most potent. Then, they were French, and it is hard now to explain the degree of attractiveness France had for the British after the war. It was only partly that we knew our cooking and our clothes to be inferior, that they had a style and panache we lacked. The British had been locked up in their island for the long years of the war, could not refresh themselves outside it, and France wore the features of some forbidden Paradise. And, too, intellectual communism, intellectuals generally, were glamorous in a way they never have been here, not least because what The Mandarins were debating along the Left Bank were questions about the Soviet Union scarcely acknowledged in socialist circles here, or, if so, only in lowered voices. There was another reason why The Mandarins was expected to read like a primer to better living,