Sartre, sex and philosophy jostle as de Beauvoir centenary looms

SHE was the high priestess of 20th century French thought, the mother of modern feminism and a champion of sexual freedom who shocked Paris with her threesomes and passionate bisexual affairs.

But as France begins a glittering celebration of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's birth next week, some academics have warned against the rush of debate and publications descending into prudish attacks on her deliberately outrageous sex life.

De Beauvoir's partnership with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has been called the "original open relationship" — one of France's most celebrated and unconventional intellectual couplings. They met in 1929 and never married but devoted themselves to each other while agreeing they should be free to engage in sexual and emotional entanglements with others — as long as they shared the details.

Their long list of sometimes mutual partners included well-known intellectuals as well as some of de Beauvoir's awe-struck young women students. One of them, Bianca Lamblin, later wrote a pained memoir titled A Disgraceful Affair, telling how Sartre said before seducing her for the first time in Paris: "The hotel chambermaid will really be surprised, because I already took a girl's virginity yesterday." The hype and publishing frenzy around de Beauvoir's centenary have created a rush of interest in the relationship between a couple whom one French magazine yesterday described as the "Fred and Ginger of French existentialism".

More than a dozen books are to be published, with TV films and DVD box sets to match. De Beauvoir has a new footbridge over the Seine named after her, and the great and the good of world academia will descend on Paris for a symposium next week. A junior Government minister, Urban Policies Secretary Fadela Amara, even used a de Beauvoir quotation on her office's New Year cards this month.

But as the latest round of de Beauvoir specials hit the French newsstands, it was clear that it was her unconventional love and sex life that would take centre stage.

Le Nouvel Observateur, which proclaimed a "de Beauvoir revival", featured the author's naked behind on its cover. L'Express asked if France was now finally ready to challenge an icon. Le Point magazine marvelled at a new biography that it felt revealed a Sartre who was "sexually cold, macho, authoritarian and jealous" and de Beauvoir's traces of "authoritarianism, Pygmalion complex and calculating libertinism" that she used to "subjugate, submit and shape" those around her.

"This year, let's look at all her work together, not just the affairs and the sex — important as they are," Daniele Sallenave, author of the biography, Castor de guerre, said. "The real game here is for de Beauvoir to step out of Sartre's shadow," she said. "I think Sartre was authoritarian, classically macho and traditional. De Beauvoir wanted to be revolutionary in everything concerning her public and private life. Sartre was ready to have parallel relations without her, behind her back, and hide it, and so behaved like a classic bourgeois husband. She wouldn't fit into that; she was much more radical."

Hazel Rowley, an Anglo-Australian writer whose recent book Tete-a-Tete detailed how de Beauvoir and Sartre's open relationship polarised public opinion, said she was worried that next week's rush of debates would see the couple described as "monsters". "I don't think we should be trivialising this incredible figure by fixating on lascivious sex," Rowley said.