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I was reading Simon Schama's Citizens about the French revolution, I had got up to the storming of the Bastille, and I thought I'd step back and take a break by reading de Beauvoir's memoirs of her childhood. Goodness what a shock, Schama paints a picture of France on the eve of revolution in which you might struggle to find a priest who believes in God, where disrespect for the royal family is near universal, the ideas of Rousseau and the classical world as an ideal were on all minds, here de Beauvoir pere, while an atheist, is a royalist (view spoiler)[ admittedly it is far easier to be a royalist once there are no actual kings or emperors and what not to deal with (hide spoiler)], the parents censor de Beauvoir's correspondence until she was almost twenty, her loss of faith is a profound blow to de Beauvoir mere. While one of de Beauvoir's friends comes of a family were all the daughters either marry men or Christ. Naturally in such constricted circumstances cousin marriage is frequent and Simone herself spends a fair chunk of the book fixated upon cousin Jacques who in time becomes fixated upon the bottle (not due to her, his trajectory seems powered by a different dynamic). The dowry is an important instrument for transferring capital between generations and maintaining a bourgeois status.

We are introduced to a society which is engaged in fighting a rear guard action against the French Revolution, this you might find reasonable for a memoir from the early days of the nineteenth century, the twist is that de Beauvoir was born at the beginning of the twentieth. The Rights of Man are along with pesky Bolshevik revolutions (destroying the value of de Beauvoir pere's investment in Russian debt) the threats to a careful, cloying, controlled, catholic culture. Simone herself the lucky beneficiary of the world changing about her.

Memoirs and autobiographies are interesting things - they give the author to shape and transform the raw stuff of their life into a narrative, not that will say anything untrue (hopefully) but there is always selection and emphasis going on, perhaps subconsciously - what we chose to remember and prefer to forget - as much as consciously.

I can't say that I am quite certain what de Beauvoir's narrative is, towards the middle of her book I felt it was the loss of Eden. The family unit of her self, her younger sister, and their parents is for her stable and complete, at the same time we read that she is growing out of that life. Since she is loosing her faith at the same time one feels that Eden is a kind of prison state and for the remainder of the book we see her rattling and fluttering against the cage of values and expectations that she was brought up within. She notices her learnt prudishness when she feels shock when people are pointed out to her who are only romantically interested in the same sex.

I felt also that she was engaging with Freud, perhaps not surprising given his intellectual influence during the period of her adult life. She is careful to point out that she was happy being a girl and saw nothing superior about boys (although physically her upbringing was constrained, no swimming, no gymnastics, to the point that when she begins dancing lessons she feels clumsy and awkward, as she is also flushed with certain physical reactions to dancing in couples she gives up dancing lessons(view spoiler)[ fear of or disquiet at the intensity of ones own physical or emotional reactions is also something of a theme, not just for Simone either by more broadly within her milieux, this was a culture which aimed to set people against themselves, and which sadly to some extent was successful (hide spoiler)] ) and that she wasn't envious of them and indeed as a student rather liked male company in different ways. At the same time there was a psychological awareness, particularly here in her discussion of her father, of how his self regard meant he cold never fully share in de Beauvoir's academic success and likely career as a Lycée teacher, as the necessity of her having to earn a living and get a job with a secured pension was due to his failure to be a real man and provide a fat dowry for his daughter so she could be married off. A certain tension in their relationship developed as she passes exams and collects diplomas.

Although she writes Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life (p.187) and while books play a certain part in her narrative she points out that it is far more the record of moods and prolonged feelings, partly perhaps because from about half way through she mentions that she started to keep a diary and no doubt her emotional state was something she wrote about, this stands in ironic counterpoint to her engagement in studying philosophy which does move her at so profound a level.

Philosophy had neither opened up the heavens to me nor anchored me to earth...I had no fixed ideas of my own, but least I knew that I rejected Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, Maritain, and also all empirical and materialist doctrines (p.234).

She seeks for meaning at one stage falling under the influence of a young man who from his experience of comradeship in the first world war was forming a catholic youth movement, this was quite paternalistic in style, for instance de Beauvoir is enrolled to lecture working class men and women on literature. There's an air of searching for a kind of secularised Catholicism at this stage in her life, she likes the ideals of self denial, mortification of the flesh, structure and purpose, so as not to waste her time for a while she gives up on brushing her teeth. One might see in this too the kinds of inter-war cultural developments for a national culture which unified social classes as a precursor to fascism or communism, indeed de Beauvoir pere approves of Mussolini (view spoiler)[ from monarchy to Mussolini not such a jump I suppose (hide spoiler)]. However young Simone is also moved by the experiences of her friend abroad and of foreigners that she meets, despite her learnt reticence she has a desire for openness both to new experiences (including Gin Fizzes) and new thinking.

In this regard this is a story of self liberation, a fond farewell, or rediscovery from an adult perspective of her childhood self. There is great feeling for nature, what it was to be like on the small estate her grandfather owned in the spring, the flowers, the colours, the cool of the morning as sh sets out to find a cosy place to read. It is a bizarre thing a book largely about an urban childhood in Paris, in which that city barely features, the Luxembourg Gardens get more mentions than the Louvre, it is a very constrained childhood, one senses the chick pecking at the shell. It is the kind of childhood which I guess would be very rare in France today. Of course had life panned out as her parents wished it she would have emerged from the shell of childhood in the parental house to the shell of marriage in the husbands, as it was history intervened, slowly, but with decisive effect and we see her building a different kind of life for herself even if she is still at that point in her life herself looking for some grand unifying structure.