The Blood of Others
The Blood of Others, Simone de Beauvoir's 1945 novel, opens on a man keeping watch through the night beside a dying woman. Jean Blomart sits at the bedside of his lover Helene, and through the long hours before dawn, the entire story of how they arrived at that moment unfolds in flashback. What does it mean to be responsible for another person's fate? And can someone truly choose to stay uninvolved in a world at war? These are the questions that thread through every page of this novel, written while German forces occupied Paris and Beauvoir herself sat each morning at the Cafe de Flore because the café was heated and her hotel was not.
Jean Blomart is a young man paralyzed by the guilt of privilege. Born into a comfortable middle-class family, he joins the Communist Party and severs ties with his family in a bid to construct a life of his own making. When a friend dies during a political protest, and Jean feels the death as his own fault, he leaves the Party entirely and turns his energies toward trade union work instead. This guilt is not incidental to the novel. It is the engine of everything Jean does.
Beauvoir frames Jean's predicament through the lens of existentialist thought. The major philosophical argument of the novel is that freedom cannot be exercised in isolation from other people. As biographer David E. Cooper frames it, an individual is just as responsible for failing to refuse something as for actively choosing it. The distinction between choosing and not refusing simply disappears. For Jean, every attempt to withdraw from entanglement with others only deepens the entanglement.
His eventual decision to become a Resistance leader is not, in the novel's logic, a conversion. It is a recognition of what was always true: that to do nothing is itself a choice, and that every person living under occupation bears some share of what that occupation does.
Helene begins the novel dissatisfied with everything her life is supposed to offer. She works in her family's confectionery shop, carries on a conventional romance with her fiance Paul, and finds both arrangements hollow. She engineers a meeting with Jean and pursues him even after he initially rejects her. After a reckless affair with another man results in an abortion, Jean and Helene form a real relationship, and Jean tells her he loves her despite privately believing he does not.
When France enters the war, Helene intervenes against Jean's wishes to arrange a safer posting for him. It costs her the relationship. Jean breaks with her, angry at what he sees as a violation of his choices. Alone, she flees Paris as the German forces advance, and among the streams of refugees she witnesses suffering on a scale that no amount of personal comfort can explain away.
Back in Paris, she briefly takes up with a German officer whose connections could benefit her career. But the experience of watching her countrymen suffer, and witnessing the roundup of Jews firsthand, changes her. It is the effort to secure the safety of her Jewish friend Yvonne that ultimately brings Helene back to Jean. She joins the Resistance, and it is during a resistance operation that she is shot. The night Jean spends at her bedside, the novel's opening scene, is where his reckoning finally arrives.
Beauvoir began writing The Blood of Others in 1941. By May 1943 it was, in her own account, essentially finished. She wrote it at the Cafe de Flore in Paris, arriving each morning at eight o'clock. The café provided heat that her hotel did not, and so the novel took shape at a table in that particular place, under occupation, in the cold.
She drew heavily on her own life. Helene's flight from Paris as the Germans advanced mirrors Beauvoir's actual journey in June 1940, when she traveled with friends by car to Laval and then by coach to Angers. The moment in chapter one when Blomart reacts to the death of the baby son of his family's maid is drawn from something Beauvoir experienced herself as a young woman. The story of a character named Madeleine, who volunteers to help during the Spanish Civil War and injures her foot by spilling hot water on it, is based on something that happened to the writer Simone Weil.
Much of Helene's character, according to one account, was modeled on Nathalie Sorokine, who was both a pupil and a friend of Beauvoir's. The Blood of Others is dedicated to Sorokine. That dedication sits at the front of the book, a quiet signal that the novel's most searching portrait of freedom and consequence was shaped by someone Beauvoir knew well.
When the novel appeared in 1945, published in France by Gallimard under the title Le Sang des Autres, readers responded with what biographer Deirdre Bair described as a barrage of praise. One reviewer singled out Beauvoir's style, calling it economical and sometimes flat but noting that it concealed a remarkably sustained note of suspense and mounting excitement driven by the sheer vitality and force of her ideas. That same reviewer suggested this approach might be exactly how a novel of ideas should be written.
Fifteen years later, in 1960, Beauvoir looked back on the book without much mercy. She found the characters too thin and the novel too didactic. Her self-assessment sits in unusual tension with the warmth of the original reception. The English translation, by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, was first published in 1948 by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd and Lindsay Drummond. Penguin Books issued the same translation in 1964, and it has been reprinted in paperback several times since, making it the most widely available English edition.
In 1984, director Claude Chabrol adapted the novel for film, with Jodie Foster in the cast. That a French occupation novel found its way to a Claude Chabrol adaptation nearly four decades after publication speaks to how durable the story's central questions had proven.
Common questions
When was The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir published?
The Blood of Others was first published in 1945 by Gallimard in France under the title Le Sang des Autres. The English translation by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse appeared in 1948.
What are the main themes of The Blood of Others?
The Blood of Others explores freedom and responsibility, particularly the relationship between the free individual and the lives of others affected by that person's choices. A second major theme is resistance versus collaboration under the German occupation of France, with Beauvoir arguing that failing to resist is itself a form of acceptance.
Where did Simone de Beauvoir write The Blood of Others?
Beauvoir wrote the novel at the Cafe de Flore in Paris, arriving each morning at eight o'clock because the café was heated while her hotel was not. She began writing it in 1941 and had essentially finished it by May 1943.
Who are the main characters in The Blood of Others?
The two central characters are Jean Blomart, a guilt-ridden man from a middle-class family who becomes a Resistance leader, and Helene, a young designer who joins the Resistance after witnessing the suffering caused by German occupation. The novel is told through flashbacks as Jean keeps vigil at Helene's deathbed.
Was The Blood of Others adapted into a film?
Yes, The Blood of Others was adapted into a film in 1984, directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Jodie Foster.
How did Simone de Beauvoir use her own life in The Blood of Others?
Beauvoir drew on several personal experiences: Helene's flight from Paris as the Germans advanced mirrors Beauvoir's own journey in June 1940 to Laval and then Angers. The novel is dedicated to Nathalie Sorokine, a pupil and friend of Beauvoir's on whom much of Helene's character was based. A character named Madeleine's injury during the Spanish Civil War is based on an event that happened to writer Simone Weil.