This is a novel about the moral and political dilemmas of a young man from a wealthy background, Jean Blomart, who breaks with his family and joins the Communist Party on the eve of World War II. He then meets Hélène and while he has become a serious-minded trade-unionist she is a naive and vivacious individualist. As a man with a paralysing sense of responsibility her desire to live just for the moment shakes him — ‘I knew forever that one cannot control the limits of an action, that one cannot foresee what one is actually doing. Never again would I run that insane risk.’ — and as their affair unfolds, he realizes that his reluctance to respond to her romantically replicates his fear of political action.


Written during the German occupation of France, The Blood of Others is a novel with an existentialist message and while it acknowledges the moral responsibility we have to those we love and to the wider community it argues that, ultimately, our commitment must be to freedom, beyond guilt and emotional constraints. Indeed, after the false reprieve of the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938, Jean realizes that pacifism is not the answer, and that ‘the blood of others’ will be spilled: the blood of soldiers if France goes to war, the blood of those killed in concentration camps if Europe does not react. Like her longtime companion Sartre in his trilogy The Roads to Freedom, de Beauvoir believes that man is responsible for his choices, albeit they are conditioned by circumstances he has not chosen, and also that his freedom is best realized in political action.


With the figure of Jean, de Beauvoir supported the French Resistance at a time when the final outcome of the war was still unknown. The book sometimes runs the risk of being dogmatic; as Beauvoir herself admitted ‘everything converges instead of expanding’, but it offers a fascinating portrayal of life in occupied Paris and an introduction to the themes that dominated post-war French philosophy and that recur in the ‘novels of ideas’ of Sartre and Camus.

‘The roadway sped on, empty and shining, towards the frontiers of Paris; it seemed disproportionately wide; only a few bicycles disturbed the silence. The rare passers-by all looked utterly alone; they had experienced their loneliness through exile, through misfortune and through fear, and they had unanimously withdrawn into their own skins and were lost in the heart of the disaster as in a desert. He too was alone; he had been wandering all over Paris since morning, with his demobilization gratuity in his pocket; the printing works were closed, his mother was far from Paris. He knew nothing about Hélène. He was alone but he was there. A complete man. He was walking under the sulky sun.’ p185