The meeting of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929 began as a collaboration between two philosophy students preparing for France’s fiercely competitive agrégation. It became an intellectual partnership whose ideal of freedom and equality coexisted with an enduring imbalance—a tension that helped illuminate the questions Beauvoir would later pursue in The Second Sex.

The Examination and Their First Collaboration

Beauvoir was studying at the Sorbonne and Sartre at the École Normale Supérieure when they met as university students. They prepared for the agrégation together, an examination that could qualify its successful candidates for secure teaching posts and give Beauvoir a way to leave her family. Their first study date was already a meeting of intellectual equals in practice: Beauvoir explained Leibniz to Sartre.

The results made their partnership’s first asymmetry visible. Sartre placed first; Beauvoir placed second, becoming the ninth woman ever to pass the examination. The account presents this order—first and second—as a lasting feature of their shared creation myth. Their collaboration began in mutual intellectual recognition, but its public measure was an achievement ranked in a hierarchy with Sartre ahead.

A Partnership of Essential and Contingent Loves

Their relationship was built around an ideal of love without domination. Sartre proposed marriage after Beauvoir’s father confronted them about living together more or less openly; Beauvoir rejected the proposal. Instead, the two described their bond as an essential love that could coexist with other, contingent relationships, freely pursued and honestly acknowledged.

The ideal depended on frankness and radical freedom, but its consequences were not equal. Beauvoir and Sartre could treat their own partnership as a chosen experiment while other people involved in their relationships bore its costs. Beauvoir later reflected that they had failed to reckon with the reality of the pain they caused as well as suffered. Their meeting therefore initiated not only a model of intellectual and romantic independence, but also a relationship whose claims to equality did not erase the unequal burden of free love for a woman and a man.

From Intellectual Partnership to The Second Sex

Sartre’s existentialist account of the opposition between a sovereign subject and an objectified Other gave Beauvoir a conceptual framework for The Second Sex. Her own experience as a woman—and as Sartre’s partner—also impelled her to examine how women are defined in relation to men. Sartre had praised her as possessing a man’s intelligence, a compliment Beauvoir came to recognize as carrying a patronizing assumption: that intelligence and humanity were measured by a male norm.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir formulated the consequence of that norm: humanity is treated as male, while woman is defined not in herself but in relation to man. The intellectual closeness suggested by the pair’s image of themselves as a single unit could not make their positions identical. Their meeting thus became significant beyond their private partnership: it joined the philosophical vocabulary through which Beauvoir could analyze otherness to the lived experience that made that analysis urgent.

Significance

The encounter’s defining contrast is between collaboration and hierarchy. Beauvoir could teach Sartre during their preparation, yet he finished ahead of her in the examination; they imagined a love free of domination, yet Beauvoir later recognized that its burdens fell differently on women and men. These tensions do not cancel the partnership’s intellectual importance. They help explain how a relationship conceived as a bond between equals could also expose the limits of equality within a male-centered world.