The French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was dropped from a list of female candidates to have their sculptures placed in the Old Library in Trinity College Dublin because of the alleged “grooming” of sex partners for herself and her long-time friend, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, according to a source familiar with the process.
The feminist author of The Second Sex was on a shortlist of potential candidates as part of a project to include women figures among the statues in the library’s Long Room, where all of the sculptures until then had been of men.
De Beauvoir was on a shortlist of “eight or nine”, according to the source, when the people involved were told that books had been published in which it was alleged that the writer and philosopher had had sex with young students whom she had shared as lovers with Sartre.
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According to one book, A Dangerous Liaison, written by Carole Seymour-Jones, de Beauvoir was the subject of an official complaint in 1943 when the mother of a pupil alleged the writer had corrupted her daughter and acted as a procurer in handing her over to Sartre. The complaint was not upheld, but de Beauvoir lost her teaching job.
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“There was some book that came out that talked about her and grooming, and it was decided not to select her,” according to the source. “She was a popular candidate with staff and students, but it became apparent she couldn’t be included.”
The women eventually selected were the scientist Rosalind Franklin, the folklorist, dramatist and theatre-founder Augusta Gregory, the mathematician Ada Lovelace, and the women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
The sculptures joined representations of men such as Homer, Shakespeare, Dean Jonathan Swift and Wolfe Tone. They were placed in the room on St Brigid’s Day in February as a step towards better representation of diversity in the university’s public spaces.
On Wednesday the university announced it was “de-naming” the former Berkeley Library because of the association of the 18th-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley with slave ownership. Last year the Schrödinger Theatre in TCD, named after the famous Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, was renamed the Physics Theatre.
The change came a year after a report in The Irish Times that said Schrödinger, who became an Irish citizen in 1948, was “a serial abuser whose behaviour fitted the profile of a paedophile in the widely understood sense of that term”.
A spokesperson for TCD said she was not in a position to confirm that a statue of de Beauvoir was not put in the Long Room because of concerns about her reputation.
“In 2019, the then-Trinity Provost Patrick Prendergast called on staff and students to nominate the first female scholars to be memorialised as sculptures in the Old Library,” she said.
A group of members of the Trinity community chaired by Patrick Prendergast, was convened in 2020 to consider the close to 200 submissions received.
“Simone de Beauvoir was among the names submitted. The group selected a shortlist and then settled on four names of women scholars. The deliberations were not public.”
