The Problem With Some Brilliant People: Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Ethics of Intellectual Power

Friday, February 27, 2026.

Paris in the 1930s and 1940s was the sort of city where people believed ideas could reorganize reality.

Philosophers sat in cafés and spoke with breathtaking confidence about freedom, authenticity, and the courage to live without bourgeois illusions.

Students gathered around them like moths around a philosophical flame.

Everyone seemed convinced they were participating in a new moral universe.

At the center of this atmosphere stood Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the most celebrated intellectual partnership of twentieth-century Europe.

They called each other their “essential love.”

Everyone else, in their terminology, was a “contingent love.”

It was a beautifully organized vocabulary.

Which is often what people invent when the underlying arrangement might look less flattering if described plainly.

The Arithmetic That Philosophy Tried to Ignore

Consider the numbers. Because math never lies.

When Beauvoir became involved with Bianca Lamblin, Lamblin was 17 years old.

Beauvoir was 31.

Sartre was 34.

Lamblin encountered Beauvoir not at a literary salon among equals, but in a classroom.

Beauvoir was her teacher.

That single fact tends to disappear when the story is told through the elegant language of existential freedom.

But classrooms are not philosophical thought experiments. They are structured environments in which authority is explicit and admiration is almost inevitable.

Teachers grade papers.

While students try to impress them.

When admiration mixes with charisma, the difference between influence and freedom becomes harder to see—especially for the naive souls inside the arrangement.

The Recruitment Pattern

Lamblin was not the only young woman drawn into the Sartre–Beauvoir orbit.

Earlier there had been Olga Kosakiewicz, whom Beauvoir met while teaching philosophy. Olga was around 19 at the time. Beauvoir was 27. Sartre was 29.

Soon Olga’s younger sister Wanda entered the circle as well.

Over time the arrangement began to resemble less a pair of philosophers living heroically free lives and more a small intellectual court.

At the center were two brilliant thinkers.

Around them moved a series of younger admirers who encountered them first as teachers, mentors, and intellectual authorities.

Inside the circle, these sexual relationships were described as experiments in freedom.

From a distance they looked increasingly like hierarchy wearing philosophical perfume.

Existential Honesty

Existentialism, after all, had promised something rare in modern philosophy.

A sort of radical honesty.

Sartre warned repeatedly that human beings live in bad faith, inventing narratives to hide uncomfortable truths from themselves. Authenticity meant stripping away those narratives and confronting one’s motives directly.

It was a thrilling demand.

Which makes the irony difficult to miss.

Few intellectual circles in modern history developed such a sophisticated vocabulary for describing their own romantic arrangements.

Relationships were not affairs.

They were “contingent loves.”

Seduction became “freedom.”

Attachment became “authenticity.”

The language was elegant.

Perhaps too elegant.

Because elegant language has a way of turning uncomfortable realities into a vast fog of philosophical bullshit.

The Shift From I–Thou to I–It

The philosopher Martin Buber offers a lens through which this dynamic becomes easier to see.

Buber argued that human beings encounter one another in two basic ways.

In an I–Thou relationship, two subjects meet with mutual recognition. Each person acknowledges the full dignity and autonomy of the other.

In an I–It relationship, the other person becomes an object within one’s world—something to be interpreted, influenced, or incorporated into one’s project.

Intellectual life has a peculiar tendency to slide from one mode into the other.

Students become minds, muses, disciples, cases.

And without anyone announcing the transition, a person becomes material.

Charisma

The sociologist Max Weber explained why these situations recur so often.

Weber argued that certain folks exercise charismatic authority—a form of influence that arises when followers believe a person possesses extraordinary insight.

Charisma rearranges social perception.

Students do not merely listen.

They orbit.

The charismatic thinker often experiences this orbit not as power but as admiration.

But admiration has gravity.

And gravity bends relationships.

When the Students Spoke: The Memoirs That Complicate the Sartre–Beauvoir Legend

The most revealing critiques of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s relationships with young students do not come from modern commentators eager to retroactively moralize the twentieth century.

They come from the women themselves—former students who, decades later, sat down and wrote about what it had actually felt like to be drawn into the existentialist court.

The result is not gossip. It is memoir. And memoir, unlike mythology, tends to remember who paid the emotional bill.

Bianca Lamblin’s Memoir: The Student Who Told the Story

The most important of these accounts is Bianca Lamblin’s memoir Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée (1993), published in English as A Disgraceful Affair.

Lamblin met Beauvoir as a teenager at the Lycée Molière in Paris, where Beauvoir was teaching philosophy.

The situation, at first, must have felt intoxicating.

Your philosophy teacher is Simone de Beauvoir.
She is brilliant.
Magnetic.
Connected to the most famous intellectual in France.

A teenager might easily mistake that attention for something flattering rather than something structurally dangerous.

In Lamblin’s later account, Beauvoir began a sexual relationship with her while she was still a student.

The toady Sartre soon followed.

“They Destroyed Me”: Lamblin’s Verdict

What Lamblin describes in hindsight is not liberation but recruitment into a romantic system already designed by two older intellectuals who controlled all the rules.

The famous existentialist vocabulary—“essential love” and “contingent relationships”—appears in Lamblin’s memoir less as philosophy than as a kind of administrative language for managing a rotating cast of nubile younger partners.

Her verdict on the experience, written decades later, was not diplomatic.

“They destroyed me.”
—Bianca Lamblin, A Disgraceful Affair (1993)

Few sentences have done more to puncture the elegant mythology surrounding the existentialist couple.

The Existentialist Myth of Romantic Freedom

For decades the intellectual story about Sartre and Beauvoir sounded heroic.

Two brilliant philosophers reject bourgeois marriage.
They invent a daring experiment in romantic freedom.
They build a partnership grounded in radical honesty and philosophical courage.

Lamblin’s story suggests something rather less heroic.

Two celebrated philosophers in their thirties and forties luring young students into a sexual relationship whose asymmetries those teenagers could not reasonably be expected to understand.

The Teaching Scandal and Beauvoir’s Lost License

Biographers examining Beauvoir’s life have treated Lamblin’s testimony as more than a disgruntled reminiscence.

In Deirdre Bair’s biography Simone de Beauvoir (1990), Bair documents the institutional consequences of Beauvoir’s relationships with students.

After a complaint from a student’s family, Beauvoir lost her teaching license in 1943, interupting her career in the French public school system.

Bair notes that Beauvoir’s relationships with female students were already known among some colleagues and had raised concerns before the formal complaint appeared.

In other words, Lamblin’s memoir did not invent the problem.

It simply remembered it.

What the Letters Between Sartre and Beauvoir Reveal

The broader pattern becomes clearer in Annie Cohen-Solal’s Sartre: A Life (1987).

Drawing on correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir, Cohen-Solal shows the two philosophers discussing these young women with striking frankness.

The letters sometimes read less like the private reflections of lovers than like administrative notes on personnel.

New admirers arrived.
Others faded away.

But their intellectual salon continued.

Later Scholars Reconsider the Existentialist Circle

Later scholars have tried to interpret these episodes with historical caution.

Kate Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir (2019) notes that many of the women involved were significantly younger and often still students when the relationships began.

What looked within the existentialist circle like daring romantic freedom sometimes appeared quite different when described years later by the participants themselves.

The gap between philosophy and lived experience begins to widen.

Sartre’s Theory of “Bad Faith”—Applied to Sartre

And this is where the entire enterprise begins to look faintly ridiculous to me.

Sartre spent much of his career lecturing the world about bad faith—the human tendency to hide from the moral reality of one’s actions behind elaborate justifications.

Few philosophical concepts have aged more awkwardly when applied to Sartre’s own romantic arrangements.

It is difficult to read Lamblin’s memoir without suspecting that existentialist freedom sometimes functioned as a very sophisticated method of explaining why other people’s vulnerabilities were philosophically convenient.

The Memoirs That Complicate the Legend

Lamblin’s account does not erase Sartre and Beauvoir’s intellectual preeminence.

Their work reshaped twentieth-century philosophy. Of that there can be no doubt.

But memoirs like hers introduce a detail that the mythology prefers to omit:

The young people who wandered into the existentialists’ romantic laboratory sometimes left feeling less like liberated participants and more like debris.

Which raises a quietly uncomfortable possibility.

The existentialists were famously skilled at analyzing power structures in society.

They were somewhat less perceptive about the ones sitting across the table from them in the café.

The Rand Parallel

Something remarkably similar unfolded decades later around Ayn Rand.

Rand attracted a devoted intellectual following in the 1950s, including the young psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who was more than twenty years her junior.

Rand celebrated rational independence and heroic individuality.

Within that philosophical universe she initiated a romantic relationship with Branden—while both were married to other people—and explained the arrangement as a rational expression of admiration.

Inside the circle it was philosophical.

Outside the circle it looked like something else.

The pattern is difficult to ignore.

Charismatic thinker.

Younger disciple.

A philosophy celebrating exceptional folks like us.

A vocabulary capable of transforming power into choice.

Elite Consciousness

Intellectual elites often inhabit or otherwise orbit themselves what might be called elite consciousness.

They spend their lives dismantling conventional assumptions. They are rewarded for questioning moral frameworks and inventing new conceptual systems.

Over time a subtle shift occurs.

The thinker stops merely analyzing social norms.

They begin to feel exempt from them.

Admiration becomes evidence of equality.

But admiration is not equality.

It is gravity. And the sadly inevitable skin hunger.

The Problem With Brilliant People

Intellectual history contains a recurring temptation.

A thinker produces a powerful idea about freedom, authenticity, or individuality.

Students gather. Admirers listen closely.

The idea becomes not only a philosophy but a small social system.

Inside that system, the brilliant person occupies the center.

Around them orbit disciples, interpreters, protégés—and sometimes lovers.

What begins as philosophy gradually becomes hierarchy.

The language of freedom begins to mask a simpler fact: admiration produces gravity, and gravity produces power.

This is the quiet ethical danger of elite intellectual culture.

The same brilliance that allows a thinker to dismantle society’s illusions can also make it difficult for them to recognize the illusions forming around themselves.

Students begin to see the philosopher as extraordinary.

The philosopher begins, gently and almost unconsciously, to agree.

And somewhere in that process the relationship shifts—from Buber’s I–Thou, where two subjects meet in mutual recognition, to I–It, where one life becomes part of another person’s project.

The tragedy is not that great thinkers are imperfect.

The tragedy is that intellectual brilliance sometimes provides the vocabulary by which power conveniently excuses itself.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed

REFERENCES:

Bair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Summit Books.

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)

Burns, J. (2009). Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford University Press.

Lamblin, B. (1993). Mémoires d’une jeune fille dérangée. Balland.

Rowley, H. (2005). Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. HarperCollins.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. University of California Press.