La Force des choses

The third volume of the autobiographical project begun with Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée and continued with La Force de l’âge, La Force des choses opens where the previous volume left off: Paris has just been liberated.

Beauvoir and Sartre have reached the “force de l’âge” — the prime of life — that they had wished for. They are recognized, established writers, free to pursue their work; around them the team of Les Temps modernes soon takes shape. The war is over, and the postwar period seems to open onto a new world in which individual will, enthusiasm and projects will gradually be met by “things”: History, political events, aging, ruptures, death — everything over which freedom does not exercise full sovereignty.