ABSTRACT
Progressive Western intellectuals agonised over the truth or falsity of press reports of Soviet forced labour on a massive scale. In Simone de Beauvoir's fictional account, The Mandarins, what brings the political divide between Dubreuilh and Henri to a point of irredeemable bitterness is the fraught issue of Soviet forced labour camps. Later de Beauvoir recalled how, in The Mandarins, she had given the impression that French intellectuals had discovered the full facts about Soviet camps as early as 1946 although in reality it came to a head only in 1949. In October 1948, Albert Camus commented that Soviet camps were no more acceptable than Nazi ones. De Beauvoir was to some degree minimising Camus's antipathy to the USSR when, in The Mandarins, she has Henri Perron seeming to share Dubreuilh's total attachment to the USSR as the beacon of the future.
