Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, by Simone de Beauvoir: Censored under Francoism

Abstract

This article deals with the failed attempt by the publishing house Horizonte to translate Simone de Beauvoir’s Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome into Spanish at the beginning of the 1960s. On the one hand, I contextualize Beauvoir’s book from the production of the original, which appeared in English, up to the frustrated attempt to reproduce it in Spain during the Francoist dictatorship, when the National-Catholic social policies had silenced all the feminist voices since before the Civil War. On the other hand, I offer a brief introduction to the reception of Beauvoir’s work during Francoism. I also study the bureaucratic procedure of institutional censorship which the work on Bardot suffered after the Ministry of Information and Tourism opened a file on the Madrid publishing house in 1964.