KEY POINTS:
Bare buttocks are not something that usually disturb the French. Pink bottoms leer from almost every chemist's window in Paris.
The publication of a female bottom on the cover of a serious news magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, has caused, nevertheless, something of a stir. The bare bottom belonged
to Simone de Beauvoir, writer, philosopher and secular goddess of feminism, who was born 100 years ago.
One feminist organisation complained that, by illustrating the centenary of Mme de Beauvoir's birth with a nude photograph taken in 1952, the intelligent, centre-left magazine had "assaulted the dignity of women".
Sixty years after she wrote one of the most influential feminist books, Le Deuxieme Sexe (The Second Sex), Simone de Beauvoir has managed to become a "cover cutie".
Are women still regarded as the "second sex" in France?
Florence Montreynaud is one of France's best known feminist authors. She has written about the unusual lifelong love affair and friendship between Beauvoir and the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
"My first thought on seeing the magazine was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre's bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur," she said.
"Luckily, perhaps. Then my second thought was, 'What a fine bottom'. No male philosopher I can think of would have had such a lovely bottom. Mme de Beauvoir had a brilliant mind. She also had a wonderful body. Women win on both counts."
One hundred years after Beauvoir's birth, the cause of sexual equality has made substantial progress, even in France. It remains, however, a tricky subject.
Mme Montreynaud says the apparently "relaxed" relationship between the French sexes cloaks a thoroughly male-dominated world. The advance of Segolene Royal to the pinnacle of a serious (failed) presidential candidate hides a political system in which only one parliamentarian in eight is a woman.
The presence of a woman, Anne-Marie Idrac, at the head of the state railway company, the SNCF, disguises a business culture in which only one in six of all executives, but eight out of 10 shop assistants, are female.
How much influence did Simone de Beauvoir really have? How important a figure is she to young French women today?
Sartre and Beauvoir, the celebrated pair of anti-American thinkers, friends and sometime lovers, are buried in the same grave in Montparnasse. They have suffered an ironic common fate. Both are now studied more eagerly in left-wing and feminist academic circles in the United States than in France.
All the same, the centenary of Beauvoir's birth has produced a flurry of new books, radio and television programmes and magazine articles.
Serious students of Beauvoir's thought complain that the centenary has been dominated in the French media by a prurient re-examination of her life and loves, rather than her works.
This somewhat misses the point. Even more than Sartre, Beauvoir's life was her work. She became an iconic figure for feminists partly because she practised what she preached. Or at least she seemed to do so.
The Nouvel Observateur headline beside the nude photograph "Simone de Beauvoir, la scandaleuse" is a deliberate tease, but it is also true.
Huguette Bourchardeau, 73, a former environment minister and author of a new biography of Beauvoir, says: "She had enormous influence on women of my generation and those which followed. When I was young, I was impressed by her theoretical work but also by her way of life ... She was like an open window ... she struggled to free herself from conformism and to play the card of freedom."
The Simone de Beauvoir legend is largely based on her relationship with Sartre. The couple had a bizarre love affair in which they never lived together and probably never slept together in the last 30 years of their lives.
Each allowed, and even encouraged, the other to have "contingent" flings with other lovers, so long as they discussed at length what had happened later. A book published by one of Beauvoir's former pupils in 1993 revealed that, as a young philosophy teacher in the 1930s and 1940s, she had often seduced her female pupils and passed them on to Sartre.
Whether all of this amounts to "feminism" or "existentialism" or just a kind of perverse selfishness is open to question. And yet the relationship between the two was sincere. At least on Beauvoir's side. When Sartre died in 1980, she threw herself, distraught, on his grave. She once said: "Whatever happened between us, I knew that he could never hurt me, except by dying."
She also once said: "My greatest achievement was my relationship with Sartre." For a high priestess of feminism to define herself by her relationship with a man may seem odd. But there are many contradictions between De Beauvoir's life and works.
Simone de Beauvoir's writing, especially The Second Sex , published in 1949, influenced generations of young women all over the world. The celebrated first sentence of the second part - "On ne nait pas femme on le devient" (Women are made, not born) is regarded as one of the starting points of modern, radical, feminist thought.
What do French women make of Beauvoir? Fanny Mounichy, 21, a masters student in communication at the Sorbonne, says that she feels the game has moved on: women are no longer a "second sex" in France.
To make radical feminist arguments today "indicates that you still feel that you are a victim", she says. "You still feel inferior. Women should still read Le Deuxieme Sexe but in a different way to before ... The book still has an important symbolic function in terms of its ideas that we (as women) are not inferior to anyone in any situation. You have to acquire a positive way of thinking. You have to believe yourself that you are not inferior."
Montreynaud says that she and successive generations of French women owe a great debt to Simone de Beauvoir. S She remains, however, puzzled and sometimes even repelled by some of the aspects of Simone de Beauvoir's private life.
"When we discover that Beauvoir used to provide 'fresh meat' for Sartre, in other words young virgin women, what can you say? When you see that the young Beauvoir was suspended from her job as a teacher for seducing her pupils, what can you say?" she says.
"They may have felt themselves somehow too elevated , too important, to be subject to normal moral codes. But we cannot accept that, not if they were hurting others, and clearly they often were. Their behaviour was sometimes appalling, disgusting.
"On the other hand, I believe that their relationship may have been odd: he was so ugly and she was so beautiful but it was entirely sincere. It was a relationship of minds."
- INDEPENDENT