The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s.

As in Beauvoir's other works, themes of feminism, existentialism, and personal morality are explored as the characters navigate not only the intellectual and political landscape but also their shifting relationships with each other.

The Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (in the Sunday Times) described The Mandarins as "a remarkable book, a novel on the grand scale, courageous in its exactitude and endearing because of its persistent seriousness".

[1] In volume 3 of her autobiography, de Beauvoir denies that The Mandarins is a roman à clef.

Furthermore: "[Henri] in his relations with the Communist Party and in his attitude to Socialism, resembles Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and not Camus in the slightest."