Bull

In Simone de Beauvoir’s account of Henry de Montherlant, the bull is more than an animal comparison: it marks a model of power built on choosing an opponent who cannot answer as an equal. The animal allows a man to test his strength while remaining his own judge, exposing how an ideal of masculine sovereignty depends on avoiding reciprocal judgment.

The Bull as a Chosen Opponent

Montherlant’s imagined encounter with a woman is compared to facing a horse or a bull: it offers uncertainty and the taste of testing one’s strength. For Beauvoir, the comparison reveals why the animal matters. Testing oneself against another man would entail risk, an unpredictable ranking, and an external verdict. Against a bull, the man can keep control of the contest’s meaning and judge himself.

That contrast informs Montherlant’s treatment of women. He seeks partners he can regard as passive and inferior, and withdraws when he encounters signs of an independent consciousness. The bull and the woman are not equivalent beings in Beauvoir’s argument; rather, the comparison shows how Montherlant’s ideal makes both available as occasions for a self-confirming display, while withholding the standing of an equal subject.

Sovereignty Without Reciprocity

Beauvoir develops the animal comparison through Montherlant’s account of urinating on caterpillars. In that episode, he chooses which insects to spare and which to kill, making an otherwise ordinary act into an imagined exercise of power over life and death. The scene supplies a key to his preferred relation with female animals: the man gives, withdraws, satisfies, or pities according to his own pleasure, and answers to no judgment beyond himself.

The bull belongs to the same pattern of risk-free mastery. Its significance lies not in an account of an animal’s independent perspective, but in the way the human observer uses it to define his own authority. Beauvoir’s analysis therefore makes the animal’s instrumental role part of the argument: the encounter is arranged so that the man’s power can appear absolute because reciprocity has been excluded.

From Animal Hierarchy to Political Power

Beauvoir connects this posture to Montherlant’s admiration for Nazi ideology. She notes his praise for the victory of the swastika and sun wheel and his presentation, during the German Occupation of France, of Germans as models of strength for the French. His deference to the victorious, she argues, lets him identify with their power; the same desire to occupy the winning position runs through his imagined mastery over animals and women.

The bull thus belongs to a broader pattern in which domination is treated as proof of superiority. Beauvoir places this pattern beside the degradation imposed on people in concentration camps and the racial hierarchy that turns imposed subordination into supposed evidence of inferiority. Her comparison does not equate these situations; it identifies a shared logic in which the powerful create a condition of abasement and then cite that condition to justify their authority.

The Limits of Montherlant’s Ideal

Beauvoir also challenges the values Montherlant claims to uphold. He celebrates pleasure and the use of the senses, yet condemns pleasures that are not his own; he presents himself as open to everything while also calling for censorship during the Occupation. The bull’s place in his imagined hierarchy sharpens the contradiction: strength is admired when it confirms his preferred order, while encounters that might unsettle his authority are avoided.

Ultimately, the animal comparison exposes not an unassailable freedom but a dependence on carefully selected, nonreciprocal relations. Beauvoir describes Montherlant as retreating into an image of the Unique, reflected back to himself, rather than risking judgment among equals. The bull helps make that retreat legible: sovereignty is preserved by arranging the encounter so that no equal can answer.