Buchenwald is invoked as a measure of what happens when political violence is dressed in the language of noble principles. In Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of Henry de Montherlant’s plays, the concentration camp turns the imagined sacrifice of a woman into a chillingly historical comparison: Inès could be pictured there while the king hurried to the German embassy in the name of state interests.

The historical comparison

The reference occurs in a critique of the king’s murder of Inès in The Dead Queen. De Beauvoir emphasizes the banality of the political crime: the king himself cannot identify a compelling reason for killing her. Against that emptied-out justification, Buchenwald stands for the actual stakes hidden by talk of a higher, supposedly solar principle. The image links the play’s sacrifice of earthly happiness to a world in which people are destroyed in the name of state and ideology.

From mysticism to destruction

De Beauvoir places the reference within a broader indictment of Montherlant’s heroic ideal. In The Dead Queen and The Master of Santiago, imperious men sacrifice women who want love and earthly happiness; one woman loses her life, while another loses her soul. The sacrifices claim a mystical grandeur, but, she argues, they serve no human aim. Buchenwald sharpens this criticism: abstractions that dismiss the value of ordinary lives can become a warrant for real devastation.

The passage also rejects the claim that renunciation is noble in itself. Sacrifice, in De Beauvoir’s account, has meaning only when directed toward a human purpose that recognizes the value of love and happiness. What she calls the morality of the shopgirl is more authentic than hollow superhuman mysticism because it remains rooted in life. Buchenwald therefore marks the distance between genuine transcendence, which turns toward humanity’s future, and a false heroism that proves its superiority through contempt, persecution, and violence.