The German occupation of France becomes a political test of Henry de Montherlant’s cultivated ideal of superiority. Simone de Beauvoir sets his contempt for defeated compatriots beside his admiration for the occupiers: he placed himself above the national defeat, although he had done no more than others to prevent it and had not even consented to serve as an officer. His wartime posture, in her account, was not a courageous independence from political causes but a performance of sovereignty that found its strongest confirmation in identifying with the winners and praising force.

Contempt for the Defeated

At the beginning of the Occupation, Montherlant indulged in what Beauvoir calls an orgy of scorn for his vanquished fellow countrymen. He behaved as though he were neither French nor defeated, standing outside the collective circumstances he condemned. Yet this distance was not earned through resistance or action: Beauvoir stresses that he had done no more than others to prevent the defeat and had not even agreed to become an officer. He nevertheless resumed his accusations with fury, making other people’s failure the ground on which to stage his own superiority.

The contrast matters because Montherlant’s scorn presents itself as judgment from a higher position, while the Occupation exposes the lack of a corresponding public deed. Beauvoir treats his denunciations of foolishness and cowardice as a self-exemption: by condemning others, he could imagine himself intelligent and brave without risking himself among them. The defeated countrymen become an audience for his posture, not companions in a shared historical predicament.

Admiration of the Occupiers

Montherlant’s stance was not simply a refusal to identify with the defeated. Beauvoir notes that he admired Nazi ideology and welcomed the triumph of its symbols, interpreting the swastika and sun wheel as signs of a principle of change that he felt governed his own life. He also presented the Germans, whom he described as breathing the great style of strength, as an example for the French during the Occupation. His praise therefore aligned his ideal of grandeur with the power of the occupying side.

Beauvoir emphasizes the reversal in this alignment: the man who claimed sovereign freedom bowed before the victors, and through that bowing imagined himself a victor too. He had praised the “totalitarian magicians” even before their victory. His admiration of strength, in this reading, did not depend on what strength served or what political aims it pursued. It gave the appearance of independence while drawing its authority from the very power to which he submitted.

Force Without a Human Aim

Montherlant’s celebration of combat was, in Beauvoir’s account, detached from the purposes that might give a conflict meaning. He maintained that every war was beautiful whatever its aims and that force was admirable whatever it served. In 1941, his formula of combat without faith had a particular resonance. Yet this indifference to causes did not lead him toward resistance: his ideal of sovereign freedom chose submission, and his search for heroic wisdom looked to the conquerors rather than the Maquis.

That choice exposes what Beauvoir sees as an ethical vacuum. Nazi mythology, she argues, had a historical infrastructure, joining nihilism to a cult of the hero in the service of positive aims for which millions of soldiers died. Montherlant’s attitude had no comparable counterweight: its apparent grandeur expressed his existential choice rather than a human project. He imagined privilege as the right of a race, nation, or exceptional individual to rule over others, and his morality could therefore justify war and persecution without answering what they were for.

Women, Theater, and the Politics of Domination

Beauvoir connects the political posture of the Occupation to the structure of Montherlant’s imagined victories over women. In his fiction, Costals takes the leading role while women provide the responses through which he can crown himself with laurels. Beauvoir calls this a private stage: the performance depends on partners whose vulnerability and dependence permit him to appear sovereign, but it cannot establish a freedom tested among equals. Costals himself recognizes the farcical quality of these victories. The contrast clarifies why Beauvoir reads Montherlant’s praise of the conquerors as part of the same pattern: domination supplies the proof of superiority where reciprocal risk is avoided.

The Occupation also sharpens the consequences of that pattern. In Beauvoir’s reading, Montherlant’s admiration for force and his contempt for humanity are not separable from a worldview that grants some beings absolute privilege over others. His political and literary gestures make submission to power look heroic and turn the suffering of those placed beneath it into evidence of the ruler’s supposed elevation. The historical moment thus provides more than background to his writing: it reveals the stakes of an ethic in which people can be sacrificed while the language of grandeur conceals the absence of a human purpose.

Judgment and Historical Consequence

Beauvoir refuses to treat Montherlant’s posture as an abstract aesthetic preference. She contrasts its hollow mysticism with ordinary morality rooted in life and reality, and suggests that such a grounding is more authentic than grand language that makes destruction seem noble. Her argument culminates in a warning about the political uses of empty ideals: they can authorize persecution precisely because they demand no accountable, positive end. In the context of the Occupation, the discrepancy between his exaltation of strength and his failure to risk himself among his peers becomes a measure of the gap between proclaimed heroism and action.

The event therefore functions as a historical judgment on Montherlant’s sovereignty. He scorned the defeated, admired the victorious Germans, and presented their strength as a model, but Beauvoir interprets his identification with power as an escape from confronting humanity rather than an achievement of freedom. The Occupation makes visible the consequence of that escape: a private performance of superiority can echo the logic of political domination, while calling destruction and persecution by the names of heroism and grandeur.