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{{short description|French writer (1895–1972)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=January 2020}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Henry de Montherlant
| image = Henry de Montherlant - photo Henri Manuel.jpg
| image_size =
| caption = de Montherlant {{circa}} 1925
| pen_name =
| birth_name = Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1895|04|20|df=y}}
| birth_place = [[Paris]], France
| death_date = {{death date and age|1972|09|21|1895|04|26|df=y}}
| death_place = [[Paris]], France
| occupation =
| education =
| period = Early-mid 20th century
| genre =
| subject =
| movement =
| notable_works =
| spouse =
| partner =
| children =
| relatives =
| influences =
| influenced =
| awards =
| signature = Henry de Montherlant signature.svg
| website =
}}

'''Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant''' ({{IPA|fr|mɔ̃tɛʁlɑ̃|lang}}; 20 April 1895 – 21 September 1972) was a French [[essayist]], [[novelist]], and [[dramatist]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Montherlant|title=Henry de Montherlant | French author|website=Encyclopedia Britannica|date=17 September 2023 }}</ref> His most famous [[Theatre of France|play]] written in 1942 is {{ill|La Reine morte|fr}}, still studied today in French high schools. It was translated into English under the title '[[Queen After Death]]'. He was elected to the ''[[Académie française]]'' in 1960.

== Biography ==
Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) [[Picardy|Picard]] family, Henry Montherlant was educated at the [[Lycée Janson de Sailly]] and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at [[Neuilly-sur-Seine]]. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary. He despised the post-[[Dreyfus Affair]] army as too subservient to the Republic, and refused to have [[electricity]] or the [[telephone]] installed in his house. Henry's mother, a formerly lively socialite, became chronically ill due to difficult childbirth. She was bedridden most of the time, and died at the young age of 43.

[[File:Montherlant 1910 autographe.jpg|thumb|de Montherlant in 1910]]
From the age of seven or eight, Henry was enthusiastic about literature and began writing. In 1905 reading ''[[Quo Vadis (novel)|Quo Vadis]]'' by [[Henryk Sienkiewicz]] gave him a lifelong fascination with [[Ancient Rome]] and prompted a proficient interest in [[Latin]]. He was enthusiastic about school comradeship, sports and [[bullfighting]]. When he was 15, his parents sent him alone on a trip to Spain, where he became initiated in the ''corrida''. He killed two young bulls. He was also a talented draughtsman, often portraying nudes.

On 5 April 1912, aged almost seventeen, Henry was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. Together with five other youngsters, he had founded a group called 'La Famille' (the Family), a kind of order of chivalry whose members were bonded by an oath of fidelity and mutual assistance. A member of that group was Philippe Jean Giquel (1897–1977), two years younger than Henry. Montherlant was enamored with him but they had no physical contact. According to Montherlant, this "special friendship" had aroused the fierce and jealous opposition of abbé de La Serre, who arranged to have the older youth expelled. This incident (and Giquel) became a lifelong obsession of Montherlant. He drew on the incident for his 1952 play ''[[La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (play)|La Ville dont le prince est un enfant]]'' and his 1969 novel ''Les Garçons''. Also, in his adult years, he had renewed his platonic friendship with Giquel. By then married, Giguel invited the writer to be the godfather of his daughter Marie-Christine.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.montherlant.be/article-073-giquel.html|title=Henry de Montherlant|department=Articles sur Montherlant (hors presse) > 73. Philippe Giquel, le prince des airs, par Christian Lançon|website=www.montherlant.be}}</ref>

After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, Montherlant went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles.<ref name="sun">{{cite web | author=Louis Begley | title=The Pitiless Universe of Montherlant | url=http://www.nysun.com/arts/pitiless-universe-of-montherlant/58590/ | work=The New York Sun | date=18 July 2007 | access-date=1 October 2008 | archive-date=22 June 2015 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150622132128/http://www.nysun.com/arts/pitiless-universe-of-montherlant/58590/ | url-status=dead }}</ref> Mobilised in 1916 during World War I, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote ''Songe'' ("Dream"), an autobiographic novel, as well as his ''Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun'' ("Funeral Song for the Dead at Verdun"), both exaltations of heroism during the [[World War I|Great War]]. ''Le Paradis à l’ombre des Epées'' ("Paradise in the Shadow of Swords") was entered in [[Art competitions at the 1924 Summer Olympics#Literature|the literature competition]] at the [[1924 Summer Olympics|1924 Olympics]] in Paris but did not win a medal.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/920303 |title=Henry de Montherlant |work=Olympedia |access-date=23 July 2020}}</ref>

[[File:H de Montherlant J E Blanche Rouen.jpg|thumb|1922 portrait of de Montherlant by [[Jacques-Émile Blanche]]]]
Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel ''Les Célibataires''. He sold millions of copies of his [[tetralogy]] ''Les Jeunes Filles'', written from 1936 through 1939. In these years Montherlant, a well-to-do heir, traveled extensively, mainly to [[Spain]] (where he met and worked with bullfighter [[Juan Belmonte]]), [[Italy]], and [[Algeria]].

During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940, he remained in Paris. There he continued to write plays, poems, and essays, and worked as a war correspondent. Since he had been awarded the [[Grand Prix de Littérature de l'Académie française]] in 1934, he was considered among France's leading writers. He wrote in admiring tones of the victorious Germans, seeing in them members of a manly, stronger race.

After the war, he escaped the severe punishments meted out in France to other pro-German writers. The Committee for the Purification of Writers prohibited him from publishing anything, but limited the ban to one year. Montherlant's collaborationism was soon forgotten. In 1960, he became a [[member of the Académie Française]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hedges |first=Inez |title=Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine: Three Plays and Essays on WWÏI and its Aftermath |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2021 |isbn=978-3-030-84009-9 |location=London |pages=80–81 |language=English}}</ref>

In 1968, according to [[Roger Peyrefitte]],<ref>''Des Français'', Flammarion, Paris, 1970 (page 119), and ''Propos secrets'', Albin Michel, Paris, 1977 (page 73).</ref> the 72-year-old Montherlant was attacked and beaten up by a group of youths outside a movie theatre in Paris because he had groped one of them. Montherlant was blinded in one eye as a result.<ref name="sun" /> The British writer [[Peter Quennell]], who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall" instead; he noted that Montherlant suffered from [[Vertigo (medical)|vertigo]].<ref>{{cite book | last=Quennell | first=Peter | title=The Wanton Chase | edition=First | location=London | publisher=Collins | year=1980 | isbn=0-00-216526-0 }}</ref>

Montherlant suffered increasing loss of sight and became the target of critics such as Peyrefitte. In 1972 he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head after swallowing a [[cyanide]] capsule.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.montherlant.be/biographie-06-mort.html|title=Henry de Montherlant > Biographie > 6. La mort de Montherlant|website=www.montherlant.be}}</ref>

As he had requested, his ashes were scattered by Jean-Claude Barat and Gabriel Matzneff in Rome, at the Forum, among the [[Temple of Portunus]], and into the Tiber.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Savigneau |first=Josyane |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DgZYJXCFg7wC&dq=Barat+Matzneff+Rome+montherlant&pg=PA337 |title=Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life |date=1993 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-73544-3 |pages=337–338 |language=en}}</ref>

His biography was written by [[Pierre Sipriot]] and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990).

== Works ==
His early successes were works such as ''Les Célibataires'' (''The Bachelors'') in 1934, and the highly anti-feminist [[tetralogy]] ''Les Jeunes Filles'' (''The Young Girls'') (1936–1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages.<ref name="sun" /> His late novel ''Chaos and Night'' was published in 1963. The novels were praised by writers as diverse as [[Louis Aragon|Aragon]], [[Georges Bernanos|Bernanos]], and [[Andre Malraux|Malraux]]. Montherlant was well known for his anti-feminist and misogynistic views, as exemplified particularly in ''The Girls''. [[Simone de Beauvoir]] considered his attitudes about women in detail in her ''[[The Second Sex]]''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Simons |first=Margaret A. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zU8c89cU8kgC&q=montherlant |title=Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism |date=1999 |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |isbn=978-0-7425-1246-7 |pages=12 |language=en}}</ref>

He wrote plays such as ''Pasiphaé'' (1936), ''La Reine morte'' (1942, the first of a series of historical dramas), ''[[Malatesta (play)|Malatesta]]'' (1946), ''Le Maître de Santiago'' (1947), ''Port-Royal'' (1954) and ''Le Cardinal d'Espagne'' (1960). He is particularly remembered as a playwright. In his plays as well as in his novels he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed, and explored the 'irrationality and unpredictability of human behaviour'.<ref>New Oxford Companion to Literature in french, OUP 1995, p.544</ref>

He worked as an essayist also. In the collection ''L'Equinoxe de septembre'' (1938) he deplored the mediocrity of contemporary France and in ''Le solstice de Juin'', (1941), he expressed his admiration for [[Wehrmacht]] and claimed that France had been justly defeated and [[Fall of France|conquered in 1940]]. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the [[French Third Republic|Third Republic]], especially as it had become in the aftermath of the [[Dreyfus Affair]]. He was in a ''"round-table"'' of French and German intellectuals who met at the [[Georges V Hotel in Paris]] in the 1940s, including the writers [[Ernst Jünger]], [[Paul Morand]] and [[Jean Cocteau]], the publisher [[Gaston Gallimard]] and the Nazi legal scholar [[Carl Schmitt]].<ref>{{cite book |last= Junger |first= Ernst |title= A German Officer in Occupied Paris |year=2019 |publisher= Columbia University Press |location= New York |isbn= 9780231127400 |page= xvi}}</ref> Montherlant wrote articles for the Paris weekly, ''[[La Gerbe]]'', directed by the pro-Nazi novelist and Catholic reactionary [[Alphonse de Châteaubriant]].<ref>''Verdict on Vichy'', p.236, Michael Curtis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2002</ref>

Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page",<ref>"Le bonheur écrit à l'encre blanche sur des pages blanches." (''Don Juan'' II, IV, 1048)</ref> often quoted in the shorter form "Happiness writes white".<ref>"The Pursuit of Happiness: A Letter to Thomas Jefferson Magazine", article by Lili Artel; ''Free Inquiry'', Vol. 24, June 2004.</ref>

== Reception, honours and awards ==
''Les célibataires'' was awarded the [[Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française]] in 1934, and the English [[Northcliffe Prize]]. In 1960 Montherlant was elected a member of the [[Académie française]], taking the seat which had belonged to [[André Siegfried]], a political writer.<ref>Refer to his speech on the site of the Académie française, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/node/2541</ref> He was an Officer of the French [[Légion d'honneur|Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Johnson |first=Robert B. |date=1973 |title=In Memoriam: Henry de Montherlant, 1896-1972 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/387644 |journal=The French Review |volume=46 |issue=4 |pages=701–705 |jstor=387644 |issn=0016-111X}}</ref>

He was much acclaimed by [[Jean Mauriac]], [[Romain Rolland]], [[André Maurois]], [[André Gide|Andre Gide]], and [[Georges Bernanos]], who called him "perhaps the greatest of our living writers." That was in 1939.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Levi |first=Anthony |title=Guide to French literature. 1789 to the present |date=1992 |publisher=St. James Press |isbn=978-1-55862-159-6 |location=Chicago |pages=443}}</ref> [[Marguerite Yourcenar]] called him a "great writer," but noted that she found some of his writing to be "obtuse and crudely brutal."<ref name=":0" /> German director [[Rainer Werner Fassbinder]] references ''Les Jeunes Filles'' in two films: ''Das kleine Chaos'' (1967) and ''[[Satan's Brew|Satansbraten]]'' (1977).<ref>Töteberg, Michael: ''Rainer Werner Fassbinder'' Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002. p.23</ref> In the short film ''Das kleine Chaos'' the character portrayed by Fassbinder himself reads aloud from a paperback German translation of ''Les Jeunes Filles,'' a book which he claims to have stolen.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Peucker |first=Brigitte |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w2NzkeR4vSYC&dq=%22Henry+de+Montherlant%22+fassbinder&pg=PA79 |title=A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder |date=2012-02-20 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-1-4051-9163-0 |pages=79 |language=en}}</ref>

Writing in 1993, Pierre Lapaire noted that even among his detractors, "Montherlant's style is recognized for its richness, power and classicism."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Lapaire |first=Pierre J. |date=1993 |title=Aspects de la dualité du discours montherlantien |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836729 |journal=Dalhousie French Studies |volume=24 |pages=111–118 |jstor=40836729 |issn=0711-8813}}</ref>

== Translations and adaptations ==
[[Image:R Delaunay La Relève du matin.jpg|thumb|right|180px| Lithograph by [[Robert Delaunay]] for an edition of ''La Relève du matin'' (1928)]]

John Weightman translated a selection of Montherlant's essays into English in 1960.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Baro |first=Gene |date=1961 |editor-last= |editor-first= |editor2-last= |editor2-first= |editor3-last= |editor3-first= |editor4-last= |editor4-first= |title=Montherlant and the Morals of Adjustment |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27540743 |journal=The Sewanee Review |volume=69 |issue=4 |pages=704–708 |issn=0037-3052}}</ref>

[[Terence Kilmartin]], best known for revising the [[C. K. Scott Moncrieff|Moncrieff]] translation of [[Proust]], translated some of Montherlant's novels into English, including a 1968 edition of the four volumes of ''Les Jeunes Filles'', in English called simply ''The Girls''.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Engel |first=Marian |date=January 19, 1969 |title=The Girls by Henry de Montherlant. Translated by Terence Kilmartin from the French |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1969/01/19/archives/the-girls-by-henry-de-montherlant-translated-by-terence-kilmartin.html |access-date=October 2, 2024 |work=The New York Times |pages=BR4}}</ref>

In 2009, [[New York Review Books]] returned Montherlant to print in English by issuing Kilmartin's translation of ''Chaos and Night'' (1963) with a new introduction by [[Gary Indiana (writer)|Gary Indiana]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Frank |first=Edwin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7Pm0DwAAQBAJ&dq=montherlant+%22gary+indiana%22&pg=PA228 |title=The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics: A Selection |date=2019-09-24 |publisher=New York Review of Books |isbn=978-1-68137-391-1 |pages=228 |language=en}}</ref>

[[Christophe Malavoy]] directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaptation of ''[[La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (film)|La Ville dont le prince est un enfant]]''.

== Illustrated works ==
Some works of Henry de Montherlant were published in illustrated editions. Examples include ''Pasiphaé'', illustrated by [[Henri Matisse]], ''Les Jeunes Filles'', illustrated by [[Mariette Lydis]], and others illustrated by [[Jean Cocteau]], {{ill|Robert Cami|fr|Robert Cami}}, [[Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy]], and [[Pierre-Yves Tremois]].

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

== Further reading ==
*H. Perruchot - ''Montherlant'' (French and European Publications {{ISBN|0320056090}}), 1963
*J. Cruikshank - ''Montherlant'' (Oliver & Boyd {{ISBN|0050014315}}), 1964
*I. Hedges, Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine: Three Plays and Essays on WWII and its Aftermath (ISBN 978-3-030-84009-9), 2021, pp. 80–81.

== External links ==
{{commons category|Henry de Montherlant}}
* {{iMDb name|210414}}
* [http://www.montherlant.be/ Henry de Montherlant site]

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Henry de Montherlant - Revision history

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