Henry de Montherlant

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Signature of Henry de Montherlant

Henry Millon de Montherlant (Paris, April 20, 1896 – Paris, September 21, 1972) was a French writer of essays and novels, as well as one of the leading French playwrights of the twentieth century.

Descended from a noble Picard family, he was educated at private schools at Jeanson-de-Sailly, then at the Sainte-Croix academy at Neuilly-sur-Seine, where his family lived.

Mobilised in 1916, 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 Chant for the Dead at Verdun',) both exaltations of heroism during the Great War.

His early successes were works such as the tetralogy Les jeunes filles (The Young Girls) (1936–1939) and Les célibataires (The Bachelors) (1934). At this time he did a lot of travelling, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria.

From 1929 he began to write for the theatre, plays such as La reine morte (1934), Pasiphaé (1936), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954), 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.

In Le solstice de Juin (1941) he expressed his admiration for the German army and claimed that France had been justly defeated and conquered in 1940. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.

Montherlant concealed his pederastic tendencies from the public during his lifetime.^[1] In 1912, he had been expelled from the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a relationship with a fellow student. His play La ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les garçons (published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier) and his correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte, (author of Les amitiés particulières (1943), also about sexual relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school), are the main testaments to this side of his character. Christophe Malavoy directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaption of La ville dont le prince est un enfant.

In 1960 Montherlant was elected a member of the Académie française, taking the seat which had belonged to André Siegfried, a political writer. His presentation speech dwelt mercilessly on the geography of New Zealand.

According to Peyrefitte, some time in 1970 he was beaten up by some youths, which caused a serious injury to his eye, as a consequence of which he became progressively blind. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of Montherlant's works, recalls that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall"; he dates the incident to 1968, and mentions that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.^[2]

He committed suicide in 1972, swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head.

Henry de Montherlant was an Officer of the French Legion of Honour.