La honte blanche ou Quand Montherlant prenait le parti de l’Éthiopie

Abstract

In October 1935, as Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia, Montherlant wrote a short text, La honte blanche, which began with these words: “Colonization is indefensible in its principle.” This text was never published, but took the form of two articles that Montherlant had published on September 25 and October 16 in the weekly Marianne under the single title: Une statue au vaincu, in the sense of the manifestos he had signed to protest against the invasion of Ethiopia and in the sense of La Rose de sable, this great anticolonialist novel composed between 1930 and 1932 whose full publication was deferred until 1967. It even announced the most famous word from Le Maître de Santiago (1947): “The colonies are made to be lost.” It is hardly necessary to add, moreover, how much La honte blanche is topical at a time when some are taking down, or wanting to take down, here the statues of a sovereign, elsewhere those of a Southern general, elsewhere those of the discoverer of America.