Misery and its consequences in The Bachelors (1934)

Misery, a pitiable state of extreme poverty, has continued to decimate the world's population throughout the 20th century. It inevitably contributes to man's perdition. The novel being a story told to entertain and decry, Henry de Montherlant, in Les Célibataires, describes with bitter irony the miserable decline of aristocrats after the French Revolution of 1789 and the First World War. They live in ruin, poverty and atrocious unemployment, plunging them into the anguish and despair of an uncertain future. Misery pits the characters against each other in increasingly bitter conflictual relationships of misunderstanding and cruelty. The underlying problem is how to eradicate this social calamity once and for all, with a view to perfecting the human condition. Far from being a social scourge to be reprimanded, poverty nevertheless appears to be a challenge to those in power to become aware of and take responsibility for the role they have to play in the process of totally eradicating this social disease which is detrimental to the full development of mankind.