Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
|
|
Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle (January 3, 1893 – March 15, 1945) was a French writer of novels, short stories and political essays, who lived and died in Paris.
He was born in a petty bourgeois family. His father was a failed businessman and womanizer who married his mother for her dowry. Although a brilliant student, Pierre failed his final exam at Sciences Po. His experience as a soldier during World War I marked him for the rest of his life.
In 1917, he married Colette Jéramec, the sister of a Jewish friend. The marriage ended in failure and they divorced in 1921.
Sympathetic to the dadaist movement and a close friend of Louis Aragon in the 1920s, he later (beginning in the 1930s) embraced fascism and anti-semitism.
In his political writings, he argued that liberal democracy (the gouvernement d'assemblée of the French Third Republic) was responsible for what he saw as the decadence of France (economic crisis, declining birth rates etc.) In Le Jeune Européen (European Youth, 1927) and Genève ou Moscou (Geneva or Moscow 1928), Drieu La Rochelle argued for a strong Europe and denounced the "decadent materialism" of democracy.
As late as 1931, in L'Europe contre les patries (Europe Against the Nations), he was writing as an anti-Hitlerian, but by 1934, especially after a visit to Germany in September 1935 (where he witnessed the Reichsparteitag rally in Nuremberg), he embraced Nazism as an antidote to the "mediocrity" of liberal democracy. Representative of his politics at the time was the title of his 1934 book Socialisme fasciste. In 1937, with Avec Doriot, he was arguing for a specifically French fascism—he briefly joined the Parti Populaire Français led by Jacques Doriot, a former communist turned fascist—but when the Nazis occupied northern France, he initially gave them his full support.
After the occupation of Paris by the Germans, he succeeded Jean Paulhan (whom he saved twice from the hands of the Gestapo) as director of the Nouvelle Revue Française and thus became a leading figure of French cultural collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. His friendship with the Hitler's ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, pre-dated the war. Quickly disillusioned by the New Order, however, he turned to the study of Eastern spirituality. After the liberation of Paris, he had to go into hiding. Despite the protection of André Malraux, and after a first failed attempt in July 1944, he committed suicide on March 15, 1945; suicide had been a constant temptation throughout his adult life. Like Robert Brasillach, his death caused him to be revered as a martyr by neo-fascists.
Works
The following list is not exhaustive.
- Interrogation (1917), poems
- Etat civil (1921)
- Mesure de la France (1922), essay
- L'homme couvert de femmes (1925), novel
- Le Jeune Européen (1927), essay
- Genève ou Moscou (1928), essay
- Une femme à sa fenêtre (1929), novel
- L'Europe contre les patries (1931), essay
- Le Feu Follet (1931). This short novel narrates the last days of a drug addict who commits suicide. It was inspired by the death of Drieu's friend, the surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut. Louis Malle adapted it for the screen in 1963.
- Drôle de voyage (1933), novel
- La comédie de Charleroi (1934), is a collection of short stories in which Drieu attempts to deal with his war trauma.
- Socialisme fasciste (1934), essay
- Beloukia (1936), novel
- Rêveuse bourgeoisie (1937). In this novel, Drieu tells the story of his parents' failed marriage.
- Avec Doriot (1937), political pamphlet
- Gilles (1939) is Drieu's major work. It is at the same time an autobiographical novel and a bitter indictment of inter-war France.
- Ne plus attendre (1941), essay
- Notes pour comprendre le siècle (1941), essay
- Chronique politique (1943), essay
- L'homme à cheval (1943), novel
- Les chiens de paille (1944), novel
- Le Français d'Europe (1944), essay
- Histoires déplaisantes (1963), short stories
- Mémoires de Dirk Raspe (1966), novel
- Journal d'un homme trompé (1978), short stories
- Journal de guerre (1992), war diary
References
- Andreu, Pierre and Grover, Frederic, Drieu la Rochelle, Paris, Hachette 1979.
- Carrol, David, French literary fascism, Princeton University Press 1998.
- Dambre, Marc (ed.), Drieu la Rochelle écrivain et intellectuel, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle 1995.
- Hervier, Julien, Deux individus contre l’Histoire : Pierre Drieu la Rochelle et Ernst Jünger, Paris, Klincksieck 1978
- Lecarme, Jacques, Drieu la Rochelle ou la bal des maudits, Paris, Presses Universitaires Françaises, 2001.fr:Pierre Drieu La Rochelle