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Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

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Born: January 02 1893

Died: 1414 03 19451945

Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle was a French writer of novels, short stories and political essays, who lived and died in Paris. He became a proponent of French fascism in the 1930s, and was a well-known collaborationist during the German occupation.

Drieu was born into a middle class, petit bourgeois family from Normandy, based in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. 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 the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. Wounded three times, his experience as a soldier during World War I had a deep influence on him and marked him for the rest of his life.

In 1917, Drieu married Colette Jéramec, the sister of a Jewish friend. The marriage failed and they divorced in 1921. Sympathetic to Dada and to the Surrealists and the Communists, and a close friend of Louis Aragon in the 1920s, he was also interested in the royalist Action Française, but refused to adhere to any one of these political currents. He wrote Mesure de la France in 1922, which gave him some small notoriety, and edited several novels. In 1931 he published Le Feu Follet, probably his most famous novel, inspired by the suicide of his friend Jacques Rigaut. He later embraced fascism as a contraddictory and provocative way in response of what he perceived as a materialistic decadence of his era.

In Drieu's political writings, he argued that the parliamentary system was responsible for what he saw as the "decadence" of France . In "Le Jeune Européen" and "Genève ou Moscou" , Drieu La Rochelle advocated a strong Europe and denounced the "decadent materialism" of democracy. He believed that a federal Europe could bolster a strong economic and political union isolated from the imperialist Russians and Americans; in 1939 he came to believe that only Nazi Germany could deliver such an autarkian promise. His pro-European views expressed in 1928 were soon followed by closer contacts with employers' organizations, among them Ernest Mercier's Redressement Français, and then, at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, with some currents of the Radical Party .

He supported collaborationism and the Nazis' occupation of northern France. During the occupation of Paris, Drieu succeeded Jean Paulhan as director of the Nouvelle Revue Française and thus became a leading figure of French cultural collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, who he hoped would become the leader of a "Fascist International". His friendship with the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, pre-dated the war. He was also a member of the committee of the Groupe Collaboration. Beginning in 1943, however, he became disillusioned by the New Order and fascism, and turned instead to the study of Eastern spirituality. In a final, provocative act, he again embraced Jacques Doriot's PPF, simultaneously declaring in his secret diary his admiration for Stalinism.

Upon the liberation of Paris in 1944, Drieu had to go into hiding. Despite the protection of his friend André Malraux, and after a failed first attempt in July 1944, Drieu committed suicide.

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Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Books from Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Will O' the Wisp

Fuoco fatuo

Le feu follet / Adieu à Gonzague (Folio)

Récit secret

The Comedy of Charleroi, and Other Stories

Notes pour comprendre le siècle

Diario de un hombre engañado

Die Unzulänglichen

Strano viaggio

Diario di un delicato

Journal: (1939-1945)

Drieu la Rochelle - Oeuvres: Le Feu follet, Les Chiens de paille

Ginevra o Mosca

I cani di paglia

Interrogation: Poemes

Notes for Understanding Our Century

Le Feu follet (French Edition)

Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

Rêveuse Bourgeoisie

La Comédie de Charleroi