Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

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Pierre Drieu La Rochelle bigraphy, stories - French writer

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle : biography

3 January 1893 – 15 March 1945

Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle (3 January 1893 – 15 March 1945) was a French writer of novels, short stories and political essays. He was born, lived and died in Paris. Drieu La Rochelle became a proponent of French fascism in the 1930s, and was a well-known collaborationist during the German occupation.

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 an alcoholic 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 as "Le Feu Follet." Joachim Trier adapted it as "Oslo, August 31" in 2011. English Translation: Will O’ the Wisp, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, London, 2000.
  • 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 simultaneously 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, posthumous), short stories
  • Mémoires de Dirk Raspe (1966, posthumous), novel
  • Journal d’un homme trompé (1978, posthumous), short stories
  • Journal de guerre (1992, posthumous), war diary

Fascism and collaboration

As late as 1931, in "L’Europe contre les patries" ("Europe Against the Nations"), Drieu was writing as an anti-Hitlerian, but by 1934, especially after the 6 February 1934 riots organized by far right leagues before the Palais Bourbon, and then a visit to Nazi Germany in September 1935 (where he witnessed the Reichsparteitag rally in Nuremberg), he embraced Nazism as an antidote to the "mediocrity" of liberal democracy. After the 6 February 1934 riots, he contributed to the review La Lutte des Jeunes and reinvented himself as a fascist. The title of his October 1934 book Socialisme Fasciste ("Fascist Socialism") was representative of his politics at the time. In it, he described his discontent with Marxism as an answer to France’s problems. He wrote that he found inspiration in Georges Sorel, Fernand Pelloutier, and the earlier French socialism of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Proudhon.

Drieu La Rochelle joined Jacques Doriot’s fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) in 1936, and became the editor of its review, L’Emancipation Nationale, until his break with the party beginning in 1939. In 1937, with "Avec Doriot", he argued for a specifically French fascism. He continued writing his most famous novel, Gilles, during this time.

He supported collaborationism and the Nazis’ occupation of northern France. During the occupation of Paris, Drieu 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, 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. Beginning in 1943, however, he became disillusioned by the New Order, and turned to the study of Eastern spirituality.He expressed his deception in Les Chiens de Paille (1944), his last novel in which he represents himself as a cynical man with anarchist tendencies. In a final, provocative act, he again embraced Jacques Doriot’s PPF, simultaneously declaring in his secret diary his admiration for Stalinism.