The rise and fall of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

This essay was written as the introduction to the first volume of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s masterpiece Gilles, and appears there. I am uploading it because I feel it’s still relevant, perhaps moreso now than then, and will continue to be so. You can order a copy here.

Towards the end of the war, when it was clear that they had lost, and that all further fighting was merely a formality, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle decided to kill himself. On the 11th of August, 1944 he took a lethal dose of luminal, closed his eyes, and waited to die.

It had been a long time since he had arrived in Paris. Born and raised in Normandy, wounded thrice in the Great War, he had come to Paris like so many provincial upstarts to seek fame, fortune, and especially women. He had found all of these things in spades, and immediately set to making a name for himself. What’s more, he had talent and knew how to style himself, who to keep acquainted with, what opinions to have. Critics celebrated his books, women loved him. By keenly aligning himself with French rightest-clubs during the 1930s, and especially the German ambassador Otto Abetz, Drieu la Rochelle had perfectly positioned himself for a literary coup-d’etat after the German occupation of Paris. The offices of the Third Reich had long had their eyes of La Nouvelle Revue Française, and soon after the German occupation of Paris, Otto Abetz entered into negotiations with Gaston Gallimard as to the terms and conditions by which the NRF would be allowed to continue operating. There were too many Jews, too many Communists, too many Freemasons who were allowed to publish, and they would have to be dismissed if the NRF wished to continue operations. Then director of the NRF, Jean Paulhan, resigned his position, but not before agreeing to help the new appointee, Otto Abetz’s old friend Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, to take over as director of the journal and official hatchet man of the Third Reich.

Jean Paulhan was not opposed to the selection of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle to replace him. He would describe him to Gaston Gallimard as “a timid young man, very upright, very frank” and “already an anti-Semite before the war.” He was, therefore, the perfect man to lead La Nouvelle Revue Française through this period of transition. Gallimard, for his part, did not hesitate to fire all Jews in his employ. No more than two months into the German occupation of Paris, Jacques Schiffrin, a close friend of André Gide and the man who created Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, the now iconic French imprint, was dismissed from Gallimard with a curt two-line letter. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle was more kind, his first act as director of the NRF was to draw up a list of imprisoned writers, Jean Paul Satre among them, and obtain for their release by German authorities.

For those willing to collaborate with the new regime, social advancement came rapidly. The occupation of Paris had brought with it an entire entourage of German intellectuals to the city. Gaston Gallimard was a regular feature at “The Knights of St. George,” a roundtable of conservative intellectuals who would meet for lunch at the George V hotel in Paris; it included Ernst Jünger, Hans Speidel, and Carl Schmitt as well as a number of French writers. Those who chose not to collaborate were quietly removed from public life if they did not step aside willingly. Tasked with forming a writers committee, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s longtime friend Louis Aragon refused to participate. Paulhan was not as fortunate, and with Drieu la Rochelle’s help had to flee the country after being denounced to the Gestapo.

How did Drieu La Rochelle justify his collaboration with the Third Reich when it was actively prosecuting his friends? Somehow his friends were always able to find justifications. “I conclude that if, overnight, a France were to emerge—hitherto secret by force—but Spartan, but ‘military,’ but disciplined, you would immediately cease to be a collaborationist. Since you remain collaborationist only because of the absence of that France. To be honest, I don’t really know whether that France is in the offing. Kind regards.” is how one letter from Jean Paulhan ended.

Even those not collaborating with the Reich saw their careers advanced by the new regime. After being released from prison, Jean Paul Sartre quickly found work as a teacher, filling a position left vacant by the new racial laws barring Jews from public sector work. In an essay describing the occupation of Paris, Sartre would write: “[t]he Germans did not stride, revolver in hand, through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement. They would offer seats to old ladies on the Metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to behave correctly and being well-disciplined, they tried shyly and conscientiously to do so.” Robert Baschille put it more bluntly, stating simply that “France has gotten into bed with Germany, she will remember the experience fondly for a long time to come.”

It did not take long for Drieu La Rochelle to settle into his new position. It was well paid, comfortable, and allowed him considerable influence within the world of letters. In 1941 Pierre Drieu la Rochelle was invited by Joseph Gobbles to visit Germany as part of a delegation of French writers consisting of himself, Robert Brasillach, Abel Bonnard, Ramon Fernandez, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Jacques Chardonne. For most, life continued as it always had.

Charles Murraus defined his enemies as the “four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, and foreigners.” French intellectuals had been distrustful of Parliamentary Democracy for a long time, and this had been greatly increased by the February 6th riots of 1934. Antisemitism had been a mainstream tendency in France since at least the Dreyfus Affair. Under the conditions of the Second Armistice at Compiègne, a number of réactionnaire and antidreyfusard tendencies within French society were bound together under the banner of the Vichy regime and given control of France, left largely autonomous by their German occupiers.

Nor did they need much encouragement from Germany to start rounding up their own Jewish population for deportation. Robert Brasillach quickly began publishing names and addresses of French Jews in his fascist newspaper Je Suis Partout and calling for the murder of leftist politicians. In his wartime diaries, Ernst Jünger describes an episode where Louis Ferdinand Céline is astonished “at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews—astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it.” This was apparently not an uncommon opinion, and Jünger complains that “when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology, they apply them the way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others.”

Friedrich Nietzsche once asked: “What if Truth is a woman?” Pierre Drieu la Rochelle answered. The women in his life never abandoned him. Long after their divorce, his second wife Olesia Sienkiewicz kept his family name “Drieu la Rochelle.” Victoria Ocampo, the liberal, aristocratic Argentine maîtresse who did so much in those years may have broken ties with him over their ideological schisms, but never stopped reminiscing about the times they shared a bed together.

Having forgotten her purse and returning for it, it was his maid who discovered Drieu la Rochelle overdosed on luminal that fateful day of August 1944, and it was his ex-wife Olesia who rushed him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

He spent three days at Necker hospital, resentful of his suicide attempt having been foiled. On the fourth day, he was moved to the American Hospital, and that night he promptly slit his wrists. This too, failed to kill him. Like Socrates, his friends came to his side, to beg him to flee. Switzerland was a neutral country, he could go there, in a few years this would all blow over. Perhaps he had always wanted to die a martyr, perhaps he just didn’t want to face a life in prison, or worse. Ironically, in those final days, it was a Jewish woman who would risk her own well being to shelter him from Allied capture. As the liberation effort raged outside in the streets of Paris, Drieu la Rochelle’s first wife Colette Jéramec arranged for him to leave the American Hospital and hide with a family of doctors who could supervise his recovery.

In his defense, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle was not a serious man. Once, when asked to clarify on his political position, he explained “my politics is youth, I am for the young.” During the war, he had married Colette Jéramec, the younger sister of one of his classmates. She had introduced him to the literatti, figures such as Louis Aragon and André Breton, and Drieu la Rochelle dove headfirst into dadaism and surrealism. In all of his political writings, there is something of the artist and flâneur. His opinions are sharpened by a kind of political instinct that seeks firstly to titillate, and it is easy to picture him delivering his talking points primarily to an café-table of scandalized artists, bohemians, and haute bourgeoisie.

Why did Colette Jéramec protect him? The marriage only lasted four years; if his books are to be believed, it was not a happy one. He was twenty-four, she three years younger, they ran in similar social circles, had similar friends, by the time they married he had already published a book of poetry, Interrogations (1917); her connections helped to launch his career. But was there also love?. Two years after their divorce, he published his first novella L’homme couvert de femmes (1925), in which she featured heavily as a character. This novella also introduced the reoccurring character of “Gille,” a stand-in for Drieu la Rochelle. In any case, he intervened in 1943 to have her and her two children liberated from the Drancy concentration camp. There must have been love there.

As a dadaist, he participated as a witness in the 1921 “Trial of Maurice Barrès.” A mock trial organized by André Breton. The central question being “to what extent a man can be held guilty whose desire for power leads him to champion conformist ideas most contrary to those of his youth. How could the author of Un Homme Libre become the propagandist of the Écho de Paris?” This early foray into politics would have resonances with the rest of his adult life. The guilty verdict would lead to a schism within the Dadaist movement, with Tristan Tzara forming a new faction by declaring a refusal of all forms of justice, even Dada justice.

By this point in his life, he was deeply involved in the Surrealist movement, and rented a house in Guéthary in 1924 where he lived together with Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Max Ernst at different times. L’Action française tried several times to recruit him as a young writer, but he turned them down on the advice of Aragon and remained uncommitted to any political platform, torn between contradictory impulses towards socialism and conservatism.

Drieu la Rochelle outlined his early political views in a series of articles published in La Revue hebdomadaire, where he put forward a program for the formation of a “Jeune Droite” movement, which would be anti-militarist, deist and anticlerical, and against intolerance. He also worked with his friend Gaston Bergery to try and start a similar movement titled “Jeunes Gauches.” Neither of these ideas resulted in anything concrete.

By 1927 he had remarried, this time with Olesia Sienkiewicz, the daughter of a Polish banker who had been ruined during the war. Two essays, Le Jeune Européen (1927) and Genève ou Moscou (1928) soon followed in which Drieu la Rochelle laid out his vision for a post-national, federated Europe. These essays make him among a number of early advocates for a European Union. André Malraux had previously published La Tentation de l’Occident (1926) which was in part a response to these ideas, which they would often meet and discuss within Paris’ many cafés.

The further adventures of Drieu la Rochelle’s autofictional character Gille were contained in a novella titled La Voix. This was published by a somewhat niche imprint Les Amis d’Edouard, which seems to have been loosely sympathetic to L’Action française but had firm literary credentials. It was printed in a limited run of two-hundred copies, on Japanese paper. This book has become something of a collectible, with first edition copies of it selling online for around $500 USD.

Despite the seemingly right wing credentials of Les Amis d’Edouard, Drieu la Rochelle’s next novel, Une femme a su fenetre (1929) featured a communist protagonist who becomes romantically entangled with an aristocrat. A central theme of the book is the desire to sacrifice oneself for a cause. It was later turned into a film by Pierre Granier-Deferre. This book has become one of his most popular novels, and expresses the aesthetic idealization of radical politics that would inevitably pull Drieu la Rochelle into league with Hitler’s regime. During this same year, he separated from his wife Olesia and pursued an affair with the Argentine aristocrat Victoria Ocampo. Although they had many political disagreements, Ocampo would always speak highly of Drieu la Rochelle.

In L’Europe Contro Les Patries (1931) he expanded on his philosophy. Examining the changes which the first world war had wrought on Europe, and the trend towards globalization happening everywhere, he argued again for the creation of a confederated, democratic, European Union. That same year he also released Le Feu Follet, a kind of obituary for Jacques Rigaut who had committed suicide in 1929. This book would be adapted into several movies, and is by far his most known novel in the English speaking world. It contains a brutal critique of the nihilistic hedonism of postwar Europe, and his bohemian friends especially.

A Europeanist among Nationalists. A Communist who admired Hitler. A Fascist who adored Stalin. A collaborator who used his position to free political prisoners. For a long time, he had hesitated between fascism and communism. It was not until the February 6th riots of 1934 that he definitively committed to a specific political platform: in October of that year he published Socialisme fasciste arguing that if a confederated European Union is not possible, then the emerging ideology of Fascism was the best choice for achieving a socialist Europe. In an ironic twist, several months before its publication the first congress of Soviet writers was attended by his old friends Louis Aragon, and André Malraux.

It’s important to note that, although his politics had changed, he did not break from any of his old acquaintances. Probably a part of him enjoyed playing the contrarian. In January, by the suggestion of Victoria Ocampo, he visited Argentina where he was hosted by Jorge Luis Borges. Its also notable that, although he had embraced fascism by this point, Drieu la Rochelle did not adopt their racist and antisemitic views. As late as 1937, he stated of antisemitism: “I don’t know why anti-Semites admire Jews so much and, in their masochistic imagination, attribute virtues to them that they don’t have. Jews aren’t revolutionaries at all, they’re mainly trouble makers, they’re mainly rabble-rousers. They are incapable of bringing a revolution to fruition. Where they dominate, defeat is certain.”

Throughout the 1930’s Drieu la Rochelle published a number of books and essays, most notable of which were La Comédie de Charleroi which described his experiences in the first world war; and Rêveuse bourgeoisie which described his childhood and parents relationship. Towards the end of the decade he wrote an interesting novella, Le Faux Belge, a kind of prequel to Gilles, which was not published. In it, the main character, Walter, is a fascist infiltrator posing as a Belgian professor. He boards a plane for Belarus where he meets two other passengers, both communists, a Jew Cohen and a Frenchman Escairolles. When the plane is forced to make a landing in Ibiza, uncertain whether the passengers will be met by communists or fascists, they make pact of mutual aid on regardless of the configuration of political forces present. Perhaps this book, more than any other, reflects the true political leanings of Drieu la Rochelle.

It wasn’t until 1939 that Gilles first appeared in France. Initially censured by the Third Republic, it wasn’t published in full until 1941 under the Vichy regime. In it, Drieu la Rochelle describes a fictionalized version of his life, his relationships, and his political awakening. The titular character, Gilles, is in a way the pluralization of the previous Gille character that appeared in several previous novels, a synthesis and a conclusion to Drieu la Rochelle’s previous autofictions.

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle considered Gilles his masterpiece. An honest, unflinching portrait of the decadence of postwar France and the moral cost of ambition and social advancement. It is an autobiography which is ruthlessly critical of the protagonist, but it is also a ruthless criticism of the society in which he lived. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a major influence, and in the 1941 introduction he states: “Like all other contemporary writers, I found myself faced with an overwhelming fact: decadence. Everyone had to defend themselves and react, each in their own way, against this fact. But no one like me – except Céline – had a clear conscience about it. Some escaped through escape, disorientation, various forms of refusal, flight or exile; me, almost alone, through systematic observation and satire.”

Returning to his final days, in 1944, Colette, Malraux and Aragon all assure Drieu la Rochelle that nothing will happen to him. Every one of them had been protected by him during the occupation, now they swear that they will do the same for him. He continues to write, spends Christmas in the countryside, but on March 15th 1945 his arrest warrant is announced in the newspaper. Reading this, he says to his cook, Gabrielle, “finally I can leave this place.” The next day, he kills himself. He is found with his head in an oven, after having swallowed several bottles of pills. Besides him is a note stating simply “Gabrielle, let me sleep this time.”

Whether or not this was avoidable or deserved is not really worth debating in my opinion. As a collaborator, he didn’t participate in any of the heinous witch-hunts that Robert Brasillach and others did. Nor did he publish antisemitic propaganda like Céline. In fact, he went out of his way to help a good number of people escape prosecution under the Nazis. He certainly did more than so-called resistance figures like Sartre, those who mostly sat around waiting for their turn to play executioner.

He was a collaborator however, in a way that many people in his position were not. L’Academie francaise for example, suspended appointments in order to avoid being influenced by the Vichy regime. Drieu la Rochelle knew what he was doing, and he did it anyways. Considering his connections within the NRF and status among Paris intellectuals, it’s very unlikely that he would have been executed. Not impossible, but unlikely. He was not any more guilty than Gaston Gallimard after all, and Gallimard is today a household name and one of the most respected publishers in the world.

Although collaborators and resistance partisans were theoretically at war, in their daily lives they broke bread, debated, slept together, and engaged with each other’s ideas. At worst, they would throw their name behind some petition debating whether or not one of their class should live or die, be imprisoned or pardoned. Theirs was a war of ideas, and a sense of collective sportsmanship kept casualties light. Most of Hitler’s victims did not get a debate, they did not get the option of renouncing their previous opinions or political views, their opinions and views did not matter, and when they died they did not do so as political martyrs, but for the crime of being Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, or Slav. They did not live in Paris, but in cities like Danzig, Dresden, and Prague. And when the Third Reich surrendered the war did not end for the millions Bengalese who had been systematically starved to death by Winston Churchill, or the tens of thousands of Algerian resistance fighters who liberated Paris only to return home as second class citizens in their own countries. That Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s political opinions were cynical, nuanced, and insincere did not provide comfort to the hundreds of thousands liberated from concentration camps.

However, while nuance does not necessarily make for good politics, it does make for good literature. Clearly I would not have translated this book if I saw no merit in it. So, to close this essay, I would like to call the reader’s attention to a perhaps controversial theme, but one which is well worth discussing: the role that Myriam’s Jewishness plays in their relationship. This theme is explicitly stated in Ch. 11: “Gilles suddenly wondered with violent curiosity what he thought of the fact that Myriam was Jewish, and what role this had played in their relationship. He sensed with surprise that it had played a role.” However, on reading and re-reading Gilles, and especially comparing it to Drieu la Rochelle’s own life story, it is not completely clear what this role is.

To be clear, Drieu la Rochelle was an antisemite He himself stated as much, as did the people close to him. But he did not start out this way. As a youth, he wrote in his schoolbooks: “There are two beings I will spend my life understanding: Women and Jews.” Nothing stopped him from his marriage with Colette Jéramec, and it should be remembered that even during the height of the war he went out of his way to protect her and her family from prosecution. Describing his initial reaction to meeting Myriam’s family, he mentions “something of the childish terror of the Christians in front of the Jews” and attaches to Jewishness a kind of mystic significance. He does not, however, describe Jews as possessing any innate or practiced characteristics or ways of being, rather, he describes the anxiety of the non-Jew faced with the Other, and this will be a consistent theme throughout Gilles.

Describing Myriam’s father: “Mr Falkenberg had baptized his children Catholic at the time of the Dreyfus affair, but that hadn’t stopped him from being a Dreyfusard. That was a long time ago. His sons had been killed: France had taken him at his word. He had no grudge against France, but against life. Jews understand life better than others, in a more positive way. Unfortunately, the others far outnumber the Jews, and life is part of the madness of this majority. Life is an execrable folly. Men murder each other senselessly in this war, this senseless brawl.” And here we are confronted with a kind of philosemitism, in which the only fault ascribed to Jews is that they are not numerous enough. There is perhaps a kind of dramatic irony at play here, because he is describing Mr Falkenberg’s perspective as opposed to his own.

Let’s not take it at face value then, that Pierre Drieu la Rochelle believed Jews a lone voice of reason among “the madness of this majority.” After all, Drieu la Rochelle himself states that his book is written from “systematic observation and satire” Mr Falkenberg believes the Jew superior to the Gentile, and with his experience living through the Dreyfus Affair and later losing both sons to the war, it is understandable why he would feel that way. Drieu la Rochelle was, after all, an astute judge of character. But what can we say then about Ch. 12, in which Gilles visits his old mentor Carentan?

In this chapter, Gilles visits the man who raised him, an old Normand réactionnaire named Carentan, for the first time since returning from the war. After some catching up, Gilles starts to describe his scheme to marry Myriam, a woman he does not love, for her money. For his part, Carentan is very supporting of the idea. Until the topic of Myriam’s Jewishness comes up, at which point he takes a much different tone. First he insists that he is too conservative to be an antisemite: “I’m not anti-Semitic because I hate politics. Politics, as we’ve understood it over the last century, is a despicable prostitution of high disciplines. Politics should only be about recipes, trade secrets like those passed on by painters, for example. But that pretentious nonsense, ideology, has been shoved in.” It’s hard not to read in this passage an implicit criticism of Adolf Hitler. Carentan quickly follows this statement with a justification for his own brand of antisemitism: “What remains is experience, what contact with people teaches us. Well, I can’t stand Jews, because they exemplify the modern world, which I abhor.”

Perhaps we could say that this represents the true feelings of Drieu la Rochelle, but I think we should be careful to assign the same cynicism towards Carentan as we do to Mr Falkenberg. The titular character, Gilles, quickly shoots back at this opinion, by bringing up the nationalist writer Charles Péguy, who was deeply in love with a Jewish woman Blanche Raphael and wrote appreciatively about the Jews. To this Carentan responds that “Their religion is still fairly archaic. It’s not as rationalized as Christianity, Buddhism or Islam. It’s still a tribal religion. But the more primitive people are, the more eagerly they jump into the modern world. They’re defenseless. A peasant who passes through Normale can give himself over entirely to the basest rationalism, while a bourgeois finds defenses in his religious upbringing, his prejudices. Jews jump from the synagogue to the Sorbonne.”

So here we are confronted with something of an impossibility, the kind of which that is always present in racist discourses, where Jews are both one thing, and also the opposite. They are too modern, and if they are too modern, it is because they are too primitive, too backwards, too tied to the past. Mr Falkenberg’s opinions are perhaps self serving and chauvinistic, but they are not self contradictory.

And taking a step back to examine the context of this conversation, it has to be pointed out that Gilles and Carentan are conspiring to steal a woman’s inheritance. It’s this irony that really reveals the role of antisemitism within Gilles. There are many Jews within the novel, Benedict, Myriam, Mr Falkenberg, Ruth, to list a few, and they are varied. Their experiences, their actions, their beliefs are not ascribed to any innate characteristic, but it is non-Jewish characters who project their own beliefs, anxieties, and ideals onto them. So while antisemitism is present throughout the novel, it is the experience of antisemitism by gentiles, rather than any qualities or characteristics of Jews themselves which is called into question.

And this question is not a literary or philosophical one, it is a moral question. When Gilles seeks to disdain Myriam’s Jewishness, it is motivated by the desire to placate his own conscience. The antisemitism of Gilles is entirely reflective, and it is clearly motivated by a desire for social advancement. The idea that, by committing a swift and brutal crime, by taking what is not his and what he has not earned, Gilles can advance socially in a world of stark class divisions, where the poor are sent to die in the trenches while the wealthy live in decadent luxury. It is very reflective of the old saying that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools.” All the criticisms of Jews are carefully constructed to serve a specific function: to assuage Gilles’ guilty conscience.

Had Pierre Drieu la Rochelle been anybody else, had he not collaborated, had he simply taken a backseat while waiting for the war to play out, I think that the message of Gilles could be seen very clearly as a rejection of antisemitism. But life is not so simple. Drieu la Rochelle was an antisemite, and what’s more, a collaborator. And this is where the cynicism of Gilles is really effective. Because it is not a moral tale, or an attempt at political justification. It’s the story of a man, and the decisions that man makes, and the guilt he feels, and the blood on his hands. As he says to Carentan “I entered this girl’s life like a thief in the night, like a murder, like a coward.” The response to which is simply that “scruples are ugly. It’s what disfigures the criminal.”

Although Drieu la Rochelle was a criminal, he was hardly an anomaly. Charles de Gaulle once stated that “all of France was in the resistance.” But it is equally true that “all of France collaborated.” Some moreso than others. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle moreso than most. And in the end, he paid for it with his life.

What makes him unique among collaborators is that he was not a misanthrope like Céline, or rapid antisemite like Brasillach. He was successful, respected, and well liked by his peers; his mistake was joining the loosing side during a period of transition, and not much more than that. Looking at our own public intellectuals, there are many who advocate for genocide, regime change and war without any personal risk to themselves, and who are celebrated for it.

At least Pierre Drieu la Rochelle was not one of them.