Pierre Drieu La Rochelle - biography, career, poetry
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Pierre Drieu La Rochelle |
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Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle (3 January 1893 – 15 March 1945) 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 Vichy period.
Drieu was born in a middle class, petit bourgeois family from Normandy, based in the XVIIIth 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. Injured three times, his experience as a soldier during World War I marked him for the rest of his life.
In 1917, Drieu married Colette Jéramec, the sister of a Jewish friend. The marriage ended in failure and they divorced in 1921. Sympathetic to the dadaist movement, the surrealist 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 ("Measure of France") in 1922, which gave him a small notoriety, and edited several novels. He later (beginning in the 1930s) embraced fascism and anti-semitism.
In Drieu’s political writings, he argued that the parliamentary system (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 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 was left to believe that only Nazi Germany could deliver such an autarkian promise.[1] His pro-European views exposed in 1928 were soon followed by closer contacts with the employers’ organization, among which Ernest Mercier’s Redressement Français, and then with some currents of the Radical Party at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.
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 - 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
About the author:
http://www.wikipedia.org
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