With each week’s accumulation of diplomatic news, it becomes increasingly clear that Europe is now permanently divided into two camps of conviction, which differ fundamentally on one thing: war. For historical and material reasons, France and England today consider war a summum malum; for biological and material reasons, Germany and Italy consider war a summum bonum.
—JANET FLANNER, February 2, 1939, Paris Was Yesterday
I hope for the triumph of totalitarian man over the world. The age of divided man has passed.… Enough of this dust of individuals in the crowd.
—PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, Journal, June 10, 1945
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who tacked so obsessively between self-hatred and vanity, ended up collaborating with the Germans despite himself and for reasons of literary promotion. His pledge of fealty to Jacques Doriot and the French Fascist Party in 1936 had followed the pattern of all his enthusiasms. It had laid the ground for disillusionment. He came to believe that the movement capable of transcending politics and organizing France around a militant creed had dissipated its energy in political opportunism. Worse still for Drieu, who felt alive only within the radiant circle of a hero, was the dimming of Jacques Doriot’s aura. Drieu accused him of failing to “weld into one metal the energy of the many who had entrusted themselves to him” and in January 1939 resigned from the PPF. Doriot, the Vulcan presuming to harden men in the heat of battle, turned out to be an ordinary trimmer. Like Republican France, he was “mou”—soft. Not so, Hitler.
The basic vocabulary of an ideologue at war with his own intellect—energy, fire, metal, strength, virility—received full play in Gilles, an autobiographical novel Drieu published shortly after his resignation from Doriot’s PPF, hoping finally to establish himself as something more than a respectable but minor literary figure and to find consolation thereby for his political orphanhood. It spans the life of Gilles Gambier from the First World War, when he first visits Paris as a wounded young soldier on leave, to 1937, when the soul-sick veteran of Paris society volunteers for service with Franco during the Spanish Civil War. His movements across the intervening years tell a story not unlike Flaubert’s Sentimental Education in its randomness—a story of wrong turns, dry wells, and impasses. Women flock to him. He has affairs. He marries a rich Jewess and divorces her. His well-connected wife finds him employment in the foreign office, where he languishes dutifully. He shares his loathing of the bourgeoisie with nihilistic young writers who play at revolution. He flees to Algeria, seeking spiritual solace in the desert, but returns to bourgeois Babylon unredeemed and continues his quest for spirituality as the editor of a journal, Apocalypse, dedicated to the proposition that France’s ultimate well-being lies not in the sterile middle ground of a republic but at the ideal confluence of political extremes. This, too, is an impasse. Apocalypse ends up buried in the riot rubble of February 1934, when Gilles converts to Fascism.
Suffice it to say of Gilles that Drieu wrote a picaresque novel with the bones of a thesis regularly poking through the flesh of its characters. Irremediably decadent, France has been undermined by modernity and by the assimilation of foreigners alien to her nature. Surrealists, homosexuals, drug addicts, feminists, and métèques are all called to account, but the most lethal and comprehensive agent of subversion is the Jew. Like Maurras, Drieu distinguished between the “real” country and its “legal” counterfeit. Jews belong to the latter. Devoid of the organic Frenchness that inheres in roots and soil and physical reality, they are themselves legalisms, personifying the abstract notion of citizenship invented by the Revolution. Only as old as their abstraction, they are yet responsible for France’s senility—a paradox Drieu applies to the broad compass of French history. The modern world, which Jews epitomize, is decrepit; the Middle Ages, in which “French reason” made its home, were young and vital. “Gilles had associated his loneliness with the soul of France,” writes Drieu.
On foot or by car he had made pilgrimages to sites the length and breadth of France. He had rested his eyes on mountains and rivers, trees and monuments. He had been moved and arrested by monuments quarried from the matrix of the earth. How often he had jumped out of his car on a country road to visit some forsaken little church, believing that it contained the secret of life. The French once built churches and they no longer could.… The reasoning, calculating architect needed audacity.… With his church he challenged the tree rooted beside it. Now what did he make? Office buildings, boxes for rent, public conveniences, and monuments that feebly imitate the style of lost youth and creation.… French reason was the passionate, proud, furious twelfth century splurging itself in epics and cathedrals.… The French had been soldiers, monks, architects, painters, poets, husbands, and fathers. They had sired children, they had constructed, they had killed, and laid down their lives. They had sacrificed themselves and sacrificed.
“Sacrifice” is another word belonging to the vocabulary of the Fascist at war with his intellect. In an epilogue that calls to mind the French Romantics who portrayed Spain as a netherworld of salutary primitivism, Gilles finds on the battlefield of Extremadura, where men untouched by the modern age and careless of their individual fate fight for a cause, what he couldn’t find in the Algerian desert. “Almost all the soldiers were young and recruited from the neighboring province of Old Castile. Young peasants, robust and incorruptible in their simplicity. They were born of that eternally primitive race which still populates the depths of Europe and from which we now see emerging the great irresistible movement that astonishes delicately strung minds in cities of the West.”
Drieu’s paranoia, feelings of inferiority, and melancholy all played a part in making the publication of Gilles, by Gallimard in December 1939, a vexed affair. Months earlier, Jean Paulhan, the editorial director of the literary review NRF, to which Drieu contributed, had rejected the chapter ridiculing the Surrealists—a rejection at which he would have certainly taken umbrage even if Paulhan had not continued to publish the work of Louis Aragon, by whose flourishing career Drieu always measured his own. In April he vowed never again to set foot in the NRF offices, where “Jews, Communist sympathizers, former Surrealists and all manner of people who believe that truth lies on the left call the tune.” He protested to Paulhan that his “national sentiment” was not subject to the vagaries of a foreign power. “Aragon is more Communist than ever and obeys the defeatist agenda of the Soviet Union. As for myself, I remain a resolute adversary of democracy, which I consider above all a ruin encumbering us with its debris—and at the same time a patriot. I am the opposite of Aragon—I subordinate my tastes and distastes to the country I belong to. I have asserted this position in the NRF, … in the PPF’s Émancipation Nationale, and in Gilles.”1
But Paulhan was not alone in thinking that with patriots like Drieu, France had no need of potential traitors. Drieu himself couldn’t tease apart his allegiances. “I can’t think my thoughts through to the point of hoping for a victory of the totalitarians, although they would establish a European union more organic and effective than our League of Nations,” he wrote on May 10, 1940, the day Germany attacked France. “I am incapable of stifling my instinctive French reaction. Habit is second nature and second nature is instinct.” Yet three days later, when the Germans were crossing the Meuse at Sedan, en route to the interior, he noted in his diary that he and Hitler were made of the same stuff and moved by the same impulses. “I feel Hitler’s movements as if I were he himself; I am at the center of his impulsive force. The male and positive side of my work are what make him tick. Strange adventure, these parallels.… In Hitler the same weakness and strength.… At twenty-five or thirty, I discerned the essence of Fascism in my first works.”
The catastrophic events of 1940–41 unhinged Drieu, intensifying both his paranoia and his grandiosity. He fled Paris on June 10 with or without the poison he had threatened to swallow as soon as Germans entered the city, but more fearful of being assassinated by “Jews and Anglophiles.” The army was in full retreat. A tide of refugees swept him down to the Dordogne, where he remained until, on July 19, the opportunity to visit Vichy presented itself. By then Drieu had learned that Germany’s ambassador to Paris was Otto Abetz, whom he had met six years earlier in Nuremberg.2 Drieu offered to cultivate Abetz for whatever intelligence of German plans their acquaintance might yield. Home he came, crossing the line of demarcation with quasi-official credentials. But the powers that be in Paris proved more alluring to Drieu than the geriatric regime in Vichy. Before long he reconciled his differences with Jacques Doriot in hopes of founding a “Socialist-Fascist” party inspired by the Hitler-Stalin pact. “I tell myself (and, alas, confide to all and sundry) that I would like to play the role of gray eminence and am so persuasive that there has been much whispering about it.” Otto Abetz, who kept close tabs on Paris’s cultural scene, discouraged the idea and proposed that Drieu apply his energies to literature rather than politics as if the two could be distinguished in occupied France. This he did so effectively that in December 1940 the German authorities allowed the Nouvelle Revue Française, which had been shut down, to resume publication under Drieu’s directorship, and gave him oversight in the affairs of Gallimard, the book publisher. Suddenly the world had turned upside down for Drieu. The great had been made small, impedimenta had been swept away, and France’s foremost literary journal, which had added insult to injury by publishing an uncomplimentary review of Gilles before its extinction, would be his to revive.
Reviving it was made easier with the help of Paulhan, whom Gaston Gallimard employed as director of the Pléiade collection. The editor who had slighted Drieu became his indispensable adviser at the NRF (apparently eschewing politics after several weeks in a Gestapo prison while clandestinely working for the Resistance). But Drieu could not deny the fact that he held sway over a diminished realm. Once his writing was slighted by an editor of note; now his ersatz NRF endured slights from notable writers. Malraux, who remained his friend, had advised him against accepting the position. Gide, who had helped launch the NRF before World War I, dissociated himself from it after résistants taunted him for contributing a piece to the first issue published under Drieu’s directorship, in December 1940.3 Attempts to herd Gide, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel onto an editorial board failed. “Gide, Valéry, Claudel backed out in the weasel ways of the old generation, more despicable than ever,” Drieu fumed. “Claudel, the enemy of Voltaire, served the Masonic government and the Jews. Valéry thrived, and Gide was entirely at his ease under a regime that venerated his pederasty, his asocial strutting.”
Power and virtue were not easily reconciled at the NRF. Having helped to free Paulhan from a German prison, Drieu found himself overshadowed by the éminence grise, whom authors held in high esteem. The arrangement made Drieu acutely uncomfortable. By October 1942, when he traveled to Weimar for the Nazi-sponsored Congress of European Writers, depression was written all over his face. Photographs show it and his journal voices it.4 “I can no longer get interested in anything. I’ve retreated to my lair and feel that I’ve never left it. Why did I subject myself to this penitence for a year and a half? All the mediocrities I’ve read and seen. Why this habit of always altering and upsetting the blessed wholeness of my solitude, of my divine sloth?” Gilles was not recognized as the masterpiece he hoped it would be, and the NRF did not vindicate him.
Drieu La Rochelle had compromised himself fatally, but fraternizing with evil enabled him on at least one occasion to redeem himself. Early in May 1943, his first wife, Colette Jéramec—now remarried, the mother of two young boys, and a research physician at the Pasteur Institute—was denounced by her concierge for holding suspicious meetings in her flat and arrested by French agents of the Gestapo. Because she had loudly resisted, they arrested her sons as well and transported all three to Drancy, outside Paris, an internment camp from which prisoners, mostly Jews, were sent to Auschwitz.5 Upon learning of their predicament, Drieu rushed home from the Midi and promised to help. She smuggled this letter to him, dated May 2, 1943:
D. I don’t doubt that you spend most of your time working on my behalf. But L. [Dr. Legroux, a friend] led me to hope that the little meeting you had on Wednesday was to be followed by another and hearing nothing further about it upsets me. To tell the truth, I don’t place much faith in the effectiveness of other approaches; what little hope I have I place only in you, knowing how tenacious you can be in certain circumstances. But what can you do? … I’m not suffering too much materially, and am above all happy that the two men [her children] haven’t suffered at all. Emotionally, despite appearances which certainly didn’t deceive you, you can imagine my thoughts.6 Try to meet again, alone or in company.… Above all, I know that you will … not delude either yourself or me with vain hopes.… If you can’t speak to me one day put a word in your own writing on the next card, I would prefer it. Or if not, have me informed of your thoughts as minutely as possible. Knowing for sure that the two others can look forward to getting out, even without me, would set my mind at rest.
Drieu spent more time working on her behalf than would have been necessary if his friend Otto Abetz were still the German ambassador. Abetz had fallen out of favor and been replaced by Rudolf Schleier. But the real obstacle was the German security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, whose director distrusted the embassy. Drieu enlisted the help of people he generally avoided, volunteered to lecture at the German Institute, and threatened to stop writing for the Paris press if his petition was denied. As a result of his exertions, Colette and her children were released after two months at Drancy, unlike sixty-five thousand other internees, who were deported to the east; sixty-three thousand of them died.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, director of the Nouvelle Revue Française during the occupation.
Far from taking pride in the rescue, Drieu taxed himself with being soft and blamed the beneficiary of his good deed for subjecting him to the judgment of his conscience. “The Jews tricked me,” he groused that summer. “My first wife deliberately got herself imprisoned, it seems, to put me under the obligation of freeing her. I was cowardly enough to whine over her fate and have her chains removed.… She has absolutely no idea that I find her insufferable.” For the superior man of Zarathustra, mercy is a cardinal vice.
In 1943 he turned fifty, reimmersed himself in Nietzsche, left the NRF to Paulhan’s management, and questioned his reasons for living any longer as the world order in which he had tried to make his home began to crumble. The Russians had triumphed at Stalingrad and were advancing on Kursk. The Allied forces had landed on Sicily. In July the Fascist Grand Council dismissed Mussolini, who was arrested and imprisoned. “Mussolini has resigned like some vulgar democratic minister,” Drieu noted. “It’s ludicrous. So Fascism turns out to have been nothing more than that. Fascism was no stronger than I, an armchair philosopher of violence. He will be more grotesque than Napoleon on the Bellerophon. By its weakness Fascism demonstrates the weakness of Europe, the decadence of Europe. Will Hitler do any better?” He worshipped la force no less than before, but he saw decadence everywhere, and took to quoting Isaiah’s images of messianic wrath.
In November, Drieu spent several weeks in Switzerland with his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who assured him that cantonal authorities would be disposed to grant him a long-term visa if he chose to remain. He chose instead to return, with the intention, as he later explained, of dying by his own hand “in due course.” Living almost reclusively, he studied the great texts of Eastern religion, completed another novel, and reckoned with himself as best he could in a diary. “I would have liked to be just a man, not a writer: talent doesn’t excuse the lack of genius. But here I am writing. This journal is graffiti on the wall of a urinal or of a prison cell—even the graffiti writer believes that he will be read. The eternal Crusoe.” He was unremitting in his anti-Semitism but occasionally lucid enough to recognize its ignominious source. “I’ve always been scared to death of Jews, and terribly ashamed of my fear. Not hatred, but repugnance. Horror of Jewesses: almost not slept with them. They’ve approached, then fled. The Jew succeeding as he has in France has branded me, even more than the Anglo-Saxon, with an impression of French inferiority.”
After the Normandy invasion, collaborators went into hiding or fled the country, some to the Swabian town of Sigmaringen, where the Vichy government, rescued and sequestered by Germany, occupied an enormous castle. Drieu could have fled to Spain—he obtained papers —but once again the prospect of living in exile repelled him. He wrote that if any army could have accepted him with his multitude of physical ailments, he would have volunteered to die at the front, on either side, in the uniform of a Scottish Highland regiment or the Waffen SS. To be avoided above all was a trial and judgment. “Should I soon commit suicide?” he asked himself. “I want to avoid being stupidly disemboweled by a mob of concierges or humiliated by Jews.”
He wrote a will, letters of farewell (to Malraux, Victoria Ocampo, and Christiane Renault, among others), and on August 12, 1944, swallowed what would have been a fatal dose of phenobarbital if his maid had not found him in time. Three days later, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, he slit his wrists, but was saved again. “Where am I, in any sense?” he wrote to Paulhan. “I don’t know and am in no hurry to find out. I eat, I would like to chat with you slowly, after a long, silent walk.” With the battle for Paris impending, Drieu’s women friends took him under their collective wing. Colette Jéramec hid him on the Rue de Grenelle in the apartment of a physician, who ministered to him for a month. He then lodged at Orgeval, outside Paris, in the country house of an old American friend, Noëlle Murphy, whose release from an internment camp for foreigners he had helped arrange in 1942. At Orgeval he regained his health and enough inner strength to embark upon a novel about a painter of genius, based on Van Gogh’s life but drawing heavily on his own, Mémoires de Dirk Raspe. He read as much philosophy as friends made available to him. By January 1945, the discomfort of winter in an unheated country house had put an end to his convalescence. He fell ill, and doubts almost as old as consciousness itself assailed him like reawakened Furies. “I wanted to be a complete man, not only a bookworm but a swordsman, who assumes responsibilities, who absorbs blows and returns them.… I shall regret not having filled during these past few years the role that remained available to me, that of dandy—of the unflinching nonconformist who rejects fatuities of every persuasion, who discreetly but firmly displays his impious indifference.”
There were also Furies in the shape of informants. Drieu was a wanted man, with his name on a list of collaborationist writers drawn up by the Comité National des Écrivains. Suspecting that locals had rumored his presence at Orgeval, Colette moved him to her own country house, and from there to an apartment in Paris near the Place de l’Étoile. Another collaborator, Robert Brasillach, was executed in February. The trial frightened Drieu—the trial more than the sentence.
On March 16, leaving nothing to chance, he detached a gas pipe and swallowed three vials of phenobarbital. A note insisted that the burial be nonreligious. His brief list of official mourners did not include Colette Jéramec or Christiane Renault. He requested the presence of only two men, one being André Malraux, whom he named his literary executor.
1The reference to Aragon being a Communist concerns the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact of August 1939. In fact, Aragon was drafted early in the war, won the Croix de Guerre for acts of bravery, and, after demobilization, played a significant role in the Resistance.
2The Wehrmacht governed the northern zone, but Vichy, or “L’État Français,” was allowed to wear a wispy beard of authority, enough to justify the presence of a German “ambassador.”
3Gide had ignored the pleas of the book publisher Gaston Gallimard, whose firm was the review’s sponsor. Books bore the imprint “NRF” as well as well as “Gallimard.” Roger Martin du Gard, an old associate and friend of both, sent Gide a letter containing the kind of retort he might have made to his critics: “I know what I’m doing. Laid out for me at length are the reasons why the NRF (both the review and book publisher) must be resuscitated if we hope to ‘save the furniture’ and prevent this double enterprise, which has been more or less our child for thirty years, from falling under foreign direction.… The fate of the book publisher … is inextricably bound up with that of the review: it will be impossible to save one and sacrifice the other. Now, the review is regarded by readers as mine.… The absence of my name from the table of contents, especially under present circumstances, would be tantamount to a public disavowal. I would be knifing it in the back by refusing my collaboration.”
4Other delegates included Abel Bonnard and Robert Brasillach. Bonnard—a follower of Maurras who converted to Fascism, a prolific novelist and journalist, a member of the Académie Française, a minister of education in the Vichy government—fled to Spain after the war and was sentenced to death in absentia. Brasillach, also a protégé of Maurras’s and a convert to Fascism, who edited the collaborationist daily Je Suis Partout, was tried shortly before the end of the war and executed.
5In another version, Colette was asked for identity papers by a German soldier stopping automobiles at a checkpoint in Paris. She complied indignantly, and was later arrested in her apartment by the Gestapo.
6Drieu must have obtained permission to visit her at Drancy.