While almost all French writers bowed to the law of this war and made themselves its apologists, we, who were not yet old enough to bear arms, or who reached that age only because the murderous conflict lasted as long as it did, we spurned the Sacred Union, which reached into the domains of thought and creation.
—LOUIS ARAGON
Peace ruins people.
—PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE
While Barrès, Maurras, and their confrères had sounded the call to arms, like the graybeards in Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates who send young Trojans off to die for Helen, the future standard-bearers of Surrealism fought for “Marianne.” They survived with wounds that never ceased to fester.
André Breton was a first-year medical student in 1916, writing poems under Rimbaud’s spell, when, as noted above, the army sent him to a work at a psychiatric center within earshot of the front. It was a brief internship but pivotal, not least because his exposure to the panic attacks of traumatized soldiers coincided with his introduction to the thought of Sigmund Freud.1 In 1917, at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris he encountered Louis Aragon, a medical student his own age who had returned from a tour of duty with the Croix de Guerre. On their days off, they took long walks through Paris (memorialized several years later in Aragon’s strolling narrative Le Paysan de Paris) or made the rounds of literary haunts. Holding court at the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain with a bandage wrapped over the hole that had been drilled in his skull to remove shrapnel, and surrounded by worshipful young writers, was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
André Breton, left, still in uniform, with Théodore Fraenkel, who participated in Dada japes after the war while attending medical school.
In that circle, where Breton may have first heard the term “Surrealism,” coined by Apollinaire, he met Philippe Soupault, a kindred soul recently invalided out of the army, who seized upon Breton’s proposal that they conduct an experiment in what came to be known as “automatic writing” or, as Breton later defined it in the “Surrealist Manifesto,” “the dictation of thought, free of any influence exercised by reason, heedless of all moral and esthetic concerns.” The fruit of their collaboration was Les Champs Magnétiques, published in 1920. By then Breton cut the figure of a chef de mouvement, formulating his creed within the temporary confines of Dadaism. Other young men gravitated to him. There was Paul Éluard, whose first book of poems, Le Devoir et l’Inquiétude, had appeared in 1917, during the brief interlude between his release from a Swiss sanatorium for consumptives and his internment in a hospital for soldiers gassed at the front. There were also Robert Desnos, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Roger Vitrac, Benjamin Péret, Jean Paulhan, Antonin Artaud, and Aragon’s close friend Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a thrice-wounded veteran of four campaigns from which he, too, emerged with the Croix de Guerre, but with one arm slightly shorter than the other. “War is my homeland,” wrote Drieu. “La guerre est ma patrie.” In large measure the same held true for all of them, and as well for a movement that put the camaraderie of a hallucinatory netherworld to poetic account. Surrealism, Breton proclaimed in the “Surrealist Manifesto” of 1924, was a prescription for rebirth of the spirit. It would work the magic that doctrinaires vested in nationhood and priests in communion. It would unlock the true life.
Fresh in the minds of these survivors was the ceaseless drumbeat of Barrès’s wartime editorials and, most memorably, his assertion that a new being had been born in the trenches: the combat unit. They had their revenge in May 1921 when, with much hoopla, Breton presided over a mock trial of Barrès on a charge of “endangering the safety of the mind.”2 It was billed as a Dada event and held in the staid setting of the Salle des Sociétés Savantes on the Rue Danton. A full-sized dummy represented Barrès, who had ignored a summons to appear in person. Attorneys wore white surgeon’s gowns and clerical birettas, red for the prosecution, black for the defense. Breton read a lengthy indictment; Aragon defended the accused; witnesses included Drieu La Rochelle, Tristan Tzara, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. The trial proceeded more or less soberly until Benjamin Péret marched into the hall wearing a German uniform and identifying himself as the Unknown Soldier (before being ordered out, in German).3 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes then delivered the prosecution’s closing argument. Barrès’s dubious succès d’estime would not in itself have warranted such treatment:
It wouldn’t be worth a trial if it were only a matter of some amateur striving in old age to advance the glory of military men. The tip Barrès received for polishing their equipment might have appeased him once the gilt had worn off his academic nameplate and literary medals. We need not condemn this bourgeois attitude, this desire for both comfort and glory, for a situation that is celebrated with fanfares and alive with the sound of boots and talk of statues to be inaugurated. Dada would be more inclined to smile complaisantly at the parasitism, the hypocrisy of an arriviste who has arrived and even to sympathize with him for cleverly conning the public.
However, Ribemont-Dessaignes told the jury, there were the atrocious consequences of what Barrès had written between 1914 and 1918. When Barrès’s prose is heard through one ear and through the other the din of catastrophes that universally constitute the heroic narrative of societies, it becomes apparent that his is a sinister game.
As an adolescent, Barrès offered a few homilies to children hobbled by social constraints. Then, one day, with an almost imperceptible shift in the axis of his lips, and a slightly different blink, he exhibited the anxious face of a … moralist who had located the basis of individual and collective morality in the honor of France, thus taking the narrowest possible view of the individual and society. This atheist changed the skin of his God.… As tolerant as we are of contradiction, we cannot suffer one that has led him to propagate a consummately dangerous, stupid, and vain gospel, to erect a monument to that most mortal of divinities: the Fatherland.
The jury voted for his execution.
It disappointed Ribemont-Dessaignes that some of his fellow iconoclasts—Louis Aragon, for example—could not unambivalently support the verdict. Aragon, the bastard son of a former police prefect, remembered that his adolescence had been cheered by lessons in moral anarchy drawn from Barrès’s Sous l’Oeil des Barbares and Un Homme Libre. If present-day admirers of the accused bothered to read Le Culte du Moi more closely, Aragon argued, they would be as shocked as a pious parishioner discovering an obscene tattoo on the corpse of his confessor. What of his observation that “intelligence is a very small thing on the surface of ourselves”? Might that not have been a congenial slogan for his young judges? Even when they and Barrès situated true selfhood in very different realms—Barrès in the graveyard of venerated ancestors, Surrealists-to-be in the cradle of reawakened childhood—they were of one mind in prosecuting Reason as a subversive agent.
Dada’s mock trial of Maurice Barrès. Louis Aragon is at the far left, Breton third from the left, and Tristan Tzara next to him, dressed like the dummy representing Barrès, and about the same size.
Another participant who declined invitations to condemn Barrès outright was Aragon’s friend Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who later called Un Homme Libre a masterpiece worthy of Montaigne’s essays and Pascal’s Pensées. The paths that he and Aragon would follow afterward, in the 1930s and 1940s—when politics oriented writers as fatefully as it had during the Dreyfus Affair—took them in opposite directions. Aragon became the poet laureate of French Stalinism. Drieu waffled between Communism and Fascism, ultimately pledged himself to the latter, and under Nazi rule directed France’s leading literary journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française. Neither found accommodation in the middle ground of bourgeois values, or inner peace except in mortal combat.
Indirect light can be the most revealing. A page Drieu wrote in his diary many years after the event sheds light of that kind on his earlier self, the young man whom Ribemont-Dessaignes could not corner into testifying against Barrès in 1921. On September 11, 1939, Drieu attended a soirée at the home of Édouard Bourdet, director of the Comédie Française.4 Unhappy with the recent decision of officials, including Jean Giraudoux (who wore two hats, as a famous playwright and as minister of information), to censor passages in his autobiographical novel Gilles, he inveighed against a regime that subjected one writer to the political judgment of another. It being wartime and Bourdet also a high government functionary, Drieu won no sympathy at the dinner table. But he got even in his diary. “To be sure, Gilles is a ferocious indictment of the regime and above all of the way its servants think,” he wrote. “If Giraudoux and Bourdet read it, they would feel personally impugned.” Bourdet he described as frightfully diminished—a much frailer man than the author who had brightened Paris ten years earlier with his satirical comedies. His decline, in Drieu’s view, showed the depleting effects of peace. “To think that this was an infantry officer in 1914. Peace ruins people.” Giraudoux fares no better in Drieu’s journal. His novels and theater are dismissed as specimens of the rhetorical ideals responsible for producing a literature as unrelated to things of the world as Fabergé’s confections or the book “about nothing” that Flaubert dreamed of writing. He was born to flourish in a Republic of effete mandarins. “Giraudoux regards the events, the facts of life, as mere pretexts for deploying his system of images and metaphors, which is a closed, immutable system.” Had anything changed, he might have asked, since the Franco-Prussian catastrophe of 1870–71 when Ernest Renan declared that France’s malady was its need to speechify?
Running through Drieu’s essays and fiction, like a dark thread without which the entire fabric would unravel, is the theme of decadence. Early in life—though too late to witness the rise and fall of General Boulanger—he fastened on to the idea that a hundred years of bourgeois dominance had unmanned the nation and that France had never regained its virility after Waterloo. This perspective led him to invert the saga of progress recited by many nineteenth-century historians and statesmen. To Adolphe Thiers, for example, history was a dynastic ladder. “The father was a peasant, a factory worker, a merchant sailor,” he wrote in On Property. “The son, assuming that a father was diligent and frugal, will be a farmer, a manufacturer, a ship’s captain. The grandson will be a banker, a notary, a doctor, a lawyer, a prime minister perhaps. Thus do the generations rise, one above the other.”5 Where Thiers saw a pageant of the middle class ascending, Drieu La Rochelle saw a fall from heroic heights to the lowland of mercenaries shuffling behind the golden calf.
This was certainly the way he viewed the procession of generations in his own family. “La Rochelle” somehow attached itself to the patronymic “Drieu” in the 1790s, as a nom de guerre distinguishing Pierre’s great-grandfather Jacques (who was Norman) from other soldiers named Drieu.6 Jacques Drieu La Rochelle spent twenty-three years in uniform fighting first for the revolutionary government against the combined monarchies of Europe, then under Napoleon in many campaigns, but remained still vigorous enough, after losing a leg, to father three children. His son, Jacques fils, illustrated Thiers’s paradigm of upward mobility. The owner of pharmacies in Avranches and Coutances, he thrived, professed political opinions that inspired a conservative government to appoint him justice of the peace, and, like the village pharmacist in Madame Bovary, might have been awarded the Legion of Honor if France hadn’t taken a sharp turn to the left in the late 1870s.7 Financial disaster followed hard upon political disappointment when an investment bank called the Union Générale crashed. To lure investors torn between piety and greed, its director, Eugène Bontoux, had presented himself as a Catholic knight joining battle with Jewish financial interests. Victims—among them Jacques fils—tended to cast blame for the crash not on Bontoux the speculator but on Rothschild the omnipotent.
True to Thiers’s vision of bourgeois advancement, Jacques, despite his reverses, succeeded in putting his son Emmanuel through law school. It soon became apparent that Emmanuel, Pierre’s father, was not cut out for the practice of law or for any other form of gainful employment; but the law degree, his good looks, and his fancy name served him well in the pursuit of dowered middle-class women. He married a lovely blonde named Eugénie Lefèvre in 1891. They settled near her parents in the neighborhood of the Gare du Nord. Their son and only child was born in 1893.
Recalling his childhood, which he did obsessively, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle pictured himself in somewhat the same way that Proust describes Marcel in Du Côté de chez Swann, as a delicately strung boy whose tears never prevented his beloved mother and remote father from abandoning him for nights on the town. Their neglect increased when Eugénie came to the realization that her husband was a philanderer looting her dowry to support a mistress and scrounging off Monsieur Lefèvre, who paid his son-in-law’s debts lest the family lose face. Discord shattered the household. Pierre was seven or eight and the meek observer of fierce quarrels.
His salvation was the work of his maternal grandparents, Marie and Eugène, who regularly took him under their wing and as far as possible made up for the inconstancy of Eugénie and Emmanuel. Life with the Lefèvres had starch in it. The day proceeded according to plan. He and his grandmother—a robust, spirited lady—took long walks. They all ate together when his grandfather, a successful architect, returned from work, and after dinner they disposed themselves in the parlor for Madame Lefèvre’s reading of tales by Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard, or Louis Boussenard. They took vacations in a rented villa every summer. Grandmother bought Pierre his first books. Under her tutelage and in a cosseted environment, the child who felt irrelevant at home was encouraged to adopt models of success, derring-do, and glory. “She counted on me to compensate her for her disappointments,” Drieu later wrote in L’État Civil.
Her instruction ran counter to that of the entire family. She spoke only of vigor and audacity; she warned me about being forced to bow and scrape if I didn’t command respect physically. My least exertion would suffice to conquer men. Actually, she was quite ignorant of the world she shunned. In that milieu unfavorable to exalted fantasies, her élan dissolved into words. The same illness she scorned in others afflicted her. She salted our walks with bellicose maxims, but if I happened to step a foot off the beaten path she would shriek, and call me back, the better to resume her dream of my adventurous future.
Having rebelled against her freethinking father by embracing religion and royalism, Marie managed to reconcile her heroic enthusiasms with her piety. But little devotion was expected of Pierre. If there were illustrated Bible stories in the house, images of the revolutionary wars and Napoleon’s campaigns crowded them out. At home as well. “How often I sobbed over Raffet’s somber lithograph of the last muster of Napoleon’s Guard.… [Napoleon] was the only God I knew, the only God I saw with my own eyes.” At the World’s Fair of 1900, those young eyes would have traveled from the Grand Palais across the newly built Alexandre III Bridge to the resplendent dome of the Invalides, housing Napoleon’s tomb. It was the centerpiece of the exposition.
Still, the church loomed large in Pierre’s world, not so much a spiritual force as a political actor embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair. And it impressed itself upon him when the family moved to the fashionable west end of Paris, the Parc Monceau neighborhood, with its dense population of affluent mondains (living among Jewish bankers such as the Ephrussis and Camondos), who traditionally enrolled their children in schools run by religious orders.
A left-wing government had expelled the Jesuits from France in 1880. After 1902, Émile Combes’s anticlerical administration denied almost all religious orders the right to teach, by way of punishing them for the actively partisan role they had played during the affair. Many more schools closed. This comprehensive purge was fat in the fire raging ever since the publication, in 1898, of “J’accuse,” Zola’s exposure of the military plot to frame the Jewish captain. People made no secret of their allegiances. Madame Lefèvre despised Zola.
The conservative upper crust were not absolutely condemned to have their sons attend public lycées, for Catholic schools stayed open.8 In 1901 or 1902, Pierre, at his grandparents’ expense, started his formal education at one such parochial school, Sainte-Marie de Monceau.
Drieu, who later portrayed himself as a “melancholic and unsociable” child, rarely smiling, had few fond memories of his school days. With no siblings or friends, a distraught mother, a scoffing father, and a self that lay prostrate or stood on Napoleonic stilts, he was ill-prepared to engage other boys at eye level. Least of all rich boys. The daily spectacle of pampered heirs in Eton collars and Lavallière cravats being collected after school by governesses or chauffeurs exacerbated the feeling that he came from a tatty world of debts and financial bickering. The occasional invitation for an afternoon goûter at the town house of a privileged classmate provided another opportunity for him to feel defeated and small.
That he received invitations at all is not something one might deduce from an autobiographical novel published in 1921, according to which the first few years of school were a nightmare. “During recess, I never played games for fear of betraying my clumsiness,” he wrote. “It was all I could do to stand up in class and answer a question. I had no chums. I was ignored.” Better ignored than noticed: fellow students looked past him unless some aberration of dress or manner made him an object of mockery. “My mother had bought me a red muffler. The color delighted me and I was proud of it. I arrive at school one day. A scamp points at me. I immediately shrink, capitulate to his judgment. At the behest of that little finger, which mechanically reacts to anything singular, like a railroad signal flashing danger, I conclude that the muffler is ugly, that its very smartness speaks to the unsightliness of my person.… I was miserable, repudiating myself, envying those happy children for being all alike and wallowing in their common certitude.”
In 1905, at twelve, Drieu’s long experience of solitude in a ménage à trois ended with the birth of his brother, Jean. The belated arrival, coinciding as it did with the onset of puberty, resulted in a radical change of demeanor. Drieu was reborn a brilliant student; his excellence inside the classroom served him well outside, where, by his own account, he manipulated school toughs with the verbal adroitness of a demagogue. Unlike the typical “brain,” he exploited his intellectual prestige to become a pack leader, delighting in the power of self-invention. He who was slighted by his father now found that he could prevail upon others to follow him.
Not that he beguiled everyone, or felt any less a fraud for all the success of his ruses. Among his schoolmates were nonbelievers whose skepticism affected him more deeply than the credulousness of his clique. “There were two good students who always remained in a corner of the courtyard; they disdained the rowdiness,” he wrote in L’État Civil.
They walked to and fro with their hands clasped behind their backs, sagaciously discussing their homework, telling each other stories, happy when the bell rang. They carried crosses. They were serenely self-possessed. From their corner they watched us frolic, shout, fight. We were obviously seen as vulgar jackanapes.… Despite my furious participation in the game, I was sensitive to their judgment. I didn’t find it unjust. My self-allegiance was never complete enough to make me side with one or another of my personae. Friends and enemies alike always found me ready to betray myself. I suspected that the secret drama of my weakness was exposed. They realized that my exertions produced only a parody of strength.
After imploring the two solemn spectators to abandon their corner and join the fray, he and his comrades beat them up.
Drieu entered adolescence an irrepressible scamp, taunting teachers, talking dirty, flirting with girls, stalking women, and generally applying his talent to mischievous ends. Class uprisings were his tonic. Imbued with a sensation of “common strength,” he invited the punishments—all short of expulsion—that Sainte-Marie de Monceau reserved for a brilliant bad boy.
At fifteen, Drieu organized himself differently. He turned into a serious reader, but without disavowing the upstart he had been. His literary and philosophical predilections conformed to his antic self, like a rich canvas stretched over a primitive frame. While still assigning people to categories according to their perceived strength or weakness, he found his worldview fleshed out in the works of Barrès and Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra (which his mother innocently agreed to buy for him) was a revelation. The words seemed to flow from his own pen even before he understood them, he wrote. And Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche describes parliamentary government as embodying the virtues of the herd (“public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, pity”) and the higher happiness attained by “herd men” under a Napoleon, ensured young Drieu’s affinity to the philosopher. “Energy” and “life affirmation” entered his vocabulary in tandem with “decadence” and “degeneration.” During his penultimate year at Sainte-Marie de Monceau he also read Descartes, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Bergson, Hartmann, William James, the English neo-Hegelians, Darwin, and Spencer, burning the candle in a frenzy of lucubration. His carnets, which contain minute observations about himself, reflect the vexed soul of a hero worshipper bound up with a nihilist, or of an apostle of energy shackled to a boy “half in love with easeful death.” Drieu no longer attended mass, despite appeals from his mother, who prayed for him at her bedside every night.
In 1908, Madame Lefèvre offered her fifteen-year-old grandson a summer abroad, with a clergyman’s family at Shrewsbury, England (home of the boys’ school immortalized by Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh as Roughborough). Drieu later called it a “pilgrimage,” as if to say, in the spirit of Proust visiting Ruskin’s Amiens, that he was visiting his spiritual home. Ultimately, however, the English experience may have had less to do with art or literature than with the construction of an identity that played well in snobbish circles on the Right Bank, where Anglophilia was endemic, and girded him against subversion from within. Tormented by feelings of inferiority, the tall, blond, blue-eyed Drieu managed to reconcile his Napoleonatry with the conviction that he had discovered the truth of his “Nordic” soul among Anglo-Saxons. And Oxford during the first or second of his two sojourns in England was where that truth fully revealed itself. “There, something gripped me,” he wrote. “At first, it all seemed to be of a grandeur I couldn’t have guessed from anything in my country. Its architecture was not as sublime as ours, but it had the singular virtue of accommodating modern times. The city honored the mind and body as sufficient wealth. A decorous fraternity united men and women. I was filled with revulsion and discouragement just thinking that I would soon have to return to Paris and study at the Sorbonne, which looked like a new suburban town hall, paltry, anonymous, exposed to all manner of noxious exhalations, lost amidst the monstrous concerns of a metropolis, and rub elbows with disheveled adolescents, soiled by their gross puberty, in whom youth rears like a wild horse because they lack the strength to harness it.” When, in due course, he entered college, he might have been mistaken for a young English gentleman schooled bilingually in derision. He parted his hair down the middle, polished his shoes to a high shine, and wore tweeds (his lifelong uniform). “Strength” was now associated in his mind with sport and aristocratic self-restraint. That the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton impressed him as proverbial wisdom. Kipling’s Jungle Book and Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History joined Barrès’s Le Culte du Moi and D’Annunzio’s The Flame of Life in his syllabus of canonical texts.
Wondering where to turn after Sainte-Marie de Monceau, Drieu enrolled in three schools: the École de Droit for law, the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (known as “Sciences Po”) for foreign service, and the Sorbonne for a degree in English. His dilemma did not set him apart from other students slouching toward professional life. They, too, were daunted by the prospect of endless hours in the Palais de Justice, of an assignment to some remote consular post or exile to a provincial lycée. What did set him apart at Sciences Po were his modest circumstances.9 André Jéramec, for example, with whom Drieu formed a close friendship, had all his needs attended to by seven servants in a vast apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes. His father, Édouard, a graduate of the École Polytechnique, who had important political connections, presided over several companies, one of which monopolized Paris’s hackney cabs. Not until they entered high school did André and his sister, Colette, learn that their parents were Jews who had never converted but had raised them as Catholics. This would not dissuade Drieu from marrying Colette during the war. Nor would it temper his anti-Semitism in later years.10
Events were drawing a curtain over the future. By 1913 Drieu had cast aside the Sorbonne and become a casual presence at law school. He immersed himself in history, without knowing to what practical purpose he could put it or whether history itself had run its course. He read Schopenhauer, argued that European civilization was spent, and demonstrated its decline by contracting gonorrhea in the brothels he patronized on his meager allowance. Nothing seemed certain or stable. In January 1913, during his last semester at Sciences Po, a creditor sued Drieu’s profligate father. Word of it spread, resulting in bankruptcy and social disgrace.
One disaster paved the way for another. Drieu, who was expected to graduate near the top of his class, failed every part of his degree examination. No one wondered whether the fiasco had something to do with fear of success; but a fear of success, or of the path that success prescribed, was certainly implicated in the emotional havoc wrought by his father’s bankruptcy. How could he have failed to anticipate that examiners would frown at essays phrased in the language of his cherished philosophers? He was reprimanded for distorting history to prove a theory—for spurning the etiquette of responsible scholarship and making prophetic assertions. “I revealed with brutal candor the strange, unusual knowledge I had acquired in my roving through the realm of unorthodox ideas,” he wrote years later. “They wanted to punish the dangerous disorder of my mind and also bar me from a diplomatic career, which was wise, since my family was ruined, and … my timidity did not allow me to master feelings of social inferiority.”
Suicide crossed his mind, as it would often again. Instead of throwing himself into the Seine, he decided to report for military service. André Jéramec, with whose family Drieu spent the summer at Pougues-les-Eaux, in Burgundy, joined him. In November 1913 they resigned from civilian life at the Pépinière casern near the Gare Saint-Lazare. The National Assembly had recently passed a law requiring conscripts to serve for three years. Drieu would serve more than five, André Jéramec less than one.
Drieu had a pneumatic history of pumping himself up and going flat. War favored bipolar extremes. On August 3, two days after general mobilization, he was a compassionate witness to the spectacle of a fellow soldier—a Breton peasant who spoke broken French—raging against the potentates who had torn him from his land and smashing his rifle. Three days later he was crossing Paris in a great tide of soldiers flowing from barracks all over the city and converging at the Gare du Nord. He carried Thus Spake Zarathustra in his knapsack.
Nietzsche remained in his knapsack during the bloody confrontation with Germans at Charleroi, where the French general staff, surprised by enemy troops wheeling into northeastern France through neutral Belgium, improvised a doomed defense. Drieu’s regiment had nothing but knapsacks for protection and lay under them like tortoises in their shells as German machine-gun fire raked the fields of Flanders. When at last French artillery replied, a lieutenant ordered his men to charge. “I have known two or three formidable, unforgettable moments,” Drieu wrote to a friend from a hospital bed.
At Charleroi, I heard a voice shout: forward, bayonets fixed! I was beside myself, bursting with passion. I adored my lieutenant, I would have liked to kiss the syphilitic corporal who opened his eyes (sleepy from the ignoble somnolence of peace) to the intoxicating call of glory. And the bugles. There were bugles. The trump of war sounded in my blood. At that moment, I belonged body and soul to my race charging through the centuries … toward the eternal idol of Power, of Grandeur. Then, afterward, childlike wails rising from the piles of dead and dying.
One of the innumerable corpses was André Jéramec, who disappeared on August 23, 1914. Drieu lost several more friends at Charleroi. He himself fell that day with shrapnel in his neck.
He wrote the above to a friend while recuperating from a second wound received two months later—farther south, at the front in Champagne, near Rheims, where, promoted to sergeant, he led a platoon over the top and across no-man’s-land to the German trenches. But did he in fact qualify as a leader? he wondered anxiously. In one account of the battle he portrays himself as the young hero whose Gallic exuberance inspires older men under his command: “Only leaders count. A platoon is a troupe of tearful children.” Elsewhere he confesses to having quailed before the enemy, as if fear were incompatible with courage under fire: “I too felt a wretched weakness inside; I wept for myself, I wished I had no pride, no remorse, nothing of the instinctual drive that illustrates our old History.”11
In any event, the tedious vigils interrupted by episodes of mortal combat and followed by long convalescences tested his enthusiasm for war. After more than a year of military life, he had had enough of shuffling between muddy trenches and hospitals in which he lacked the time and privacy to make literary sense of his experience. His brain could not yet comply with the fantasy of holding a gun and a pen by turns, of being a soldier as Stendhal was a diplomat and Barrès a politician. It found more compelling alternatives in mania and depression. But things would change. In 1915, he began to write poems.
The war dragged on, transporting him to other hells. When men were asked to volunteer for service in the Dardanelles, Drieu joined a polyglot regiment that shipped out from Marseille. By the time he returned, several months later, to a hospital at Toulon, his clinical profile included scabies, syphilis, and severe dysentery. He was alive, but all skin and bones after dawdling with the French force on Lemnos, a short hop across the Aegean from Gallipoli, where British and Australian troops were being slaughtered. For him, the ill-conceived campaign had been a dismal parody of the “voyage en Orient” ritually undertaken by nineteenth-century writers fleeing bourgeois Europe.12 He wrote many letters to Colette Jéramec but later claimed to have been incommunicado. “No more family, no more worries about profession or money,” he wrote in Le Voyage des Dardanelles. “No more vanity, no more future. If I have the courage to be unknown, I will push anonymity to the limit.… I was lost in the chaos, losing myself, drunk on perdition. Forgotten was my little bourgeois person.”
He was not forgotten by the army, which needed everyone who could still stand (of whom only two came from his original regiment, he and the bugler) to man the Verdun fortifications. Frozen from a six-hour march, he arrived at the Thiaumont redoubt on February 21, 1916. German artillery had already begun a thunderous bombardment, lofting one hundred thousand shells across the Meuse River. On the third day one exploded near enough to render him temporarily deaf and to paralyze his right arm, which recovered movement after several operations on the ulnar nerve but never full feeling or its normal length. He was evacuated to a hospital at Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine.
Wounds and illness suffered on four fronts earned him an exemption from duty at a fifth. He was thus vouchsafed the leisure to write about war, which he did in verse. Although a longing for self-extinction would always shadow Drieu, it did not prevent him, once reassigned to administrative duty, from submitting a poem to the editor of an important avant-garde literary magazine, Sic. More poems followed, seventeen all told, which found their way, through influential friends, to the desk of Gaston Gallimard, who agreed to publish them in a small edition under the title Interrogation (at the author’s expense). The military authorities, who may have been satisfied that Drieu’s belligerence compensated for expressions of fraternity with Germans entombed in trenches just as he was, allowed a small edition to pass through censorship. That Drieu glorified peace in the language of war undoubtedly worked to his advantage.
Et nous saurons faire une Paix comme nous avons
Mené la Guerre.
Nous brandirons nos grues d’acier.
Avec du ciment armé nous dresserons le monument
De notre Force.13
The prospect of turning swords against bourgeois institutions had greater appeal than the thought of beating them into plowshares. When, in later years, he came to embrace Fascism, la force would enjoy the same prominence in his political screed as l’énergie in Maurice Barrès’s. All it needed in 1917 was a dogma befitting its shrines. Charleroi, Rheims, the Dardanelles, Verdun: those names resonated through Drieu like a drumbeat in his own savage procession. They spoke to a lifelong enchantment with death and martyrdom. “Violent death is the foundation of civilization, of the social contract, of all pacts,” he wrote shortly after the war. “It is the only certitude. Among men, nothing is certain unless, at the end of their common undertaking, they are sure that they will risk death for whatever binds them, be it glory, lucre, love, despair, or one another.”14 A letter to Colette Jéramec dated July 7, 1918, sent her to Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His Hour,” declaring that it captured the spirit of Interrogation:
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His Hour
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,
And half-men, with their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
After this, she could not have been surprised to learn that he detested Henri Barbusse’s celebrated antiwar novel Le Feu. “I’m becoming very reactionary,” he wrote. So long as France’s eastern fields were killing fields, life had a solemnity utterly lacking in the goals and conventions of peacetime. War was a remedy for vapid dailiness.
And what of “all the little emptiness of love”? The battlefield had a Manichaean simplicity that he missed on the domestic front, where nothing was simple in his relationship with Colette, whom he had been courting after a fashion since 1913. The relationship, which led to their foredoomed marriage in 1917, was a story of ghosts in two haunted families. In 1884 Colette’s mother, Gabrielle, had given birth to a son named Pierre, who promised to grow up tall and blond but died of meningitis at age four. With great difficulty, Gabrielle produced two more children, André in 1893 and Colette in 1896. Small, dark, and Semitic-looking, they embodied everything the would-be Aryan despised in herself and were treated accordingly. Gabrielle, who became a neurotic invalid, never ceased reminding her children of their ineptitude and physical disgrace.
If Colette saw in Drieu the handsome, blond brother idealized by her mother, Drieu may have succumbed to the opportunity of recapitulating his parents’ mésalliance. Drieu would later write that he loved Colette for three months, platonically, during the summer of 1913 at Pougues-les-Eaux. That the Jéramecs considered a young man bearing the double stigma of academic failure and paternal bankruptcy ineligible for Colette’s dowry only encouraged the romance. It was the summer before Drieu and André donned uniforms. The more deeply Colette fell in love, the more Drieu fought shy of it, ultimately leaving her, when war broke out, with nothing to embrace but a blond mirage. “Don’t go crazy, I beg of you,” he wrote to her by pneumatic dispatch on August 1, 1914. “Great events ask for dignity. Tell no one about us. All my ardor is reserved for war. Here at last is the test that will clarify my future for me. But we can no longer talk about love.”
While war answered Drieu’s dream of redemption, unrequited love gave wings to Colette’s need to prove her capacity for devotion, especially after her brother’s death. Neither could stop tormenting and consoling the other. When he was wounded, she arranged special medical care through the family’s connection with Alexandre Millerand, minister of war. When he informed her that he had contracted syphilis, she scoffed at the idea that something so insignificant could come between them. “What is that, next to our affection? Pierre, how could you imagine for a second that I would flee? On the contrary, why not marry now? I would be so happy to live with you as brother and sister. Anyway, I must tell you, since it will perhaps soothe you, that I can’t have children.”15 At his urging she read Les Nourritures Terrestres, André Gide’s impeachment of the family and celebration of sensual freedom. She protested that she was indebted to Drieu for every bit of “beauty, goodness, and intelligence” in her soul.
Drieu could neither embrace Colette nor relinquish his hold over her. Families were the bane of his existence, but it weighed upon his conscience—it may even have outweighed his venality—that with the suicide of her depressed, grief-stricken father in December 1916, she desperately needed a man to lean on. Colette, in turn, would later claim that she married Drieu to save him from his demons. What seems certain is that they married each other’s mortification when they wed in a ceremony at the town hall of the 17th arrondissement in August 1917. His parents did not attend. Drieu took leave from the desk job he had been given at army headquarters in Paris after his third injury, and the couple embarked on their mariage blanc (for such it appears to have been) in a sleeping car bound for the Côte d’Azur. Colette settled a small fortune on Drieu.16
They had no sooner returned to Paris than Drieu betrayed her with the forty-year-old wife of the famous actor-director Charles Dullin. It was his first passionate affair, he wrote—as passionate as his marriage was not, and the more so for Marcelle Dullin resembling his mother. However, the affair provided insufficient shelter from marriage, and in November 1917 he applied for service at the front, despite his feeble arm. The army assigned him to an American division in the Vosges Mountains as an interpreter. There he wrote poems about the strength and vitality of “soldiers from beyond the sea” while complaining to Colette about the difficulty of putting words on paper. “I am appalled by my past slothfulness, by all that I must learn. I don’t know how to write. At the moment I am locked in a bitter struggle with my sentences. But the difficulty is passionately absorbing.” He asked her to send him books by Socialist and monarchist writers.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle before World War I, arms folded, with André Jéramec, his school friend, and André’s sister, Colette, the uppermost figure, whom Drieu married in 1917.
In 1918 the American division moved to Verdun, where Drieu spent the last months of the war. He was discharged in March 1919.
The ornate apartment Colette and Drieu occupied after the war had enough rooms in it for two people hiding from each other, and it was, indeed, more often a scene of mutual evasion than of relentless matrimonial conflict. But it was also hospitable to the larger world. Far from shunning that world in Drieu’s absence, Colette had enrolled in medical school, almost completed work for the degree, and struck up friendships with fellow students, one of whom, Louis Aragon, another beau parleur, became Drieu’s boon companion. She held receptions for well-known poets, high-ranking diplomats, and publishers (Gaston Gallimard and Bernard Grasset, who shared the honor of recognizing Proust’s genius), during which Drieu, the presumed beneficiary of her social exertions, was said to behave like an uninvited guest, gazing abstractedly out the window. He felt at home nowhere but felt less marooned in the salon of Edmée de La Rochefoucauld, a young woman of letters and future suffragette as well as the bearer of an ancient title, or at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore on the Rue de l’Odéon, La Maison des Amis des Livres, chatting with Aragon, Breton, and Soupault.17 There were serious conversations with a Communist friend from Sciences Po, Raymond Lefebvre, who never had time to convert him: on his way back from the Soviet Union in 1920, returning via Murmansk to elude the White Russian blockade, his boat disappeared.
In 1919, Drieu’s fellow poets could think about little else but a review they were launching with help from Adrienne Monnier. They gave it an ambiguous title, Littérature, intending to echo the antiphrasis in Paul Verlaine’s poem “Art Poétique,” where “literature” signifies everything that true poetry is not (“et tout le reste est littérature”) or to trick subscribers in much the same way that the Dada movement lured the credulous public to its events with punning advertisements or false news.
Their kindred spirits were Arthur Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse (Lautréamont) rather than Verlaine. Several years earlier, Breton had cocked a snook at aesthetic propriety in language reminiscent of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer. “We are drawn to ageless, undreamt of, unimaginable little objects,” he wrote, “the museum of a child raised in the wild, curios from insane asylums, … broken mechanical toys, steam organs.” They loved what soon came to be known as “found objects”—objects valued for having no value, or for being prized by children and madmen, for being innocent of the culture that butchered millions while patenting the useful and insuring the beautiful. Poetry and art were to be found in trash cans and in the flea market rather than museums. “In old shop signs, in idiotic paintings, in the backdrops of circus performers,” Rimbaud would have added.
But the ambiguity of “littérature” served a purpose. The journal’s creators dared not dress in flaming red lest the well-bred modernists they needed to vouch for the seriousness of their enterprise take fright. Thus, André Gide, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Paul Valéry mingled with Aragon, Breton, and Drieu in the inaugural issue, conferring upon Littérature the imprimatur of a fin-de-siècle literary vanguard. Marcel Proust, who had just won the Goncourt Prize for À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs and never abbreviated his opinions, wrote a twelve-page compliment. They were seen as heirs. Before them loomed the specter of careers.
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle recovering from wounds suffered at Verdun. Dressed in black is Colette Jéramec.
Poetry and art were also to be found at the cinema, where the threesome of Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, with Drieu tagging along, found refuge from the thraldom of high culture in the exploits of a wildly popular villain named Fantômas. Exalted as “Master of Fright,” “The Torturer,” and “The Emperor of Crime,” Fantômas, whose diabolical disguises match his ruthlessness, assumed the mantle of Balzac’s Vautrin, of Maturin’s Melmoth, of Byron’s Manfred, of Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole, and, above all, of Lautréamont’s Maldoror. At war with bourgeois mores, the future Surrealists fancied themselves denizens of the underworld before renaming it the unconscious. Crime prefigured nature. One act of terror would blow away the flimsy fortifications of a rational order.18
They also found refuge from high culture in the company of their cinematic heroines. “An entire generation’s idea of the world was formed in the cinema and one film especially summed it up, a serial,” Aragon wrote. “The young fell head over heels in love with Musidora, in The Vampires”—a hypnotized vamp who kills at the bidding of her lover. Musidora had a serious rival for their affections in Pearl White, the mindless, death-defying heroine of The Perils of Pauline.
That Surrealism belonged to the larger family of Romantic offspring was evident in its prenatal stage. The Romantic sensibility flourished after the bloodletting of World War I, as it had a hundred years earlier in the aftermath of the Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns. With its penchant for the bizarre and the surprising, its contempt for bourgeois morality, its black humor, its glorification of evil genius, its language of rebirth, its messianism, its explorations of the erotic at the margin of death, the postwar literary generation envisaged a new human condition and succumbed to the ravages of a twentieth-century mal de siècle.19
Breton and Aragon were chafing at their public sedateness when a small man named Tristan Tzara landed in their midst, like an imp from Pandemonium, and sparked the explosion of Dada in Paris. Born Samuel Rosenstock in Romania, Tzara had entered the University of Zurich during the war to study philosophy and found philosophy at a café among young habitués—mostly self-exiled Germans dodging military service or invalided out of the army—who spawned the Dada movement. Tzara made a name for himself beyond Zurich as the editor of reviews smuggled west across the battle line. “Dada means nothing,” he wrote in a manifesto declaring war on the warring nations.
It was born of a need for independence, of distrust of the community. Those who belong to us retain their freedom. We acknowledge no theory. We have had enough of cubist and futurist academies, of laboratories of formal ideas.… We are spirits drunk on energy; we thrust pitchforks into flab.
The only literature Dada recognized, he continued, was the “necessary” utterance of “supreme egoism” leaping off the page in mixed typeface, like the outrageous blagues of the great nineteenth-century actor Frédérick Lemaître, who inspired Daumier’s Robert Macaire drawings.
I tell you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we aren’t sentimental. An angry wind, we shred the laundry of clouds and of prayers and prepare the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition. Let us prepare to suppress mourning and replace tears with sirens blaring from one continent to another.
Reason and the belief that things can be explained rationally are the police force of authority. “Thought is a fine thing for philosophy,” Tzara continued, “but it is relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous malady; it puts to sleep the anti-real penchants of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie.… I am against systems, the most acceptable system being that which has no principle.” Morality was another weapon the abolition of which belonged to the Dada agenda.
Morality will wither like every poisonous weed planted by the intelligence.… Let every man shout: there is a great destructive, negative project to be accomplished. Sweep everything clean. The selfhood of the individual will affirm itself after a world left to the devices of bandits, who destroy one another and destroy the centuries, is in shambles. Without goal or design, without organization: untamable madness, decomposition.
Dada, he concluded, encompasses a multitude of revulsions: for the family, for charity, for pity, for memory, for hierarchy and “social equation,” for logic, for prophets, for the future. Like movements as far to the right of it as the mind could reach, it celebrated raw energy.
In January 1920, Breton, Aragon, and Soupault met Tzara at the apartment of the Franco-Spanish painter Francis Picabia, whose magazine 391 (published during the war in Barcelona, where French refugees found asylum) allied itself loosely with Tzara’s six-page journal, Dadaphone.20 Old hands at nihilistic buffoonery, Tzara and Picabia prepared Dada’s debut in Paris. Breton and Aragon rented a hall called the Palais des Fêtes and engaged several actor friends to read Dada texts. Picabia and Tzara organized the program.
Opening of the Max Ernst exhibition at the Au Sans Pareil bookstore in May 1921. On top of the ladder is Philippe Soupault, holding an inverted Jacques Rigaut, who later served as the model for the drug-addicted, suicidal hero of Drieu’s novel Le Feu Follet. Breton is on the right.
The Palais des Fêtes, on Rue Saint-Denis, was far removed from Left Bank literary circles. Flanked by two cinemas where Breton and Aragon had watched Fantômas, Les Vampires, and Chaplin films, the hall had been chosen for prankish and sentimental reasons. Located in a commercial neighborhood, it attracted merchants, who came hoping to learn more about France’s financial crisis, for the event had been advertised in newspapers as a symposium entitled “La Crise du Change.” “Change” could be understood to mean either “currency” or cultural and social change. The program opened with a lecture on Apollinaire. Puzzled jewelers and wigmakers who sat it out left soon afterward, as the evening descended from serious poetry to antics of the kind that had led to Tzara’s arrest in Zurich. Drieu was present. He and Jean Cocteau read poems by Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy before Breton came onstage with a canvas of Picabia’s scrawls conspicuously entitled L.H.O.O.Q. The letters form, by their sounds, the sentence “Elle a chaud au cul.”21 Once it caught on, the audience—as much of it as remained—erupted, booing and stamping until a small orchestra calmed it down with the music of Satie.
The second act continued where the first had left off, but with no alloy of serious poetry and music. Preceded by a fanfare of rattles, Tzara announced that he would read his “latest work,” which turned out to be a speech Léon Daudet had recently delivered to the National Assembly. Aragon and Breton drowned him out with bells, and members of the audience shouted, “Back to Zurich! To the gallows with him!” Juan Gris protested that he had been enlisted as a participant under false pretenses. He was not alone.
Other capers followed in quick succession. The May 1920 issue of Littérature carried thirty-two Dada manifestos, notifying subscribers and literary eminences who had originally sponsored it that it no longer operated within their understanding of literary modernism. On May 26, the Dada Festival was held in Paris’s principal concert hall, the Salle Gaveau.
By then, the thirty-two manifestos notwithstanding, Tzara’s French collaborators had already begun to distance themselves from him. “Every time a demonstration was foreseen—naturally by Tzara, who never tired of them—Picabia would assemble us in his salon,” wrote Breton, “[and] ask us, each in turn, to suggest ideas. The harvest became increasingly sparse.” Dada continued fitfully. Tzara left Paris in July 1920 for the Balkans and returned in December, after a Dada Congress in Italy, to sabotage a lecture by Emilio Marinetti on tactilism. A concert of bruitist music met the same fate. Vacationing together in the Tyrol, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Tzara conceived a show called “Open-Air Dada.” In May 1921, Tzara reluctantly participated in Maurice Barrès’s mock trial. Six months later, Picabia briefly distracted Paris from the very real trial of a serial killer with his painting L’Oeil Cacodylate at the Salon d’Automne (the oeil cacodylate being an eye surrounded by the comments and signatures of friends—like graffiti around a peephole inside a urinal, wrote one critic). Tzara broke with Picabia, or Picabia with Tzara, and, sooner or later, everybody with everybody else.
A Dada tract, January 12, 1921, signed by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Breton, Aragon, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Paul Éluard, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. The title translates to “Dada moots everything. Dada knows everything. Dada spits everything out.”
Drieu observed, as a supernumerary, the drama of large egos jostling for space at center stage of a Parisian sideshow. He followed where Aragon led, out of friendship or loneliness rather than conviction, and remained the fellow traveler when Littérature, having renounced Dada, found its true path in the practice of automatic writing.
The Dada group assembled at the Church of Saint-Julien le Pauvre, staging one in a series of Dada “visits and excursions” to “places that really have no reason to exist.”
He and Colette divorced in 1921, not bitterly. They became friends. Colette continued to socialize with their Surrealist acquaintances and practiced medicine.
1The supervising psychiatrist had him read La Psychanalyse des Névroses et des Psychoses by Drs. Régis and Hesnard, published in 1914. Freud’s works had not yet been translated into French.
2The charge against Barrès implies that the Dada court was posing as a twentieth-century avatar of the Committee of General Security established during the First Republic to supervise the police and safeguard the Revolution. In 1793 it became a prime implement of the Terror.
3Conservative papers were outraged. “Everyone with a French soul will naturally be repelled by such baseness and foul abuse.… Another performance of the show may provoke something more than simple boos and anodyne hisses,” wrote La Presse. A reviewer for La Justice suggested that hydrotherapy for Dadaists might be in order and that it was high time their identity papers be checked.
4Bourdet had been appointed to the directorship during the left-wing coalition called the Front Populaire by Jean Zay, minister of education and fine arts, and Premier Léon Blum. Both were Jewish and detested for that reason, among others. Zay—founder of the Cannes film festival—was assassinated by Vichy militia in 1944. Blum was caught by the Germans and sent to Buchenwald.
Giraudoux entered the foreign service before World War I and resumed his career afterward. He and Drieu could have met during the war, as both fought in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign.
5Thiers rose very high indeed, first entering Paris as an obscure lawyer from Marseille, marrying into great wealth, playing a key role in the Revolution of 1830, attaining the premiership and, several decades later, the presidency of the Republic before exiting to occupy, offstage, the largest mausoleum in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.
6In fact, Jacques came from a village near Coutances in Normandy, not from the Atlantic seaport of La Rochelle.
7It will be recalled that Barrès’s grandfather Charles Luxer was also a rich pharmacist.
8The neighborhood lycée was Condorcet, whose alumni included Henri Bergson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thadée Natanson, Eugène Labiche, and Marcel Proust.
9The Ministry of Foreign Affairs attracted children of the haute bourgeoisie and drew upon the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.
10His prewar notebook contains a prophecy: “There are two beings I shall spend my life trying to comprehend: woman and the Jew.”
11It caused him no apparent discomfort to identify his instinctual drive as French, to have Nietzsche as his vade mecum, and to wish that he could continue the war in the stylish uniform of a British officer.
12Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Gautier, Flaubert, and Rimbaud, among many others.
13“And we shall make Peace as we made War. We shall wield our steel cranes. With reinforced concrete we shall raise the monument of our Strength.” Elsewhere he described “la force” as “mother of all things”—“mère des choses.”
14After the death of André Jéramec in 1914, Drieu wrote to Colette: “Those who have endured the suffering of months on the battlefield have often longed for death and regretted that they hadn’t found it during the first engagement.… It helps to plunge into the swelling tide of one’s race. I want to think about nothing but my minuscule place in the immense sacrifice we must make at the altar of our homeland to fend off the threat of annihilation.”
15Colette bore two children in the 1930s.
16Some say 500,000 francs, or approximately $100,000 in 1917—the equivalent of almost $2 million in 2011; others say several hundred thousand dollars.
17Her bookstore was an international gathering place for writers, as was the review she launched in 1924, Le Navire d’Argent. She befriended and mentored Sylvia Beach, the young American expatriate who opened Shakespeare & Co. down the block and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would. Drieu may have met Joyce’s translator, Valéry Larbaud, at one bookstore or the other.
18Paris’s monuments were subjected to terroristic revision in a game the Surrealists recorded for posterity. They proposed, for example, to cut the Panthéon in two and pull the halves one inch apart.
19In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls that “new” was used obsessively in daily conversation after the Revolution.
20Picabia, who had visited New York in 1913 to attend the Armory Show and had been given a solo exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, named his journal after Gallery 291.
21“She has a hot ass.”
