Drieu La Rochelle and Ascetic Aestheticism

Abstract

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, novelist, poet, essayist and political journalist, was a major spokesman for French fascism in the late 1930s, a propagandist for Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire FranCais which had some 100,000 members in 1937 (the French Communist Party had only 80,000 members). Drieu was also a Nazi collaborator during the Second World War. His novel Gilles (1939) was undoubtedly the most famous French fascist novel written during the 1930s, a work which Drieu had hoped would rival the leftwing novel, L'Espoir [Man's Hope] written by his close friend Andre Malraux. Drieu is only one example among many in the 1930s of a superior writer, steeped in the riches of European literature, who was attracted to fascism.' One of the questions that caused me to study Drieu in the first place, a naive question no doubt but one which still think worth asking, is how could an intelligent, cultivated writer like Drieu, who once declared I am above all an artist, have succumbed to an ideology so full of ugliness? This question, with which have dealt at length elsewhere, is present as well in this brief examination of Drieu's aesthetic thought.2 Part of the answer is this: Drieu sought a spiritual regeneration of France that was fundamentally ascetic at base, an asceticism that was culturally rooted in both Catholic and military values.3 On a deeper, more personal level, Drieu also practiced an emotional asceticism or an affective puritanism, especially where women were concerned, an asceticism that condoned moral indifference at best and physical violence at worst toward those he considered decadent in French society, including decadent women. Various kinds of asceticism, in other words, permeated his political, social and economic thought-and his aesthetic thought as well. Proust's comment that tout se relate, that everything relates to everthing else, is particularly applicable in Drieu's case. Drieu's politics and aesthetics were part of a consistent vision, a coherent totality, that affected all aspects of his thought, the basic undertow being Drieu's obsession with what he repeatedly called decadence and his own ardent (and guilt-ridden) desire to combat it. The great sin, in his eyes, was the non-spiritualized hedonism that pervaded French culture and that doomed the French soldier, unlike the Nazi storm trooper, to feminine weakness. Drieu was something of an expert on the subject since he felt