Drieu la Rochelle and Modernist Anti-Modernism in French Fascism

Abstract

It should come as no surprise to readers of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis or Louis-Ferdinand Celine that modernist aesthetics and reactionary politics were often comfortable bedfellows in the 1920s and 30s. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a supporter of Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Franpais in 1936 and a Nazi collaborator after 1940, is another case in point. An avant-garde critic of the cultural and political status quo of the Third Republic, affiliated in the early 1920s with Breton, Aragon and the French surrealists, and a defender in 1934 of fascist socialism, he might seem at first glance to be impeccably anti-bourgeois in his radical credentials, a rebel against the old order, a man of the Left. But such a glance would be superficial indeed, ignoring as it does the traditionalist, conservative, anti-modernist ballast that underlay his rhetoric. His advanced views on art, culture, sex, and politics were the cosmetics used by a very insecure soul to hide the decadence which he felt within him and to achieve relationship with strong, reassuring, virile realities that would help him overcome that decadence. But taken out of context and read literally, fragments of Drieu's cultural and social views might seem quite modernist. As a soldier poet during the First World War, he had been attracted to the aesthetically modern and revolutionary, to the free verse of Claudel particularly, and many of his favorite writers were hardly conventional at the time: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Proust, Aragon, and Lawrence. Some years later he listed among the in-