Pierre Drieu la Rochelle β was the tall blond darling of the French right between the wars. Brought up in a bourgeois family with royalist beliefs, he emerged from World War I with with the kind of loathing for capitalism that found the right more congenial than the left.
A much-admired poet when young and an effective prose stylist always, he would have been regarded as an adornment of French culture if not for his politics. As things turned out, only his politics lend him lasting interest.
A direct route to the centre of his agitated political consciousness is Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: Secret Journal and Other Writings , translated and introduced by Alastair Hamilton, a valuable student of the fascist intellectuals right up until the day of their total disappearance at the end of World War II.
Drieu was convinced that French culture had been toppled from its rightful pre-eminence by the corrosive influence of liberals and Jews. Giving a warm welcome to the idea that France might be restored to strength by an alliance with Germany, he saw France as the woman and Germany as the man in a partnership that for him always had sexual overtones.
His personal beauty was important to him. He was the kind of man who takes it to heart when he loses his hair. Since he looked more like a blond barbarian Nazi god than most of the Nazis did, his alliance with the invader had the stamp of destiny.
