Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle was a contradictory figure, whose career shifted from avant-gardist poet and writer after World War I to proponent of Fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Traumatized by his experience of World War I, he joined close friend and fellow poet Louis Aragon in the burgeoning French Dada movement. He published poems in their journal Littérature and joined in their public manifestations and events in the early 1920s, such as the infamous Dada mock trial of writer Maurice Barrès in 1921.

Although not known as a collector, it was during this time that Drieu participated in the sequestration sales of the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler collection, along with his peers in the literary and artistic avant-gardes, such as André Breton, Francis Picabia, Jacques Rigaud, and Le Corbusier. As a German national living in France, Kahnweiler had the stock of his Paris gallery seized by the French state in 1914 and sold off to fund war debts in a series of sales held at the Hotel Drouot from 1921 through 1923. That these young artists and poets, including Drieu, could afford to purchase works by Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris testifies to the low prices at which they were sold.

Drieu was a close friend of André Malraux, although their political differences reached a head during the Spanish Civil War, when Drieu took the side of Francisco Franco. During World War II, Drieu shifted farther to the right, publishing Socialisme Fasciste (1934), a book that defended Fascism while remaining idiosyncratically influenced by nineteenth-century socialism. During the Nazi occupation of France, Drieu enthusiastically supported the collaborationist Vichy regime under the leadership of Marshal Philippe Pétain. He became the editor in 1940 of the Nouvelle revue Française under the Fascists and contributed political journalism to publications such as La Révolution nationale, the official journal of the Vichy regime. He committed suicide in 1945.