The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  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 Boulange
r—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 mysel
f, 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.