The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Drieu entered adolescence an irrepressible scamp, taunting teachers, talking dirty, flirting with girls, stalking women, and generally applying his talent to mischievous ends. Class uprisings were his tonic. Imbued with a sensation of “common strength,” he invited the punishments—all short of expulsion—that Sainte-Marie de Monceau reserved for a brilliant bad boy.

  At fifteen, Drieu organized himself differently. He turned into a serious reader, but without disavowing the upstart he had been. His literary and philosophical predilections conformed to his antic self, like a rich canvas stretched over a primitive frame. While still assigning people to categories according to their perceived strength or weakness, he found his worldview fleshed out in the works of Barrès and Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra (which his mother innocently agreed to buy for him) was a revelation. The words seemed to flow from his own pen even before he understood them, he wrote. And Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche describes parliamentary government as embodying the virtues of the herd (“public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, pity”) and the higher happiness attained by “herd men” under a Napoleon, ensured young Drieu’s affinity to the philosopher. “Energy” and “life affirmation” entered his vocabulary in tandem with “decadence” and “degeneration.” During his penultimate year at Sainte-Marie de Monceau he also read Descartes, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Bergson, Hartmann, William James, the English neo-Hegelians, Darwin, and Spencer, burning the candle in a frenzy of lucubration. His carnets, which contain minute observations about himself, reflect the vexed soul of a hero worshipper bound up with a nihilist, or of an apostle of energy shackled to a boy “half in love with easeful death.” Drieu no longer attended mass, despite appeals from his mother, who prayed for him at her bedside every night.

  In 1908, Madame Lefèvre offered her fifteen-year-old grandson a summer abroad, with a clergyman’s family at Shrewsbury, England (home of the boys’ school immortalized by Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh as Roughborough). Drieu later called it a “pilgrimage,” as if to say, in the spirit of Proust visiting Ruskin’s Amiens, that he was visiting his spiritual home. Ultimately, however, the English experience may have had less to do with art or literature than with the construction of an identity that played well in snobbish circles on the Right Bank, where Anglophilia was endemic, and girded him against subversion from within. Tormented by feelings of inferiority, the tall, blond, blue-eyed Drieu managed to reconcile his Napoleonatry with the conviction that he had discovered the truth of his “Nordic” soul among Anglo-Saxons. And Oxford during the first or second of his two sojourns in England was where that truth fully revealed itself. “There, something gripped me,” he wrote. “At first, it all seemed to be of a grandeur I couldn’t have guessed from anything in my country. Its architecture was not as sublime as ours, but it had the singular virtue of accommodating modern times. The city honored the mind and body as sufficient wealth. A decorous fraternity united men and women. I was filled with revulsion and discouragement just thinking that I would soon have to return to Paris and study at the Sorbonne, which looked like a new suburban town hall, paltry, anonymous, exposed to all manner of noxious exhalations, lost amidst the monstrous concerns of a metropolis, and rub elbows with disheveled adolescents, soiled by their gross puberty, in whom youth rears like a wild horse because they lack the strength to harness it.” When, in due course, he entered college, he might have been mistaken for a young English gentleman schooled bilingually in derision. He parted his hair down the middle, polished his shoes to a high shine, and wore tweeds (his lifelong uniform). “Strength” was now associated in his mind with sport and aristocratic self-restraint. That the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton impressed him as proverbial wisdom. Kipling’s Jungle Book and Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History joined Barrès’s Le Culte du Moi and D’Annunzio’s The Flame of Life in his syllabus of canonical texts.

  Wondering where to turn after Sainte-Marie de Monceau, Drieu enrolled in three schools: the École de Droit for law, the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (known as “Sciences Po”) for foreign service, and the Sorbonne for a degree in English. His dilemma did not set him apart from other students slouching toward professional life. They, too, were daunted by the prospect of endless hours in the Palais de Justice, of an assignment to some remote consular post or exile to a provincial lycée. What did set him apart at Sciences Po were his modest circumstances.9 André Jéramec, for example, with whom Drieu formed a close friendship, had all his needs attended to by seven servants in a vast apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes. His father, Édouard, a graduate of the École Polytechnique, who had important political connections, presided over several companies, one of which monopolized Paris’s hackney cabs. Not until they entered high school did André and his sister, Colette, learn that their parents were Jews who had never converted but had raised them as Catholics. This would not dissuade Drieu from marrying Colette during the war. Nor would it temper his anti-Semitism in later years.10

  Events were drawing a curtain over the future. By 1913 Drieu had cast aside the Sorbonne and become a casual presence at law school. He immersed himself in history, without knowing to what practical purpose he could put it or whether history itself had run its course. He read Schopenhauer, argued that European civilization was spent, and demonstrated its decline by contracting gonorrhea in the brothels he patronized on his meager allowance. Nothing seemed certain or stable. In January 1913, during his last semester at Sciences Po, a creditor sued Drieu’s profligate father. Word of it spread, resulting in bankruptcy and social disgrace.

  One disaster paved the way for another. Drieu, who was expected to graduate near the top of his class, failed every part of his degree examination. No one wondered whether the fiasco had something to do with fear of success; but a fear of success, or of the path that success prescribed, was certainly implicated in the emotional havoc wrought by his father’s bankruptcy. How could he have failed to anticipate that examiners would frown at essays phrased in the language of his cherished philosophers? He was reprimanded for distorting history to prove a theory—for spurning the etiquette of responsible scholarship and making prophetic assertions. “I revealed with brutal candor the strange, unusual knowledge I had acquired in my roving through the realm of unorthodox ideas,” he wrote years later. “They wanted to punish the dangerous disorder of my mind and also bar me from a diplomatic career, which was wise, since my family was ruined, and … my timidity did not allow me to master feelings of social inferiority.”

  Suicide crossed his mind, as it would often again. Instead of throwing himself into the Seine, he decided to report for military service. André Jéramec, with whose family Drieu spent the summer at Pougues-les-Eaux, in Burgundy, joined him. In November 1913 they resigned from civilian life at the Pépinière casern near the Gare Saint-Lazare. The National Assembly had recently passed a law requiring conscripts to serve for three years. Drieu would serve more than five, André Jéramec less than one.

  Drieu had a pneumatic history of pumping himself up and going flat. War favored bipolar extremes. On August 3, two days after general mobilization, he was a compassionate witness to the spectacle of a fellow soldier—a Breton peasant who spoke broken French—raging against the potentates who had torn him from his land and smashing his rifle. Three days later he was crossing Paris in a great tide of soldiers flowing from barracks all over the city and converging at the Gare du Nord. He carried Thus Spake Zarathustra in his knapsack.

  Nietzsche remained in his knapsack during the bloody confrontation with Germans at Charleroi, where the French general staff, surprised by enemy troops wheeling into northeastern France through neutral Belgium, improvised a doomed defense. Drieu’s regiment had nothing but knapsacks for protection and lay under them like tortoises in their shells as German machine-gun fire raked the fields of Flanders. When at last French artillery replied, a lieu
tenant ordered his men to charge. “I have known two or three formidable, unforgettable moments,” Drieu wrote to a friend from a hospital bed.

  At Charleroi, I heard a voice shout: forward, bayonets fixed! I was beside myself, bursting with passion. I adored my lieutenant, I would have liked to kiss the syphilitic corporal who opened his eyes (sleepy from the ignoble somnolence of peace) to the intoxicating call of glory. And the bugles. There were bugles. The trump of war sounded in my blood. At that moment, I belonged body and soul to my race charging through the centuries … toward the eternal idol of Power, of Grandeur. Then, afterward, childlike wails rising from the piles of dead and dying.

  One of the innumerable corpses was André Jéramec, who disappeared on August 23, 1914. Drieu lost several more friends at Charleroi. He himself fell that day with shrapnel in his neck.

  He wrote the above to a friend while recuperating from a second wound received two months later—farther south, at the front in Champagne, near Rheims, where, promoted to sergeant, he led a platoon over the top and across no-man’s-land to the German trenches. But did he in fact qualify as a leader? he wondered anxiously. In one account of the battle he portrays himself as the young hero whose Gallic exuberance inspires older men under his command: “Only leaders count. A platoon is a troupe of tearful children.” Elsewhere he confesses to having quailed before the enemy, as if fear were incompatible with courage under fire: “I too felt a wretched weakness inside; I wept for myself, I wished I had no pride, no remorse, nothing of the instinctual drive that illustrates our old History.”11

  In any event, the tedious vigils interrupted by episodes of mortal combat and followed by long convalescences tested his enthusiasm for war. After more than a year of military life, he had had enough of shuffling between muddy trenches and hospitals in which he lacked the time and privacy to make literary sense of his experience. His brain could not yet comply with the fantasy of holding a gun and a pen by turns, of being a soldier as Stendhal was a diplomat and Barrès a politician. It found more compelling alternatives in mania and depression. But things would change. In 1915, he began to write poems.

  The war dragged on, transporting him to other hells. When men were asked to volunteer for service in the Dardanelles, Drieu joined a polyglot regiment that shipped out from Marseille. By the time he returned, several months later, to a hospital at Toulon, his clinical profile included scabies, syphilis, and severe dysentery. He was alive, but all skin and bones after dawdling with the French force on Lemnos, a short hop across the Aegean from Gallipoli, where British and Australian troops were being slaughtered. For him, the ill-conceived campaign had been a dismal parody of the “voyage en Orient” ritually undertaken by nineteenth-century writers fleeing bourgeois Europe.12 He wrote many letters to Colette Jéramec but later claimed to have been incommunicado. “No more family, no more worries about profession or money,” he wrote in Le Voyage des Dardanelles. “No more vanity, no more future. If I have the courage to be unknown, I will push anonymity to the limit.… I was lost in the chaos, losing myself, drunk on perdition. Forgotten was my little bourgeois person.”

  He was not forgotten by the army, which needed everyone who could still stand (of whom only two came from his original regiment, he and the bugler) to man the Verdun fortifications. Frozen from a six-hour march, he arrived at the Thiaumont redoubt on February 21, 1916. German artillery had already begun a thunderous bombardment, lofting one hundred thousand shells across the Meuse River. On the third day one exploded near enough to render him temporarily deaf and to paralyze his right arm, which recovered movement after several operations on the ulnar nerve but never full feeling or its normal length. He was evacuated to a hospital at Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine.

  Wounds and illness suffered on four fronts earned him an exemption from duty at a fifth. He was thus vouchsafed the leisure to write about war, which he did in verse. Although a longing for self-extinction would always shadow Drieu, it did not prevent him, once reassigned to administrative duty, from submitting a poem to the editor of an important avant-garde literary magazine, Sic. More poems followed, seventeen all told, which found their way, through influential friends, to the desk of Gaston Gallimard, who agreed to publish them in a small edition under the title Interrogation (at the author’s expense). The military authorities, who may have been satisfied that Drieu’s belligerence compensated for expressions of fraternity with Germans entombed in trenches just as he was, allowed a small edition to pass through censorship. That Drieu glorified peace in the language of war undoubtedly worked to his advantage.

  Et nous saurons faire une Paix comme nous avons

  Mené la Guerre.

  Nous brandirons nos grues d’acier.

  Avec du ciment armé nous dresserons le monument

  De notre Force.13

  The prospect of turning swords against bourgeois institutions had greater appeal than the thought of beating them into plowshares. When, in later years, he came to embrace Fascism, la force would enjoy the same prominence in his political screed as l’énergie in Maurice Barrès’s. All it needed in 1917 was a dogma befitting its shrines. Charleroi, Rheims, the Dardanelles, Verdun: those names resonated through Drieu like a drumbeat in his own savage procession. They spoke to a lifelong enchantment with death and martyrdom. “Violent death is the foundation of civilization, of the social contract, of all pacts,” he wrote shortly after the war. “It is the only certitude. Among men, nothing is certain unless, at the end of their common undertaking, they are sure that they will risk death for whatever binds them, be it glory, lucre, love, despair, or one another.”14 A letter to Colette Jéramec dated July 7, 1918, sent her to Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His Hour,” declaring that it captured the spirit of Interrogation:

  Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His Hour

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

  Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,

  And half-men, with their dirty songs and dreary,

  And all the little emptiness of love!

  After this, she could not have been surprised to learn that he detested Henri Barbusse’s celebrated antiwar novel Le Feu. “I’m becoming very reactionary,” he wrote. So long as France’s eastern fields were killing fields, life had a solemnity utterly lacking in the goals and conventions of peacetime. War was a remedy for vapid dailiness.

  And what of “all the little emptiness of love”? The battlefield had a Manichaean simplicity that he missed on the domestic front, where nothing was simple in his relationship with Colette, whom he had been courting after a fashion since 1913. The relationship, which led to their foredoomed marriage in 1917, was a story of ghosts in two haunted families. In 1884 Colette’s mother, Gabrielle, had given birth to a son named Pierre, who promised to grow up tall and blond but died of meningitis at age four. With great difficulty, Gabrielle produced two more children, André in 1893 and Colette in 1896. Small, dark, and Semitic-looking, they embodied everything the would-be Aryan despised in herself and were treated accordingly. Gabrielle, who became a neurotic invalid, never ceased reminding her children of their ineptitude and physical disgrace.

  If Colette saw in Drieu the handsome, blond brother idealized by her mother, Drieu may have succumbed to the opportunity of recapitulating his parents’ mésalliance. Drieu would later write that he loved Colette for three months, platonically, during the summer of 1913 at Pougues-les-Eaux. That the Jéramecs considered a young man bearing the double stigma of academic failure and paternal bankruptcy ineligible for Colette’s dowry only encouraged the romance. It was the summer before Drieu and André donned uniforms. The more deeply Colette fell in love, the more Drieu fought shy of it, ultimately leaving her, when war broke out, with nothing to embrace but a blond mirage. “
Don’t go crazy, I beg of you,” he wrote to her by pneumatic dispatch on August 1, 1914. “Great events ask for dignity. Tell no one about us. All my ardor is reserved for war. Here at last is the test that will clarify my future for me. But we can no longer talk about love.”

  While war answered Drieu’s dream of redemption, unrequited love gave wings to Colette’s need to prove her capacity for devotion, especially after her brother’s death. Neither could stop tormenting and consoling the other. When he was wounded, she arranged special medical care through the family’s connection with Alexandre Millerand, minister of war. When he informed her that he had contracted syphilis, she scoffed at the idea that something so insignificant could come between them. “What is that, next to our affection? Pierre, how could you imagine for a second that I would flee? On the contrary, why not marry now? I would be so happy to live with you as brother and sister. Anyway, I must tell you, since it will perhaps soothe you, that I can’t have children.”15 At his urging she read Les Nourritures Terrestres, André Gide’s impeachment of the family and celebration of sensual freedom. She protested that she was indebted to Drieu for every bit of “beauty, goodness, and intelligence” in her soul.

  Drieu could neither embrace Colette nor relinquish his hold over her. Families were the bane of his existence, but it weighed upon his conscience—it may even have outweighed his venality—that with the suicide of her depressed, grief-stricken father in December 1916, she desperately needed a man to lean on. Colette, in turn, would later claim that she married Drieu to save him from his demons. What seems certain is that they married each other’s mortification when they wed in a ceremony at the town hall of the 17th arrondissement in August 1917. His parents did not attend. Drieu took leave from the desk job he had been given at army headquarters in Paris after his third injury, and the couple embarked on their mariage blanc (for such it appears to have been) in a sleeping car bound for the Côte d’Azur. Colette settled a small fortune on Drieu.16