author
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
1893–1945
A sharply gifted and deeply troubled French novelist, he turned the disillusionment of the interwar years into tense, introspective fiction. His life and work remain compelling partly because of the unsettling mix of literary brilliance and disastrous political choices.
3 Audiobooks
L'homme couvert de femmes
by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Le jeune Européen
by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Plainte contre inconnu
by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
About the author
Born in Paris in 1893, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle became known for novels, short stories, and political essays shaped by the shock of World War I and the uneasy mood that followed it. He was wounded during the war, and that experience fed the sense of drift, crisis, and spiritual exhaustion that runs through much of his writing.
He is best remembered for works such as Le Feu follet and Gilles, books that explore alienation, desire, self-destruction, and the search for meaning in a fractured society. His prose is often admired for its clarity and intensity, even by readers who strongly reject his politics.
That rejection is unavoidable: in the 1930s he embraced fascism and later became a prominent collaborationist during the German occupation of France. He died in Paris in 1945, and his legacy has remained controversial ever since, with readers returning to his work both for its literary force and for what it reveals about a dark chapter in European intellectual history.