Drieu la Rochelle ou le bal des maudits (review)

Jacques Lecarme’s Drieu la Rochelle ou le bal des maudits is in many ways what a first-rate critical study of an important writer and cultural figure ought to be. It is wide-ranging and provocative in the topics it addresses, and is argued with flair and extraordinary erudition. Lecarme’s knowledge of French literature and literary history in the twentieth century is exceptional. He displays an encyclopedic knowledge of, and intimate familiarity with, the published works and inédits as well as the career and biography of not only Drieu but the vast majority of his contemporaries on the Right and Left. The list of writers discussed in detail includes Céline, Brasillach, Morand, Malraux, Nizan, Berl, Aragon, Sartre, Beauvoir and many others. Moreover, Lecarme fuses biographical detail and close textual analysis with discussions of literary institutions, political affiliations, and historical upheavals to provide nothing less than a kind of x-ray of Parisian literary culture and intellectual life from the turn of the century through the Épuration and into the mode rétro of the 1970s.