We have played, I have lost: I demand death

On the night between March 15 and 16 in Paris, the writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle took his own life.

A purebred Norman, he dedicated his life to the awareness of Europe’s decline and to the virile dream of its redemption. Before his final act, he left a note beside him in which he affirmed his loyalty to the ideal of collaboration and acknowledged the victory of the Resistance, declaring that, having lost, he demanded death.

For his collaborationist activities—more literary than anything else—and for his voluntary withdrawal from politics in 1943, he was not at risk of the death penalty or even a long imprisonment. Yet he preferred to act like an officer who had lost the war and wished to preserve his honor.

In his life, which was relatively short—having ended it at the age of 52—he wrote thirty-five books, many of which were successful. One of them, Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within), would be adapted into a film after the war by Louis Malle in 1963. Other films would later be inspired by his novels, including Une Femme à sa Fenêtre (1976) and La Voix (1992), both directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre, as well as Oslo, August 31st (2012) by Joachim Trier.

Drieu’s central theme

the thread running through Le Feu Follet, was always death. He consistently expressed a drive toward suicide—but a cathartic suicide, aimed at rising from the ruins, never a desperate one. He was a man of taste, of success, and an elegant conqueror of many beautiful women who adored him. His primary subject was not only his own death but the death of civilization itself. Alongside this, he explored the strength required to accept it, as well as the prospect of regeneration. This is why he always sided with the vital forces that could give society a virile jolt.

During the Great War, he was struck by the incompetence of commanders and the greatness of those courageous enough to step up in their place. He attests to this in his memoir La Comédie de Charleroi. Returning from that experience, hoping to shake a decadent society, he immersed himself in rebellious circles: surrealists, communists, and the monarchists of Action Française.

On February 6, 1934

the nationalist right protested in Paris against parliamentary corruption scandals. The Assemblée Nationale (Parliament) fired upon the demonstrators, even using machine guns. Eighteen people were killed, and thousands were injured.

Exactly eleven years later, the writer Robert Brasillach was executed near Paris for collaborating with the Germans. Before his execution, he wrote, “I think of you, the dead of February 6, and I will be with you, eleven years late.” This writing is found in the collection La Mort en Face (Death in the Face), where he also wrote:

“They say that the sun and death cannot be looked at directly. Nevertheless, I have tried. I am no Stoic, and it hurts to be torn from what one loves, but I have tried, so that those who would see me or think of me would not be left with an undignified image.”

Following the bloodbath in front of Parliament, another protest took place on February 11, this time by the communists. There were no deaths. But Drieu La Rochelle became convinced that political parties only served to divide the people and that, if united, they could change everything. He dedicated himself to a new era, based on the strength of a unified people and the dream of something greater.

He even suggested that all ancient ruins be destroyed so that people would no longer rest on past glories. He had already expressed a similar idea in L’Europe contre les patries (Europe Against Nations) in 1931: France itself was outdated.

In 1939, he openly declared himself a fascist

in his novel Gilles, supporting the Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot, a former communist leader turned national-socialist. He wrote for newspapers that supported the Vichy government, including Je Suis Partout and La Nouvelle Revue Française, where he was editor-in-chief.

Over time, he came to believe that not only did political parties divide the people, but that nationalism itself, rather than uniting into a single International, fragmented Europe and made it weak.

In 1943, with a novel set in South America, L’Homme à Cheval (The Man on Horseback), he told the magnificent ending of a leader who dreamed of building a greater and imperial homeland, only to be overwhelmed by the failure of such an ambitious, poetic, and romantic dream.

The following year, in Les Chiens de Paille (The Straw Dogs), he was likely the first to speak of the rise of globalism.

By the summer of 1943, he withdrew from political collaboration, convinced that a true European project was not being built.

He then wrote a poem that, after the war, would become the European neofascist manifesto

We are men of today.

We are alone.

We have no more gods.

We have no more ideas.

We believe neither in Jesus Christ nor in Marx.

It is necessary that immediately,

at once,

in this very moment,

we build the tower

of our despair and our pride.

With the sweat and blood of all classes,

we must construct a homeland

like none ever seen before;

compact like a block of steel,

like a magnet.

All the scattered fragments of Europe

will be drawn to it by love or by force.

And then, before the block of our Europe,

Asia, America, and Africa

will become dust.

On the night between March 15 and 16, he left a final note: “We have played, I have lost: I demand death.”

His adversary Jean-Paul Sartre will acknowledge: “He was sincere, and he proved it!”

After the war, he would become the point of reference for the idea of a New Europe for the revolutionary nationalist movements of Europe

among which the figures of the French Maurice Bardèche, friend and brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach, the Englishman Oswald Mosley, the Italian Filippo Anfuso, later followed by Adriano Romualdi, and the Belgian Jean Thiriart would stand out.

All the university organizations of the radical right would be inspired by his work.

The first book of another notable Norman (born by chance in Paris), Jean Mabire, would be dedicated to him and is the most beautiful work ever written on the subject: Drieu parmi nous (Drieu Among Us), released in the same year, 1963, when Louis Malle brought his existentialist novel to the big screen.

Jean Mabire would embody, for the entire post-war period, the European and Norman spirit as perhaps no one else, writing over a hundred books, both novels and historical essays, and would train at least two generations of young militants.

Eighty years later, the memory of Drieu La Rochelle

has slightly faded. Partly because there is no vitalism, and even less myth, among political forces, and partly because having taken his own life and not being killed by the enemy, one cannot exercise, in remembering him, that subtle and unconscious victimhood which, unfortunately, is very present in commemorations.

Because it is always forgotten that: “Heroes should not be mourned, they should be imitated!”

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