ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of earlier and more earnest portrayals of the novelist. It presents a selection of the major literary-biographical treatments of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle from the liberation to the early 1960s. The first comment to be made about Drieu and historical memory formation is both banal and essential: the novelist's suicide meant that there could be no trial, prison sentence or direct martyrdom at the hands of the 'Gaullo-Communist' state. Pierre Andreu’s work, accompanied by a laudatory preface written by the publisher Daniel Halevy of the Grasset publishing house, opened the way for several significant reconsiderations of Drieu's life. The chapter reviews the subject of film to examine Louis Malle's screening of Drieu's novel, Le Feu follet. Malle's updating, which includes several references to the war in Algeria, sharpens the message, subtly undermining the legitimacy of the new Fifth Republic.
