ABSTRACT
The private lives of our two protagonists have so far hardly been touched upon in this study. In order to explain some factors related to the post-war positions of Fabre-Luce and especially Jouvenel, it is necessary to consider them. Based on their post-war identity as, respectively, an outspoken and unrepentant extreme-rightist risking prison sentences under different regimes and a political scientist avoiding provocative statements while reading Thomas Hobbes in his Swiss village, one would expect Fabre-Luce’s private life to be unruly and Jouvenel’s to be that of a sedate family man. For a large part of their adult lives, the exact opposite seems to have been the case. While there is little information about his early years, in 1928 Fabre-Luce married Charlotte de Faucingy-Lucinge, a princess from a prominent French noble family who was an appreciated guest in France’s interwar high society. 1 Although the announcement of the wedding led notorious womaniser Drieu to write a ‘jealous’ letter of congratulations, Charlotte managed to escape Drieu’s charms and the marriage seems to have been both happy and fairly uneventful. 2 Charlotte often accompanied Alfred on his travels, and they jointly published a book calling for the legalisation of contraception. 3 The couple had two children, born in 1941 and 1942.
