Le jeune Européen by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Le jeune Européen by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle is an autobiographical novel written in the early 20th century. It follows a rootless, cosmopolitan narrator who careers from prewar pleasure and sport into the crucible of World War I and revolutionary Russia, then back to Paris where he wrestles with idleness, desire, and the burden of writing. Blending confession and manifesto, it probes a young European’s hunger for action, holiness, love, and art
amid the disillusionment of postwar modernity. The opening of Le jeune Européen traces the narrator’s uncertain origins, luxe-filled youth, and headlong plunge into war, where he discovers both the intoxication of violence and a fleeting mystic fervor before rejecting the democratic slog and defecting. He flees through Switzerland to America, marries impulsively, tastes business success and domestic ease, then recoils from American materialism and sails with a Russian comrade toward the Revolution, fighting across Russia, Poland, and Crimea before becoming disenchanted with Bolshevik state capitalism. Back in Paris, he falls into a proud, lucid “paresse,” wandering the night city and confronting the trap of reading and writing: he longs to live yet keeps turning himself into pages. He experiments with fiction versus confession, botches a first “roman” stitched from his own past, then reimagines writing as service to others—only to find his characters still fed by his life—while he debates how to be a complete man: athlete, friend, lover, artist, and free. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 1893-1945 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 27021646 |
| Title | Le jeune Européen |
| Edition | Sixième édition |
| Original Publication | Paris: Gallimard, 1927. |
| Contents | Le Sang et l'Encre: Le Jeune Européen. Vivre pour écrire. Histoire d'un roman. Écrire pour vivre. La liberté -- Le Music-Hall: Une maison sans visage. Une salle vide. Entrée en matière. Le contorsionniste. Décadence et destruction. Danse. L'homme. Seul. Les ruines. Pour en finir. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | French essays |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78063 |
| Release Date | Feb 27, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 4884 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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