"Le jeune Européen" by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle is an autobiographical essay written in the early 20th century. It follows a cosmopolitan narrator—the self-styled “young European”—through war, pleasure, revolution, and self-scrutiny, as he wrestles with identity, modern Europe’s drift, and the pull between action and art. Through confessional scenes and sharp reflections, the work probes violence, desire, faith, and the seduction and ruin of literature.
The opening of the book presents a restless first-person life: an uncertain parentage, a rich and hedonistic youth across Europe, then the shock of 1914 and enlistment in the French infantry. The narrator embraces patrols, terror, and a mystic exaltation, then grows disillusioned, deserts via the German lines, escapes through Switzerland, kills for a passport, and flees to America, where marriage, money, and athletic bodies prove empty. Drawn to Russia, he rides the revolutionary wave, fights in border wars, and leaves disenchanted by a clumsy, American-style industrial creed, returning to Paris with money and fatigue. There he sinks into “paresse,” drifting through nocturnal Paris while diagnosing mass spectacle, consumer life, and his own isolation, and he relives a lifelong tug-of-war with books and the urge to write. He first writes about his past, then bungles a “novel” (Finette and Gille) that collapses into confession—published as a dull, uneven book with a few raw pages of blood. Learning from failure, he turns to “écrire pour vivre,” hoping to sing others rather than himself, yet keeps debating subjectivism, action, and the role of art, closing this opening stretch by longing to be fully a man—athlete, friend, lover, and artist—despite feeling thwarted. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
