Before the Law: Drieu La Rochelle’s Exorde

  • Emanuele Canzaniello University of Bari
Keywords: Collaborationism, Fascism, Purge, Suicide, Autobiography

Abstract

This paper aims to bring to light a short text by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Exorde, and to analyze its shifty belonging to various genres such as autobiography, political testament, or judicial defensive memorial. In doing so, the paper takes account of the historical background of the French collaboration with the Nazi occupant during the Second World War. A portrait of one of the major intellectuals of les années folles emerged; a character who consumed to the end his involvement with the new totalitarian cult. Through the forms of the text, the concealing of the style, the singular alteration of the genres between judicial fiction and literary truth, some essential aporias have been unravelled: aporias between different perspectives on law in the debate around purges. The text’s scandal is therefore revealed before the court, in conformity with democratic law procedures, with democracy itself, and, more deeply, in the negation of the concept of history’s justice.

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Author Biography

Emanuele Canzaniello, University of Bari
Emanuele Canzaniello graduated in comparative literature at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”. He is a specialist in French and European literature, nineteenth-century literature in particular, and is currently a PhD candidate in the same discipline at the Università di Bari“Aldo Moro”. His research focuses on the aesthetic of the novel inspired by the fascist ideology between France and Italy in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Published
2012-05-30
How to Cite
Canzaniello, E. (2012). Before the Law: Drieu La Rochelle’s Exorde. Between, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/390
Section
Literature and Human Rights