From fragmentation to unity, from unity to fragmentation. Imagination and ideology of the virile body in "Gilles" by Drieu la Rochelle

The crisis of the virile body that fuels Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's literary and political imagination resonates in Gilles in a particularly articulated way: on the one hand, the conflicts of the decadent society shift onto the character's body; on the other hand, Interwar France becomes a body agitated by contrasting tensions. As a figure in which several conflicting tensions coexist, the body is the ideal starting point for highlighting Gilles' semantic and semiotic autonomy from any excessively monological interpretation. All this without underestimating - or even denying - the presence of an ideological tension: the atomisation of identity makes the body an evanescent simulacrum which, far from coinciding with a series of somatic coordinates, can only become an object of interest insofar as it is subjected to a process of ideologisation. Such a view problematizes the strictly propagandistic configuration of fascist discourse, generally proceeding through a system of clear-cut oppositions. In Gilles, these fundamental antinomies are inscribed in a plot, that is to say, in an axiologically mobile network based on the coexistence of opposites. The issue of the virile body is thus linked to a conflicting tension, which, throughout the text, takes on both individual and collective value: the one between nostalgia for the aristocratic model and acceptance of petty bourgeois mediocrity.