Bertrand de Jouvenel

Some believe Bertrand to be the role model for the title character in Colette's novel Chéri, but in fact she had published about half the book, in serial form, before she and her stepson met for the first time, in the spring of 1920.

[3] In his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler recalled that in 1934, Jouvenel was among a small number of French intellectuals who promised moral and financial support to the newly established Institut pour l'Étude du Fascisme, a supposedly self-financing enterprise.

He began frequenting royalist and nationalist circles, where he met Henri de Man and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

[citation needed] That same year he joined Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français (PPF).

After the French defeat in 1940 Jouvenel stayed in Paris and under German occupation published Après la Défaite, calling for France to join Hitler's New Order.

Jouvenel's mother passionately supported Czechoslovakian independence, and so he began his career as a private secretary to Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia's first prime minister.

In 1947, along with Friedrich Hayek, Jacques Rueff, and Milton Friedman, he founded the Mont Pelerin Society.

In 1960, he complained to Milton Friedman that the Mont Pelerin Society had "turned increasingly to a Manichaeism according to which the state can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong.