His father was an unsuccessful lawyer[3] who relied on his wife's dowry[4] and ended up squandering it, being "responsible for a sharp decline in the family's social status" by the time of his son's adolescence.

Sympathetic to Dada and to the Surrealists and the Communists, and a close friend of Louis Aragon in the 1920s, he was also interested in the royalist Action Française, but refused to adhere to any one of these political currents.

In Drieu's political writings, he argued that the parliamentary system (the gouvernement d'assemblée of the French Third Republic) was responsible for what he saw as the "decadence" of France (economic crisis, declining birth rates, etc.).

In his essays "Le Jeune Européen" ("European Youth", 1927) and "Genève ou Moscou" ("Geneva or Moscow", 1928), Drieu La Rochelle advocated a strong Europe and denounced the "decadent materialism" of democracy.

As late as 1931, in his essay L'Europe contre les patries ("Europe Against the homelands"), Drieu was writing as an anti-Hitlerian, but by 1934, especially after the 6 February 1934 riots organized by far right leagues before the Palais Bourbon, and then a visit to Nazi Germany in September 1935 (where he witnessed the Reichsparteitag rally in Nuremberg), he embraced Nazism as an antidote to the "mediocrity" of liberal democracy.

During the occupation of Paris, Drieu succeeded Jean Paulhan (whom he saved twice from the hands of the Gestapo) as director of the Nouvelle Revue Française and thus became a leading figure of French cultural collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, who he hoped would become the leader of a "Fascist International".