Pierre Lasserre

Pierre Lasserre (1867–1930) was a French literary critic, journalist and essayist. He became Director of the École des Hautes-Études.

He was an agrégé in philosophy, contemporary with Henri Vaugeois and Louis Dimier. As a young man he was a strong nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard. He was the leading literary critic of Action française and the author of the first work on Charles Maurras. Along with Georges Valois, Lasserre was one of the first to work to incorporate Nietzschean themes into neoroyalism.

Biography

Lasserre defended neo-classicism against romanticism, which he tied to the ideals of the French Revolution. He upheld a controversial thesis on this topic in 1907, on French Romanticism, at the University of Paris. Part of his general argument, that the French romantics had damaged the concept of monarchy, was influenced from the side of the Action Française and Maurras. That strand of anti-romanticism, close to that of the essayist Ernest Seillière and the counterrevolutionary tradition, later affected Carl Schmitt and his Politische Romantik of 1921.

Up to World War I, Lasserre was a militant, associating with Charles Péguy and digesting the ideas of Georges Sorel. He opposed the trend of modernisation in the university system, supporting classical and humane studies. His colleagues Henri Massis and Alfred de Tard were concerned also at the perceived falling away of classics at the Sorbonne.

In 1914, Lasserre broke with Maurras and the Action française. Others in the circle had made much of a crude form of his arguments on romanticism: Louis Reynaud had claimed German romanticism was corrupting of contemporary French culture, and Lasserre was Germanophile and not a subscriber to the nationalist line of the Action française.