Bertrand was the heir of an old family from the French nobility, coming from the
Champagne region. He was the son of
Henri de Jouvenel and Sarah Boas, the daughter of a Jewish industrialist. Henri divorced Sarah in 1912 to become the second husband of French writer
Colette. In 1920, when he was only 16, Bertrand began an affair with his stepmother, who was then in her late 40s. The affair ended Colette and Henri's marriage and caused a scandal. It lasted until 1924. 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. Their affair actually inspired Colette's novel
Le Blé en herbe. In the 1930s, he participated in the
Cahiers Bleus, the review of
Georges Valois'
Republican Syndicalist Party. From 1930 to 1934, Jouvenel had an affair with the American war correspondent
Martha Gellhorn. They would have married had his wife agreed to a divorce. 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. Other personalities to offer support were Professor
Langevin, the
Joliot–
Curies and
André Malraux. However, that same year, Jouvenel was impressed by the
riot of the antiparliamentary leagues that occurred on 6 February 1934, became disillusioned with traditional political parties and left the Radical Party. He began a paper with
Pierre Andreu called
La Lutte des jeunes (The Struggle of the Young) while at the same time contributing to the right wing paper
Gringoire, for which he covered the 1935 Nuremberg Congress in Germany where the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed. He began frequenting royalist and nationalist circles, where he met
Henri de Man and
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. He was in favour of Franco-German rapprochement and created the "Cercle du grand pavois", which supported the
Comité France–Allemagne (Franco-German Committee). Here he became friends with
Otto Abetz, the future German ambassador to Paris during the occupation. In February 1936 he interviewed Adolf Hitler for the journal
Paris-Midi, for which he was criticised for being too friendly to the dictator. That same year he joined
Jacques Doriot's
Parti populaire français (PPF). He became the editor in chief of its journal ''L'Émancipation nationale'' (National Emancipation), wherein he supported fascism. He broke with the PPF in 1938 when Doriot supported the Munich Agreement. 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. He fled to Switzerland just before the liberation of Paris by the Allies. Jouvenel was among the very few French intellectuals to pay respectful attention to the economic theory and
welfare economics that emerged during the first half of the 20th century in Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, he is against government-enforced redistribution in his work
The Ethics of Redistribution. Jouvenel's mother passionately supported Czechoslovak 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. Later in life, de Jouvenel established the Futuribles International in Paris.
Dennis Hale of Boston College has co-edited two volumes of essays by Jouvenel. Later in his life, Jouvenel's views shifted back to the left. 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." He was sympathetic to the
student protests of 1968 and critical of the
Vietnam War. He also expressed support for the Socialist
François Mitterrand. ==Bibliography==