Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

Tamir Bar-On

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754671541
• eBook ISBN: 9781351873130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Intellectual European New Right (ENR), also known as the nouvelle droite, is a cultural school of thought with origins in the revolutionary Right and neo-fascist milieux. Born in France in 1968, it situated itself in a Gramscian mould exclusively on the cultural terrain of political contestation in order to challenge the apparent ideological hegemony of dominant liberal and leftist elites. It also sought to escape the ghetto status of a revolutionary Right milieu wedded to violent extra-parliamentary politics and battered by the legacies of Fascism and Nazism. This study traces the cultural, philosophical, political and historical trajectories of the French nouvelle droite in particular and the ENR in general. It examines the ENR worldview as an ambiguous synthesis of the ideals of the revolutionary Right and New Left. ENR themes related to the loss of cultural identity and immigration have appealed to anti-immigrant political parties throughout Europe. In a post 9/11 climate, as well as an age of rising economic globalization and cultural homogenization, its anti-capitalist ideas embedded within the framework of cultural preservation might make further political inroads into the Europe of the future.

Chapter 1
The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins: The Right-Wing Roots

A form of resistance to transcendence.
– Ernst Nolte’s minimal definition of fascism

In 1988, German historian Ernst Nolte’s automobile was set on fire. The car was parked at the Free University in Berlin, where Nolte is a professor. An anonymous letter, which was sent to a Berlin news agency, declared: “It is useless to argue with such characters. It only legitimates their status as pseudo-scholars, thereby reducing debate to ‘academic disputes’ and disguising their role as imperialist agents within the university and beyond” (Zitelmann 1995, 32). “We attack Nolte because he is one of those who personally represents the continuity of fascism,” the letter continued.

Nolte was a major figure in West Germany’s “historian’s dispute” (1986-7) between revisionist scholars who called for a more “objective” examination of modern German history and left-wing academics such as Jürgen Habermas, who reject any “neutral” discussion of the Nazi era. While a large category of historians both in Germany and abroad from Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen to Ian Kershaw and Michael Marrus denounced Nolte, historians Klaus Hildebrand and Hagen Schulze came to his defence. Nolte was widely criticised for his position that Germany’s Final Solution against the Jews during World War Two, which he admits was one of “widespread liquidation,” was no more unique than other mass genocides in history. He sees Nazism as a copycat totalitarianism that was merely reacting to the greater threat from the Bolshevik Soviet Union. Nolte insists that the moral dividing line between the “social extermination” of the gulags and “biological extermination” of Auschwitz is not pronounced in reality (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 69). The German scholar has been accused of ignoring Nazism’s evil particularism, normalising Germany’s past and more ominously, seeking to revive German nationalism. Unlike Nolte, the writer, chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (1919-87) insisted on the evil particularism of Nazism. Levi argued that while Nazi and Soviet camps mirrored each other in terms of the hard physical work, poor rations and “models of hell,” the death rates of the Lager (Nazi concentration camps) in contrast to the Soviet regime’s gulags were higher and the aim of the former was the complete elimination of the Jews as a racial rather than religious group (Levi 1987).

For Nolte, fascism which was officially born in 1919 with the founding of the Italian Fascist Party in the aftermath of Italian and German national defeats, feeds off the rise of the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917. It is a revolutionary imitation of communism or a “mimicry of Bolshevism,” to cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty writing in 1947 (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 47). Nolte’s greatest taboo is to question the number of deaths at Auschwitz while not denying the existence of the gas chambers. His other great taboo is to claim that there was a “rational core of Nazi anti-Judaism,” which Nolte relates to the Nazi appraisal of communism and capitalism as anti-national, materialist, universalist and Jewish movements (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 29). Nolte cites the disproportionate role played by Jews in leadership positions in the Bolshevik Revolution ignited the ire of ultra-nationalists like Hitler, who claimed that “Jews pulled the strings of world history.” Furet rightly points out that the October Revolution might have been Hitler’s pretext to use the Jews as a scapegoat, but Christian anti-Semitism and the critique of the Jew hiding behind abstract universality and the Rights of Man predated the 1917 Revolution (Furet in Nolte and Furet 2001, 60-1).

When ENR thinker Alain de Benoist came to deliver a lecture in Berlin in February 1993, he was shockingly beaten by Autonomen, far left-wing, anti-fascist militants (Zitelmann 1995, 32). In 1998, de Benoist mirrored Nolte’s revisionist approach in an essay “Nazism and Communism: Evil Twins?” (De Benoist 1998, 15-24). Post-war German youth in both West and East had been reared on a state-supported anti-fascist, anti-Nazi ideology, which nourished feelings of guilt and hate vis-à-vis their parents for participating in the excesses of Nazism. The Autonomen, as well as other radical left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) or Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s, were militant, violent anti-fascists. One former female RAF member told one academic: “We hated our parents because they were former Nazis, who had never come clean about their past” (Hudson 1999, 44). Since Nazism was the most extreme permutation of fascism, it was no accident that in the post-war era the most militant anti-fascism should come from Germany.

As scholars on the right, Nolte and de Benoist have paid a price in an era when anti-fascism became the unifying ideology. To be a man on the right risked the fascism label. Yet, even in France the anti-fascist credo was more mythical than real. Far right-wing and fascist ideas flourished in France between the wars. For historian Ze’ev Sternhell, fascism was born in France rather than Germany or Italy and it was not merely an ideology of the right (Sternhell 1995). Fascism, Sternhell argued, was a union of constant revision of anti-Marxist socialism by left-wing dissidents and ultra-nationalism.

Although France is the birthplace of the 1789 Revolution and the universal declaration of the Rights of Man, it is simultaneously the nation with one of the most historically potent and sophisticated revolutionary right-wing traditions in Europe. These revolutionary right-wing traditions are united by a vehement counter-revolutionary ethic, a sort of anti-1789 stance, in relation to the most basic principles of the French Revolution and Enlightenment-based ideals, such as science, reason, personal and societal moral betterment, universalism and linear visions of “progress.” Nolte once described this revolutionary right-wing rejection of the Enlightenment tradition and progress (including fascism and Nazism) as a practical and violent “form of resistance to transcendence” (Nolte 1965). For Nolte, fascism meant “hostility to liberalism’s and socialism’s a priori vision of a ‘new man’, radically uprooted from tradition” (Nolte in Eatwell, 2003).

Many of the leading French New Right thinkers, including its head Alain de Benoist, have their origins in the anti-Enlightenment, revolutionary right and ultra-nationalist milieux of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the struggle for French Algeria. In this period, some French New Right thinkers were filled with sympathy or lingering nostalgia for the Vichy collaborationists of the 1940s, the French and German “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s and even certain aspects of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. A number of contemporary French New Right thinkers continue to look for revolutionary inspiration from a number of these right-wing traditions. As Tomislav Sunic has neatly explained, although the ENR does not explicitly profess any of these aforementioned currents of thought, in reality it remains indebted to all of them (Sunic 1990, 6).

This chapter will seek to highlight the most important revolutionary right-wing strains of thought within France and Europe generally in order to situate the right-wing historical and ideological origins of the ENR. This is especially important if we are to understand the polemical storms surrounding ENR ideas, which many on the left viewed as a sophisticated form of fascism.

The main argument of the first four chapters and this work more generally, then, is that the French New Right and ENR have been shaped by an ambiguous set of intellectual and political legacies. On the one hand, the French New Right and ENR have been influenced by the political and intellectual heritages of both French and continental European right-wing traditions. Yet, on the other hand, formed in 1968 shortly before the student and worker revolts, the French New Right and ENR have been deeply shaped by the cultural, intellectual and political trajectory and fortunes of the French Left and New Left. In addition, the French New Right has displayed a measure of sympathy for the revolutionary left because it shares with it a common anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-materialist and radical stance vis-à-vis the liberal democratic system. It is my argument that the interaction and dynamic relationship between right and left in France has seriously shaped the evolution of the French New Right and ENR in general. The years of left-wing and anarchist student and worker agitation in 1968 and the “earthquake” Socialist electoral victory of François Mitterrand in France in 1981 loom particularly large in my analysis. These two dates are critical for the evolution of the French New Right. In short, the years 1968 and, to a lesser extent, 1981, have radically shaped the intellectual, cultural and political choices of the French New Right and ENR in general.

Ideological Origins: The Counter-Revolution Against 1789

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
– Joseph de Maistre

The Frenchman Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was the earliest and leading theoretician of the traditionalist, anti-Enlightenment counter-revolutionary heritage, which waged a metapolitical “war” on the entire metaphysical edifice of the liberal French Revolution and the “abstract” notion of individual or human rights. Exiled to Switzerland by the French Revolution and later a member of the Russian court in St. Petersburg for 14 years, his best work, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (1821), acclaimed the public executioner as the ultimate guardian of the social order. He remained convinced of the need for the conservation of tradition, the supremacy of Christianity and the absolute rule of both sovereign and pope. Attacking the ideas of liberal philosophes such as Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, de Maistre rallied all his life against Enlightenment-driven notions, especially their faith in science, empiricism, humanity and progress.

One of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, Isaiah Berlin, has even argued that de Maistre was an early precursor of fascism (Berlin 1991): The shared pessimistic and apocalyptic vision of life, the gloomy world of an eternal graveyard of executioners and executionees (or friends and foes), the violent revolutionary ethos tinged with traditionalism, complete individual self-abnegation to a higher reality (i.e., god or nation), the intense anti-egalitarianism and anti-humanism, and the complete hatred of the “decadent,” materialist “disorders” of liberalism and democracy. Despite the fervent Catholicism of de Maistre, Paul Gottfried highlights how ENR publications abound with praise for Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as de Maistre and the Spanish statesman and theologian Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-1853). Both are critics of the French Revolution, its “debilitating” egalitarianism, “abstract” individualism and “intolerant, revolutionary universalism” (Gottfried in Sunic 1990, “Preface,” ix-x).

In addition, France rather than Germany is cited by some scholars as the theoretical birthplace of “scientific racism” (Weinberg 1987). The French thinker Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) is the most representative figure of this school of “scientific racism” and is renowned for the publication of his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-1855). In this four-volume text, Gobineau asserted that the fate of civilizations is determined by racial composition and that Aryan societies flourish as long as they remain free of yellow and black racial strains. Gobineau also claimed that the more a civilization’s racial character is diluted through miscegenation the more likely it is to lose its creativity and vitality and sink into the wilderness of corruption, immorality and decadence. His racial thinking had a wide influence on hyper-nationalist, völkisch German circles, including Adolf Hitler who turned to Gobineau for inspiration. While Gobineau was largely concerned with a scholarly examination of human social life rather than racial political programs, he did influence the racialist thinking of Richard Wagner, the English racist politician Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolf Hilter’s “guiding star” and “the spiritual father of National Socialism” Dietrich Eckart.

A number of French New Right thinkers, including Alain de Benoist, embraced this racialist and colonialist thinking in the 1950s and 1960s through ultra-nationalist, pro-Western and pan-European publications such as Défense de l’Occident and Europe Action. In his major work Vu de droite, de Benoist devotes several pages to Arthur Gobineau. He claims that Gobineau is “the victim of a double prejudice,” which only sees him as the author of Essay on the Inequality of Human Races and this work as “the bible of a perverse racism;” or neglects to explain that the French writer was one of the “fathers” of federalism, the theory of elites and “the first important visionary of racial conflict” (De Benoist 1979b, 261-64).

In the twentieth century, prominent French writers Maurice Barrès (1862-1923) and charles Maurras (1868-1952) both gave French ultra-nationalist ideology its theoretical foundations and aura of respectability. sternhell has argued that both thinkers helped to pave the ideological groundwork for the fascist synthesis between ultra-nationalism and socialism (Sternhell 1978). Barrès nurtured an entire generation on the mythic solidarity of the national community; the quasi-mystical legend of the eternal unity of the “blood, soil, and dead.” Barrés had his roots in the short-lived revanchist movement of General Georges Boulanger (1837-1891), the former French Minister of War between 1886 and 1887, and the leading figure of a right-wing protest movement, which firmly rejected the notion of parliamentarism in favour of direct populism. Sternhell argues that Barrès broke with traditional conservatism to create a new revolutionary right-wing discourse combining a Nietzschean struggle against the French Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism, Kantian ethics, the Rights of Man, liberal democracy and progress that presaged fascism (Sternhell 1972).

Maurras was the leader of the influential neo-royalist, anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist inter-war movement, Action française, founded in 1898. Like his predecessor Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) who published the infamous anti-Semitic, conspiracy tract La France juive (1886) and was elected a deputy of Algiers in 1898, Maurras was deeply committed to Catholicism and royalism in order to safeguard the “honour” of the French nation and save it from “decadent” materialism, liberalism and parliamentarism. Nolte argues that when the anti-clerical Maurras and his Action française movement were ostracized by the Vatican hierarchy in Rome in 1926 this was a decisive turn from a Catholic conservative nationalism towards revolutionary fascism (Nolte 1965).

Barrès and Maurras were firmly rooted in the anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-individualist and anti-Dreyfusard camp, which attempted to completely sabotage and transform the revolutionary heritage of 1789. For Nolte, the Action française is a precursor of Italian Fascism and German Nazism and a fascist movement, or what he views as a deeply reactionary, anti-emancipatory movement whose fundamental aim was the annihilation of Marxism (Nolte 1965). In the tumult of the inter-war years, the Action française paved the way for a constellation of France’s extreme right-wing political forces, including numerous ultra-nationalist and fascist leagues (e.g., François de La Rocque’s immensely popular Croix-de-Feu, Jean Renaud’s Solidarité française, Bucard’s Le Francisme, etc.) (Soucy 1986). These ultra-nationalist leagues would constantly threaten the future of French parliamentary democracy. They contributed greatly to the project of derailing French liberal democracy and the legacy of 1789. The French defeat in 1940 and the emergence of the anti-liberal, anti-democratic Vichy collaborationist regime helped to fulfil the revolutionary aspirations of the ultra-nationalist leagues.

French scholars René Rémond and Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol have observed a close resemblance between the role of Charles Maurras in the Action française and Alain de Benoist with the nouvelle droite: the similar focus on the intellectual domain, the idea of the primacy of the “cultural war” and the vision of an elite-based cultural group in hostile conflict with the dominant political and intellectual establishment (Rémond 1982, 283-89; Duranton-Crabol 1988, 22-3). The major difference between Maurras and de Benoist, however, was that the latter rejected the rigid Catholic clericalism and assimilationist nationalism of the former in favour of an anti-religious, pagan Nietzscheanism. While Maurras was an agnostic officially ostracized by the Catholic Church in Rome, he thought that it was imperative to stress the royalist and Catholic roots of France because they remained an integral part of the French nation’s cultural identity and created a vast reservoir of potential for popular, ultra-nationalist agitation against French parliamentarism and the heritage of 1789. De Benoist, on the other hand, totally rejected Christianity in both its religious and secular manifestations, while instead espoused an affinity with the pre-Christian, pagan period. In 2001, de Benoist gave a long interview to Bulletin Charles Maurras in which he argued that Maurras was not a racist in the classical sense of term, while situating his own thought within the European imperial model (De Benoist 2001b).

Moreover, recent French historiography has shown that, contrary to the mainstream thesis of Réne Rémond French fascism was not a minor, imported ideology (Remond 1982). Numerous scholars such as Ze’ev Sternhell and William Irvine have challenged this prevalent French academic view of fascism as a “paranthesis” in French history. For Sternhell, between 1885 and the eve of World War One in 1914, it was France that was the birthplace of the “neither right, nor left” fascist ideological synthesis (Sternhell 1985). Irvine and other scholars, on the other hand, claim that fascism was both widespread in France during the inter-war years and clearly on the political right rather than among dissident French leftists attempting to revise Marxism (Wohl 1991). Irvine and Sternhell stand united against Rémond’s traditionalist thesis of French fascism as a minor, imported ideology, although the two scholars part on Sternhell’s insistence that French fascism has predominantly left-wing roots. Both Sternhell and Irvine triggered a new wave of scholarship documenting the mainstream nature of nativist manifestations of extreme-right and fascist ideology in France during the inter-war years, especially the extra-parliamentary leagues such as the Croix-de-Feu, Action française and Jeunesses Patriotes. For these scholars, then, the French right includes native, French strains of fascism and ultra-nationalism along with Rémond’s traditional classification of three right-wing traditions within the country: monarchist, liberal Orleanist and Bonapartist (Rémond 1982).

Originating from the right, the French New Right was well-placed to borrow from the thought of French inter-war era political fascists such as Georges Valois, Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat; cultural fascists such as Henri Montherlant, Robert Brasillach and Drieu de la Rochelle; or other French “non-conformists” of the 1920s or 1930s like Georges Sorel, which could express sympathy for either radical right or left as a result of their common anti-materialist idealism, hatred of liberal democracy and capitalism and revolutionary longings. The examination of cultural fascists was an integral part of de Benoist’s progression as a Paris university student writing in the early 1960s for the ultra-nationalist journal Cahiers universitaires, an inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins: The Right-Wing Roots
• 2 The ENR’s Birth and Development in France: A New Right?
• 3 The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Opening to the Left
• 4 The ENR and the Legacy of May 1968 – A Critical Turning Point
• 5 ENR Influences and Worldview: The Primacy of Metapolitics and the “Right to Difference”
• 6 Ambiguities in the ENR Worldview
• 7 Interpreting the ENR
• 8 The Influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe and Beyond: A Right-Wing International?
• 9 The ENR’s Relationship to the Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascism
• 10 Treason of the Intellectuals?
• Conclusion
• Reference
• Index