Rethinking the French New Right

Alternatives to Modernity

Tamir Bar-On

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135966331
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the philosophy, politics and impact of the 'New Right' which originated in France and has since influenced activism, ideology and policy in a number of European countries.

This book explores the idea that revolutionaries do not necessarily need to come from the left, nor use arms in order to overturn liberal democracy. In the post-World War Two era, the extremists of the revolutionary right took three different paths: 1) parliamentary; 2) extra-parliamentary; and 3) metapolitical. The New Right (nouvelle droite – ND in France) took the metapolitical path, but that did not mean it abandoned its revolutionary desire to smash liberal democracy throughout Europe.

The book examines four interpretations of the New Right. These interpretations include the following: 1) The New Right as a fascist or quasi-fascist movement; 2) The New Right as a challenge to the traditional right-left dichotomy, which has structured European political debates for more than 200 years; 3) The New Right as an alternative modernist movement, which rejects liberal and socialist narratives of modernity; accepts the technical but not political or cultural effects of modernity; and longs for a pan-European political framework abolishing liberal multiculturalism and privileging ethnic dominance of so-called original Europeans; and 4) The New Right as a variant of political religion and conversionary processes. The book concludes by analysing the positions, cultural and political impact, and relationship to democracy of the New Right.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of racism, fascism, extremism, European politics, French politics and contemporary political theory.

1 The French New Right’s transnationalism¹

Ian Tyrrell (2007) posits that transnational history ‘concerns the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries’. Transnational history developed in the era after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the rise of sovereign nation-states, and democratic revolutions in the USA and France in 1776 and 1789, respectively. The aim of transnational history, reasons Tyrrell (2007), is to examine ‘the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation’. In short, transnational history is based on the premise that the nation competes for loyalty with other identities both within and outside the nation. For Sven Beckert (2006: 1459), the starting point of transnational history is ‘the interconnectedness of human history as a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states, empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces’. Let me offer three examples of transnational history. The first is the forced migration of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and the creation of Spanish-speaking Sephardic communities in diverse locations from Tangiers to Sarajevo and London to Antwerp. The second is the institution of three Communist Internationals in 1864, 1889, and 1919, respectively, which attempted to unite socialist movements, parties, and trade unions worldwide in a common front against capitalism. The third example is the attempt to create a ‘fascist international’ by elements of the Italian Fascist Party (Ledeen 1972; Sørensen and Mallet 2002).

The aim of this chapter is not to examine any of the three aforementioned transnational phenomena, but rather the historical trajectory and transnational impact of the French ND. Following Tyrrell, I use the ND to examine ‘the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation’. And, following Beckert, I focus on ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that transcend the importance of states.

As pointed out in the Introduction, the ND is neither a political party nor a violent extra-parliamentary outfit. Rather the ND is a cultural ‘school of thought’ dating back to 1968 and a metapolitical movement that originated largely as a synthesis of two ideological currents: the revolutionary right-wing CR (Griffin 1995: 351–4; Woods 1996) and the American and French NL (Bar-On 2001, 2007, 2008). The CR connotes non-Nazi fascisms of the interwar period. CR thinkers combined German ultra-nationalism, defence of the organic folk community, technological modernity, and socialist revisionism, which valorized the worker and soldier as models for a reborn authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian ‘decadence’ of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism. CR thinkers included Carl Schmitt (the Nazi crown jurist), Arthur Moeller van den bruck (inventor of the term ‘Third Reich’), and Ernst Jünger (ultra-nationalist war veteran who penned In Stahlgewittern [The Storm of Steel], a hymn to First World War soldierly virtues first privately printed in 1920). The term ‘Conservative Revolution’ was popularized by the Swiss-born philosopher Armin Mohler, who wrote a doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers in the late 1940s. The thesis was later revised and published by Mohler in 1972. Mohler called the CR thinkers the ‘Trotskyites of the German Revolution’ and was sympathetic to their brand of fascism (quoted in Griffin’s ‘German Nihilism’, 1995: 351). ND leader Alain de Benoist (2012: 214) correctly points to three different strains of the CR: young conservatives, national revolutionaries, and a Völkisch wing. De Benoist (2012: 215–16) was a fan of the CR because of their trenchant critique of liberalism; their attempts to reconcile the most redeeming features of ‘modernity’ and anti-modernity’, thus producing the expression ‘Conservative Revolution’; and their ethnic conservatism that was revolutionary and dynamic rather than based on a backward-looking nostalgia.

The ND has been shrouded in controversy, owing to its roots in French ultra-nationalism and attachment to CR authors who legitimized the Nazi regime (1933–45). As pointed out in the Introduction, de Benoist (2012: 215) has not helped matters by never fully breaking with CR thinkers, even suggesting in 2012 that the CR could have been a genuine ‘alternative’ to Nazism by pointing to CR thinkers who were ‘silenced’, ‘persecuted’, ‘imprisoned’, or ‘executed’ by the Nazi regime, yet conveniently failing to point out CR thinkers who were collaborators or fellow-travellers. In two polemical mass-media storms in France in 1979 and 1993, ND thinkers were bitterly attacked by the liberal and left-wing intelligentsia as racists or closet fascists (Bar-On 2007: 11). So, for example, in 1993 40 prominent European intellectuals signed ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’ in Le Monde, warning of the ND’s ‘dangerous’ post-Cold War strategy, which included its desire to form alliances with disgruntled communists. The ‘Appeal to Vigilance’ was signed by an additional 1,500 European intellectuals one year later. The ND was also accused of covert racism and fascism by the historian of fascism, Roger Griffin (2006: 23–5). ND doyen de Benoist claimed he was ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’, indifferent to the terms right and left, and that he sought to create a new political paradigm for a new millennium (de Benoist 1999b: 11–48, 1995a: 73–90). A scholar sympathetic to the ND argued that ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’ was the work of a left-wing intelligentsia fearful of the left’s total demise after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Adler 1993–4: 23–33).

A rich literature on the ND has grown up, mostly in French, but increasingly also in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and other languages (François 2008; Bar-On 2007; Woods 2007; Taguieff 1994; Sunic 1990). While the ND’s historical origins, ideological evolution, worldview, impact on civil society, and connections to fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and centre-right and radical right-wing populist parties have been analysed, a hitherto unexplored subject is the French movement’s transnational identity and impact. The ND helped to create a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the revolutionary right in an anti-fascist age; it nurtured the ‘politically correct’ discourse changes of radical right-wing political parties; and turned former French ultra-nationalists into ethnically fixated pan-Europeanists seeking to smash the egalitarian heritage of 1789. This chapter argues that the development of the ND worldview has been shaped by transnational influences, and that the ND itself in turn shaped a decidedly more right-wing political culture throughout Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND ideas has been a product of three key factors: first, the encyclopaedic intellectual output and prestige of ND leader Alain de Benoist; second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European project, which mimicked earlier attempts to unite the revolutionary right among interwar fascists and post-war neo-fascists in the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened by the decline of the European left and Communist regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

More to the point, the French ND has increasingly been called the European New Right to highlight the transnational impact of its ideas on the European continent generally (Bar-On 2007; Sacchi 1993–4; Sunic 1990). As the ND lost its influence in French politics after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained more transnational currency in the 1990s as new political opportunities emerged in the ‘Communism in ruins’ era for all political forces that rejected liberalism and the sole remaining superpower, the USA.

A history of the ND

The ND’s intellectual path has indeed been a unique one. In the 1960s, its leader Alain de Benoist was an ultra-nationalist sympathetic to the cause of French Algeria, to circles close to Vichy collaboration, to defence of the ‘white man’, and to the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia (Bar-On 2007: 21–32). In 1961 he met François d’Orcival, a journalist and member of the French neo-fascist organization Jeune Nation (Young Nation) founded in 1949. De Benoist later joined the vehemently anti-Marxist, ultra-nationalist, and pro-French Algeria Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN, Federation of Nationalist Students), which was founded in 1960 by d’Orcival and other revolutionary nationalists. In 1962, de Benoist became the editor of Cahiers universitaires, the journal published by FEN.

In Mémoire vive, de Benoist recalled with nostalgia his FEN days: ‘I loved the electric atmosphere of the demonstrations, the movements of the crowds, the way the slogans and cries propagated, the confrontations with the police, the smell of tear gas’ (2012: 64, my translation). He was especially impressed by the original, ‘revolutionary style’ of FEN; its attempt to create ‘revolutionary soldiers’; its ‘sacerdotal character’ in the spirit of revolutionaries such as Georges Sorel and Vladimir Lenin; and its conception of participating in politics as if one belonged to a ‘religion’ (de Benoist 2012: 65). In Chapter 5, I return to this point when I examine the ND’s quest for a new ‘religion of politics’ (conceptual tool three). Finally, de Benoist (2012: 71) insisted that at the time FEN and other ultra-nationalist groups used the French Algeria cause as a way to spark a revolution; a ‘second French Revolution’. He stated that in his youth he was for the ultra-nationalist, pro-French Algeria Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organization), but had he been Algerian he would have been for the ‘terrorist’, pro-independence Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) (de Benoist 2012: 72). The OAS engaged in armed struggle in its campaign to maintain French Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the early 1960s, de Benoist also met Dominique Venner, a founder of Europe-Action, which was both a revolutionary right-wing organization and journal from 1963 to 1967. Europe-Action imbued French revolutionary right-wing militants with a new pan-national Europeanism and adopted the turn away from narrow nationalism espoused by the French neo-fascist writer Maurice Bardèche (1907–98). It should be noted that Venner’s father was a member of the Parti populaire français (PPF), a French fascist party founded by Jacques Doriot in 1936 that collaborated with Nazi Germany. De Benoist wrote articles for Europe-Action, which included an assortment of former Vichy collaborators and OAS supporters. In his manifesto ‘Pour une critique positive’, penned in 1962, Venner sought to redefine French nationalism by giving it a more pan-European flavour (that is, a ‘European nation’) (de Benoist 2012: 89), while also questioning the value of the sterile path that the ultra-nationalist milieu was taking following the loss of French Algeria that year (Griffin 1998). Venner also influenced de Benoist’s ethnic differentialist positions, which in the 1970s held that the right should be for white power, but also for yellow and red power (de Benoist 1979: 156). Numerous Europe-Action and Jeune Nation activists became supporters of the ND during those years.

Between 4 and 5 May 1968 in the French city of Lyon, de Benoist and almost 40 other ultra-nationalists helped found Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE, Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the ND’s principal think tank. De Benoist (2012: 106) pointed out that of the 36 founding members of GRECE, 27 were from the ultra-nationalist, militant, and pro-French Algeria FEN or its affiliated journal Cahiers universitaires. For de Benoist (2012: 109), GRECE was a ‘synthesis’ of the leftist Frankfurt School, the extreme right-wing inspiration of the royalist Action française, and the prestigious academic ‘neutrality’ of Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Thus began the ND’s process of Europeanization and metapoliticization of the revolutionary right; a process rejected by more radical and pragmatic sectors of the revolutionary right. The following year, de Benoist, Pierre Vial, and Jean-Claude Valla, two prominent future secretary-generals, established GRECE as a legal organization. The name of the think tank suggested a more European path for the revolutionary right, and hinted at restoration of the glories of an Indo-European civilization. When GRECE was founded, its aims were four-fold: (1) to reorient the ultra-nationalist French political milieu towards greater doctrinal sophistication and the transcendence of internecine conflicts between various ultra-nationalist tendencies; (2) to reject the right’s dominant parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods of seizing power; (3) to regain cultural power from the liberal-left by seizing the ‘laboratories of thought’ throughout Europe in a right-wing Gramscian spirit, and to restore credibility to the revolutionary right-wing milieu battered by the excesses of fascist race laws and the Holocaust; and (4) to rethink the dominant ideological legacy of the ultra-nationalist right, which tended to be based on ethnic, biological, or racist conceptions of the nation and to be associated with militaristic expansionism.

De Benoist (2012: 272) argued that GRECE’s metapolitical vocation was essential because the right in France was ‘seriously de-legitimized’, ‘discredited’, and viewed with ‘suspicion’ after being twice ‘decapitated’: after the Liberation from Nazism and the Algerian War. He acknowledged that the right would have to use new language and ‘take its distance vis-à-vis its heritage’ (2012: 272). Influenced by Bardèche (1961: 175–6), who paradoxically openly declared his fascism, de Benoist understood that one day fascism might re-emerge with ‘another name, another face’. Moreover, he argued (2012: 101) that by 1963, while still with Europe-Action, the future ND learned two key lessons from the Algerian War and the OAS struggle: (1) the best political path was the ‘combat of ideas’; and (2) revolutionary violence is only useful in ‘objectively revolutionary circumstances’ and, if those ‘circumstances’ do not exist, you merely prop up the ‘established disorder’.

While de Benoist and most members of GRECE came from the extreme right, they recognized that times had changed and that post-war Europe was firmly anti-fascist politically and culturally more liberal and left-wing. The spectacular events of May 1968 in which ten million French men and women brought France to a standstill and threatened revolution convinced de Benoist and company that the liberal-left held the key to power in France, since it now supposedly controlled the schools, universities, media, and the thinking of the key state elites. De Benoist (1979: 258–9, 456–60) argued that the right was wrong to think that either elections or terrorist violence were the ways to power; following the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), it was ‘cultural hegemony’ in civil society – control of dominant values, attitudes, and ways of seeing and being – that promised long-term, durable power. Capture the hearts and minds of the masses, as well as key elites, and liberal democracy would fall, reasoned de Benoist. May 1968 was a success, he argued, because liberal and leftist elites were able to capture the levers of cultural power in civil society. He insisted that, when cultural power in civil society becomes divorced from the values of those in the state, a revolution would become far more plausible.

In 1968, rightists de Benoist and GRECE were still reeling from the loss of French Algeria and the weak showing of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, the extreme right-wing candidate who gained 5.2 per cent of the popular vote in the 1965 French presidential elections. Although de Benoist ideologically rejected the NL and Maoist protesters of 1968, he envied them because, like them, he wished to abolish liberal democracy and sought a ‘third way’ politically and economically that rejected the hegemony of the two superpowers, but because the protesters had cultural power, the key to political power, their protests were able to have an impact that was felt well beyond the borders of France, in a spirit of transnational protest, in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the USA, and elsewhere.

With a combination of hatred and sheer envy for the 1968ers (GRECE 1998), then, de Benoist embarked on the project of reorienting the entire culture of the ultra-nationalistic right. What interests us here is that he founded ND journals that were read by followers of the ultra-nationalistic milieu in France and around Europe. De Benoist’s prestige rose throughout Europe in the mid-1970s when Le Figaro opened its pages to him. When he won France’s highest literary prize from the Académie française in 1978 for Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), his star status catapulted him into the consciousness of a Europe-wide reading audience. His works were translated into numerous languages, from Spanish and English to Italian and Croatian. This allowed ND ideas to be transmitted beyond a narrow milieu in France. It is estimated that Vu de droite alone has sold more than 25,000 copies throughout Europe (de Benoist 2002). In addition, GRECE’s Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite showed the degree to which French, German, Italian, and Croatian ultra-nationalists of the period shared a hostility for the 1968 generation for ‘selling out’, while praising themselves and ‘real 1968ers’ such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (currently a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party) for not betraying their youthful ideals (GRECE 1998). Today the 1968ers shamelessly defend capitalism and wars of humanitarian intervention, insisted de Benoist, thus necessitating a ‘second May 1968’; a second revolution to overthrow liberalism and capitalism (de Benoist 2012: 107–8).

In 1969 de Benoist created the first ND journal, Nouvelle École (New School). The name was based on a historical reference to Georges Sorel’s ‘new school’ of revolutionary syndicalism (de Benoist 2012: 104). Nouvelle École made sure to avoid the ‘outdated vocabulary’ associated with fascism, racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism in order to restore the right’s credibility. Following the launch of Éléments in 1973, a third ND journal, Krisis, was introduced by de Benoist in 1988. Krisis in Greek connotes ‘tear’, ‘choice’, or ‘decision’. With the launch of Krisis the ND doyen announced a new phase in the ND’s intellectual development; the ‘changing of an epoch’ as modernity was ending and postmodernity was beginning (conceptual tool two); and the right–left political divide would be superseded by a new political synthesis (conceptual tool one) (de Benoist 2012: 143). From the 1970s to the early 1980s, de Benoist wrote regularly in Le Figaro and Spectacle du Monde. He estimates that at the ND’s height in 1979 Figaro-Magazine could boast two to three million readers (de Benoist 2012: 129). From 1980 to 1992, the ND leader was a regular guest on Le Panorama, a radio show broadcast daily on France Culture. Moreover, he was the director of several publishing concerns, including Éditions Copernic (1977–81), Éditions de Labyrinthe (since 1982), Éditions Pardès (1989–93), and L’Âge d’Homme (since 2003). Copernic and Labyrinthe are the publishing arms of GRECE, while Pardès promoted ND paganism, traditionalism, and the cause of Julius Evola (1898– 1974) (François 2005: 224–33). Evola was an Italian philosopher who wrote Fascist Italy’s manifesto of ‘spiritual racism’; he was a hero to the neo-fascist milieu after the war; and although de Benoist rejected Traditionalism² per se, Evola influenced his pagan, anti-Western traditionalism.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The French New Right’s transnationalism
• 2. Neither right, nor left?
• 3. Modern, postmodern, premodern
• 4. The search for alternative modernity
• 5. The quest for a new religion of politics
• 6. ‘Europe for Europeans’
• 7. Analysing ‘The New Right for the Year 2000’
• 8. Three key messengers
• 9. Ties to radical right populist parties
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index