Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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De Benoist, who is keen on genealogy, says his father belonged to the
nobility, with roots from the Middle Ages in what is now Belgium. His
mother came from the lower middle class, her ancestors being fishermen
and peasants from Normandy and Brittany. Jean- Yves Le Gallou, another
intellectual figure in the French New Right, writes that the reason for de
Benoist’s avowed contempt for the bourgeoisie lies in this family back-
ground,7 and de Benoist himself admits that his socially mixed family
made him aware at an early age that he could not bear the upper class’s
contempt for the common man.
From the age of fifteen, de Benoist was attracted to the nationalist
Right, at first in the context of the war in Algeria and the return to power
of General de Gaulle. He started work as a journalist by contributing to
Henry Coston’s magazine Lectures françaises ( French Readings) in 1960,8
but always stayed away from Coston’s belief in conspiracy theories (espe-
cially involving Freemasonry and the Jews) and his strident anti- Semitism.
Often using the pseudonym “Fabrice Laroche” (and later “Robert de Herte,”
as well as a few others) he found a political home in activist movements
such as the Federation of Nationalist Students (Federation des étudiants
nationalistes, FEN) and Europe- Action, which fought to keep Algeria
French.
After Algeria became independent in 1962, de Benoist was among
those who decided to break with the useless street activism of the fringe
extreme Right and to focus on “metapolitics,” borrowing Antonio
Gramsci’s idea that ideological hegemony is a precondition for polit-
ical victory. De Benoist explains that “all the big revolutions in history
did no more than transpose into facts an evolution that had already
taken place in minds, in an underlying manner.”9 Both parliamentary
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75
politics and street activism can only have short- term consequences
and, if one really wants one’s ideas to shape society, one has to work
on ideas first. This, and de Benoist’s belief that petty French nation-
alism had to be replaced by European nationalism, led him to become
the main founding member of GRECE (Groupement de recherche et
d’études pour la civilisation européenne/ Research and Study Group
for European Civilization), the intellectual think tank of the French
New Right.10 GRECE had a political influence on conservative and
liberal parties between 1975 and 1980, and later gave birth to sister
movements in, among others Italy (Nuova Destra with Marco Tarchi),
Germany (Neue Rechte, with Henning Eichberg and today, the weekly
Junge Freiheit, to which de Benoist contributes), Flanders (with Luc
Pauwels and the magazine TeKos– Tekste, Kommentaren en Studies) and
the French- speaking part of Belgium (GRECE- Belgique with Georges
Hupin and then Robert Steuckers).11 It also has an influence in the US,
where he was introduced and published by the late Paul Piccone of the
New Left magazine, Telos, starting in 1992– 93.
In 1979 and 1993, two press campaigns in the French liberal media
damaged de Benoist’s influence in France by alleging that he and GRECE
were “closet Fascists” or even “Nazis” who hid their beliefs in a racist,
antiegalitarian Weltanschauung aimed at reformulating völkisch ideas
in a seemingly acceptable way by replacing the hierarchy of races with
“ethnodifferentialism.” Since that time, although still a frequent commen-
tator on French politics and as such someone who keeps an interest in the
role of the Front national (National Front), de Benoist has focused on his
intellectual activity, trying to be the key thinker of a nonconventional Right
and a critic of globalization, postmodern society, and— above all— the
“ideology of sameness.” He rejects politically correct anti- racism on the
grounds that it ultimately leads to the eradication of the very same “right
to be different” that it seeks to implement. His criticism of globalization
and free- market economics has led him to translate and publish such non-
conformist Marxists or Progressives as Costanzo Preve12 and Danilo Zolo.
Since 1988, through the quarterly magazine Krisis, he has also tried to
build a bridge between the New Right and some of the academics who
write in La Revue du MAUSS, 13 and has positively received the thought of
Christopher Lasch, with whom he agreed on participatory democracy and
the criticism of the globalized elites.14 Another consequence of his rad-
ical stand against capitalism is that he supports “degrowth”— the ecology-
oriented policy of downsizing production and consumption. This goes
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hand in hand with his post- 2000 evolution toward advocating localism
and deliberative democracy.
Key ideas
The key idea throughout de Benoist’s intellectual journey has been,
through the use of metapolitics, to think the ways and means that are
necessary in order for European civilization, based on the cultural values
shared on the continent until the advent of globalization, to thrive and
be perpetuated. De Benoist’s work and thought are not always identical
to that of GRECE and the French New Right, even though he embodies
both movements and sets the tone of their development. GRECE and the
French New Right, because they are schools of thought, encompass a va-
riety of beliefs and attitudes. For example, de Benoist admires the mid-
twentieth- century novelist and political writer Raymond Abellio and his
concept of gnosis but, unlike other French New Right figures, he is not
a perennialist and (other than with regard to aesthetics) has been little
influenced by Julius Evola or René Guénon. He is undoubtedly a pagan,
as can be seen in his 1981 book On Being a Pagan ( Comment peut- on être
païen?)15 but his opposition to monotheism is voiced in a softer tone than
that of Pierre Vial, or the late Maurice Rollet and Jean Mabire, members
of GRECE who are committed to völkisch values, including a focus on
Nordicism. Understanding de Benoist’s intellectual journey means
accepting that he is a thinker, not a mere compiler, and that his views
are his own, as is shown by his distancing himself from Guillaume Faye,
who had been a member, then a top official of GRECE from 1970 until
1986. When Faye published The Colonization of Europe: Speaking Truth
about Immigration and Islam ( La Colonisation de l’Europe: discours vrai sur
l’immigration et l’Islam) in 2000, de Benoist disavowed Faye’s “strongly
racist” ideas with regard to Muslims.16
This being said, de Benoist’s core values are those of the French
New Right, which he embodies. His work and thought can be summed
up in three key ideas. The first is the criticism of the primacy of indi-
vidual rights, which he sees as a consequence of eighteenth- century hu-
manism, later embodied in the principles of the French Revolution and
of the American Founding
Fathers (he is very critical of the “American
dream”). However, he is no less opposed to nationalism, as he thinks
both ideologies derive from the “metaphysics of subjectivity.”17 His
second core idea is that the main danger the world is now facing is the
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hegemony of capital, combined with the pursuit of self- interest which
is typical of the postmodern era. As a result, de Benoist has told his
(mostly rightist) readers that although he is not a Marxist, he sees some
truth in what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, both with regard to the
nature of capitalism and to the reality of conflicting class interests.18
Contrary to what his opponents from the radical Right believe, there
is no such thing as a “leftist” move in his thought: he stays true to the
anti- capitalist tradition of the National Revolutionaries and that of the
Communitarian Socialists and, furthermore, his opposition to the un-
limited expansion of the free market stems from his belief that consum-
erism and finance contribute to the erasure of peoples’ identities. The
first and foremost distinction he makes is not between the “working
class,” although he acknowledges that it does exist, and the “bour-
geoisie,” but between the “haves” and the “have nots,” the “new domi-
nant class” and the “people.”19
Another consequence of his cherishing ethnic and cultural identities
is that de Benoist stands for the political autonomy of each and every such
group. When applied to Europe, this third central idea means that he is
opposed to the nation state (in the case of France, the centralized “Jacobin”
state) and favors a federal Europe built on the principle of subsidiarity—
that is, the recognition of the existence of communities, whether based
on ethnicity, language, religion, or gender. De Benoist frequently refers to
the ideas of Johannes Althusius in Politics Methodically Set Forth ( Politica
methodice digesta, 1603), and also shows sympathy toward the idea of “na-
tional personal autonomy” ( nationale Selbstbestimung) developed by Otto
Bauer, Karl Renner, and the interwar Austro- Marxists, who envisioned
replacing the nation state with the “ethnopluralist” concept of gathering
individuals belonging to a distinct ethnic or ethnoreligious group into a
nonterritorially based association of persons.
He has been criticized by those who see him as a (neo- )Fascist for wanting
to replace the nation state with a juxtaposition of homogenous ethnic
entities, thereby denying rights to those who hold dual or multiple identities.
This forgets that de Benoist, in We and the Others ( Nous et les autres, 2006),
defines identity as dialogical, in the sense of Martin Buber’s Ich- Du concept
of interaction between individuals.20 He explains that one’s identity is made
of two components: an “objective part” that comes from one’s background
(ethnicity, religion, family, nationality) and a “subjective part” that one can
chose according to one’s personal wishes, experiences and interactions
with others. Ultimately, according to de Benoist (and contrary to what
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ideologues of race contend), identity is not fixed once and for all, but is a
process in evolution.21
Finally, although de Benoist believes that knowledge of one’s genealogy
and local (ethnic, religious) traditions is a duty, and that such traditions
need to be passed on to following generations, he also criticizes what he
calls “the pathology of identity”— the political use of identity which often
leads the populist Right to focus exclusively on “us versus them” policies.
However, he is also very critical of the moral imperative of cosmopoli-
tanism imposed by the Left and the liberal Right. The French scholar
Pierre- André Taguieff sees the New Right as prone to “mixophobia,” to
fear of miscegenation.22 One can challenge this, and de Benoist seems to
be sincere when he writes that he stands against all forms of phobia, if that
word means refusing to take into account the complexity of reality, leading
to “systematically and irrationally hating” a specific group or ideology.23
One of the most interesting aspects of his work is that while he often
refers positively to Carl Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy
as the core issue of politics,24 and while he also emphasizes the impor-
tance of keeping alive the knowledge of pre- Christian Europe,25 he does
not scapegoat immigrants, whom he ultimately thinks are victims of glob-
alization and the hegemony of capital over the diversity of cultural values.
He is critical of non- European mass immigration because he thinks that
it leads to “pathological consequences” in European societies, but he does
not embrace Islamophobia, and explains that immigration is first of all a
consequence of big companies being greedy for profits and preferring to
import cheap labor.26
Finally, while some former leading figures of GRECE (such as Pierre
Vial) still cling to the anti- Jewish clichés of the völkisch movement, there
is no reason to believe he is an anti- Semite. Suspicion that he is one
derives from the false idea that he remains committed to each and every
word he previously wrote, while in fact reading his works shows that his
thought is in constant evolution. When it comes to the question of bio-
logically diverse races, for example, de Benoist said, in 1974, that “there
is no superior race. All races are superior and each of them has its own
genius.”27 This implies that de Benoist believes that race is a biological
reality. Nevertheless, as early as 1991, Eléments explained that among its
editorial staff “the rejection of Modern Individualism . . . has come to
the forefront, instead of too systematic a critic of egalitarianism, and too
systematic anti- egalitarianism can lead to social Darwinism, which might
justify free- market economy.”28
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Inspirations
De Benoist’s exit from the nationalist extreme Right was influenced by
Dominique Venner and his seminal work For a Positive Critique ( Pour une
critique positive, 1964), which explained why activism was a dead- end street
and called for a break with petty French nationalism, putting the defense
of European civilization first. When he was a contributor to Europe- Action
between 1963 and 1967, de Benoist discovered the work of the philosopher
Louis Rougier, especially his rebuke of Christianity as an egalitarian and
thus subversive doctrine, which he claimed was responsible for uprooting
the hierarchical but tolerant social model derived from the old pagan
wisdom of Europe. At that time, de Benoist acknowledged his debt to
Rougier’s rationalism, as opposed to Jean- Paul Sartre’s Existentialist phi-
losophy, adding that he also drew on the French biologist Jean Rostand,
with whom he shared a belief in eugenics, which he opposed to the utopia
of
innate equality between individuals.
There is no doubt that, at this early stage of his life, de Benoist was
very much in tune with the white- supremacist ideology of Europe- Action,
as shown by his 1966 book Rhodesia, Land of the Faithful Lions ( Rhodésie,
pays des lions fidèles), penned under his pseudonym “Fabrice Laroche” and
coauthored with François d’Orcival, then a militant in the Federation of
Nationalist Students and now a leading and highly respected mainstream
conservative journalist. After the loss of the French empire, worldwide
decolonization, and the lost civil war in Algeria, de Benoist’s generation—
that of young men and women born during or after the Second World
War— was not attracted to white supremacy by a coherent neo- Fascist
ideology: they rather felt compelled to defend a “Western civilization”
that they saw as being challenged by the rise of the Third World and by
communism. It is in this context that de Benoist, starting at the time of
Europe- Action, developed his idea of promoting European identity based
on ethnicity as a “third way” between the materialism of the US and that
of the communist USSR. However, unlike Jean Thiriart (who advocated a
European nation with only one pan- national, centralized state), he chose to
stand for building a Europe of smaller ethnic nations, alongside the ideas
disseminated within the radical Right by Jean Mabire,29 later a member of
GRECE, who in turn had borrowed the idea from the novelist and former
collaborator Marc Augier.30
By the mid- 1970s, de Benoist had set himself the goal of leaving fringe
politics and making his voice heard among Right- leaning intellectuals, who
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were in the minority in academia, and felt the urge to reshape the political
landscape during the presidential term of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–
1981) in favor of a more organic, holistic and elitist democracy. De Benoist’s
magnum opus is often thought to be his 1978 prize- winning book Seen
from the Right ( Vu de droite),31 which aimed at being an anthology of con-
temporary rightist thinking, with a slant toward the behavioral sciences, in
line with the then scientistic and positivist orientation of GRECE. In this