mammoth book, one can already see the major influences on de Benoist’s
thought. He started by distancing himself from the mainstream Right,
writing that “at the time of publishing, the ideas supported in this book
stand on the Right. They do not necessarily belong to the Right. I can even
imagine a situation when they would stand on the Left.”32 He then under-
took to map the intellectual landscape of the postmodern era as seen from
the Right, but in strong opposition to the free- marketers and proponents
of laissez- faire who, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were to
become beacons of mainstream conservative thought. The key sentence
in this book, which gives an in- depth insight into de Benoist’s worldview,
is: “I hereby define the Right, by pure convention, as a positive thing; and
the progressive homogenization of the world, extolled and effected by two
thousand years of egalitarian ideology, as a negative thing.”33
First and foremost, de Benoist is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche,
whom he discovered around 1959 while still in high school.34 He says
his encounter with Nietzsche was a “revelation” that lasted until the late
1970s, when he became familiar with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
and undertook to re- read Nietzsche in this light. De Benoist sees those two
authors as complementary. Initially, he was attracted to Nietzsche’s idea of
the “death of God,” as well as to his call for the advent of “the men with
the longest memory.” After having also been influenced by Nietzsche’s
idea of the Will to Power ( der Wille zur Macht), he came to think (with
Heidegger) that the Will to Power can degenerate into “the will to will,”
a form of impotency. Also, he first adhered to the idea explained in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra ( Also sprach Zarathustra) that one value system is no
more worthy than another, but later decided that Heidegger was right in
saying that Nietzsche clung too much to the realm of values, and that the
only way to escape from nihilism is not to change values, but to go beyond
them. De Benoist also reflected on the notion of truth in Nietzsche and
Heidegger’s philosophy, eventually finding more depth in Heidegger’s
distinction, in Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit), between truth and aletheia
(“disclosure”).
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Other major influences on de Benoist’s thought are the writings of the
French philosopher Georges Sorel on violence and action, as well as his
anti- bourgeois stand and his call to the general strike as a myth that would
awaken the instinct of fighting in a decaying society. This leads us to men-
tion three other authors, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,
and Ernst Jünger, who are associated with the Conservative Revolution.35
From Spengler’s The Decline of the West, de Benoist borrows elitism, skep-
ticism about the role of reason in history, cultural pessimism and the fear
that technical progress may annihilate man. Tomislav Sunić emphasizes
that the New Right heavily relies on Spengler’s assumption that mankind
does not exist as such, that “each culture passes through various cycles”
and that there is no universal history, just “the plurality of histories and
their unequal distribution in time and space.”36 In Moeller van den Bruck,
de Benoist loves the young conservative rebel and the man who believes
he lives in times of transition (or in an interregnum) when new cleavages
will take place and bring along something which stands above socialism
and conservatism, which will enable “new peoples” (as opposed to “old
peoples”) to shape the world.
Finally, Jünger, whom de Benoist knew personally, is certainly the in-
fluence who was closest to him. De Benoist describes Jünger as a man
with four lives who was in succession “the soldier on the front, the worker,
the rebel, and the Anarch.”37 He sees him as a model man who embodies
heroism in wartime action and also the sense of honor. He thinks Jünger
was right in his criticism of technology, which draws the warrior away
from fighting in a chivalrous way, and he shares his belief that the expe-
rience of war can give birth to a new kind of man who will overthrow the
old order of society. Undoubtedly, de Benoist agrees with Jünger’s claim
that the First World War had produced a sense of community between
soldiers at the front belonging to all classes of society. He also supports
his aesthetic and voluntarist conception of productivity and, last but not
least, he might even identify himself with the one who resorts to “the
forest passage” (the title of one of Jünger’s major works, Der Waldgang); de
Benoist writes that Jünger’s rebel is a man who “cannot be identified with
one system or another, even the one for which he fights.” He adds that “he
is not at ease in any of them,”38 and that seems very much to be a reliable
self- description, up to the point where de Benoist seems to see himself as
Jünger’s archetypal Anarch— that is, the man who has reached the point
of not even needing to walk the forest passage, because he “is content to
have broken all ties [with power].” His praise of the Anarch reflects his
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fear that we are heading toward an Orwellian society in which individuals
will be under the control of the Big Brother state.
Early reception in France
Until the beginning of the 1970s, de Benoist’s intellectual activity was
known only in France and only to those with an interest in GRECE, a
rather small group of senior civil servants, professionals and mostly
non- academic intellectuals. It was launched in January 1968, before the
student riots of May 1968. The first mention of GRECE appeared in the
French left- wing satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné in December 1972,
asking quite seriously whether the group was neo- Nazi. In 1974, another
attack on GRECE and de Benoist came from the monarchist New Royalist
Action (Nouvelle action royaliste) and a group of Catholic traditionalists
who wrote a far- fetched investigative work denouncing the New Right and
its thinkers as dangerous promoters of anti- Christian principles, namely
eugenics, paganism and white supremacism (as opposed to the univer-
salism of Christianity).39 Ultimately, the authors linked de Benoist and the
New Right to the ideology of the Third Reich.
The New Right and its major thinker were subject to a much bigger
and hotter controversy in France during the summer of 1979, after de
Benoist and other key members of GRECE succeeded in gaining access
to the editorial board of Le Figaro Magazine and Valeurs actuelles ( Current
values), two standard- bearer magazines of the mainstream conservative
Right, reaching a combined readership of over one million. The strategy
of the New Right was then to influence the mainstream conservative
parties— that is, the neo- Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République and
the moderate, right- of- center Union pour la Démocratie française— by<
br />
providing their leadership with a set of concepts that, if adopted, would
ultimately have make the mainstream conservative Right drop its commit-
ment to key values such as equality, human rights, the welfare state and
Judeo- Christian culture.
Liberal intellectuals tried to counter the rise of de Benoist and the New
Right in the political debate with an impressive campaign launched in
June 1979 by the daily Le Monde, and followed by more than five hundred
articles claiming that GRECE and its leader had connections with racist
movements such as the (British) Northern League, quoting some crude
quotes on race from early issues of Eléments and trying to show that de
Benoist’s interest in the history of the Indo- European peoples was in the
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83
intellectual tradition of Nazi archeologists such as Hans F. K. Günther.40
Since the press campaign of 1979, de Benoist continues to be suspected in
France of being a “closet racialist” and many on the Left still cling to the
belief that, despite his repeated criticism of racism and his many writings
and explanation of how and why he has changed his mind on this and
other topics, he has remained a devoted white supremacist. This misses
the point. By the time of the 1979 campaign, de Benoist had already
left behind his Nietzschean philosophy of man and the kind of racism
which implies a hierarchy of ethnic groups in favor of what Pierre- André
Taguieff calls the “differentialist” approach,41 that is, the idea that each
and every ethnic group has its own culture which is worth preserving, so
much that the best way to preserve it is by avoiding different cultures on
the same soil.
This ideological move explains how de Benoist and GRECE were re-
ceived positively by a segment of the French conservative Right in 1978– 81.
After General de Gaulle left power in 1969 and died one year later, the
Gaullist ideology, born out of the wartime Resistance, was also about to
die. With less general acceptance that the state had to play a role in the
economy (for example by redistributing wealth as a reward for constant
growth), and with mass non- European immigration becoming a political
issue, the emergence of the New Right under de Benoist’s aegis was seen
by several prominent conservative politicians as an unique opportunity
to promote a nativist, pro- market, identitarian agenda which would ap-
peal to the most Right- leaning voters, who were not yet attracted National
Front, which was founded in 1972, and was until 1983– 84 a tiny group of
extremists tainted by their connection with the collaboration with the Nazi
occupiers of France.
When thinking this way, the likes of Michel Poniatowski, Alain
Griotteray, Philippe Malaud and other stalwart leaders of President
Giscard’s center- right party made a double mistake. First, they wrongly
presumed that de Benoist and GRECE were in tune with the libertarian
agenda of Club de l’Horloge, a think tank founded in 1974 by senior civil
servants originating from GRECE such as Yvan Blot, Henry de Lesquen
and Jean- Yves Le Gallou. This proved to be wrong, as de Benoist was then
at the stage when he put an emphasis on the criticism of the free- market
economy. The second mistake that the staunch supporters of the Europe-
United States axis working with Giscard made is that they failed to foresee
that de Benoist, being preoccupied with the decadence of Europe and the
dream of his continent becoming an empire- superpower, was very unlikely
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to become the “organic intellectual” of those very same parties that were
pushing for more European integration and closer ties with NATO.
Later reception
At the end of 1982, de Benoist and other contributors to Figaro Magazine
who were close to GRECE were forced to leave it and, although de Benoist
kept on contributing to the now- defunct monthly magazine Spectacle
du monde ( World spectacle), his link with the mainstream political Right
was broken, and he chose to live as an independent writer. If there is an
“earlier” and a “later” reception of his thought in France, the breakpoint
was first the 1979 press campaign, then the hegemony of free- market eco-
nomics and social conservative thought within the post- Gaullist Right, and
only marginally because of the coming to power of the Left in 1981. In fact,
de Benoist and GRECE were never really acceptable in mainstream French
conservative politics, except when some conservatives used them as ghost-
writers in order to give an intellectual backbone to their anti- egalitarian
agenda.
From the start, the social democratic Left and the Communists op-
posed de Benoist and GRECE because they saw them as continuing in
the tradition of Fascism. However, the real problem is that several of the
core ideas which are still at the heart of de Benoist’s Weltanschauung are
totally alien to the issues which are the key to electoral success. A gap be-
tween de Benoist and the mainstream Right that cannot be bridged results
from the belief that today’s European peoples are all offshoots of the same
stock (that is, the Indo- European people), and from the contention that
the monotheistic religions are totally alien to European culture, and the
opposition to Christianity.
Since the mid- 1980s, the ideology of GRECE has been interpreted
in France in opposite ways. Most liberals from the Left and Right have
refused to engage in intellectual debate with de Benoist: following the
celebrated leftist philosopher Bernard- Henri Lévy, they contend that his
anti- egalitarian ideology disqualifies him as a thinker, and accusations of
anti- Semitism in a “hidden form” are still commonplace. The first main-
stream intellectual academic who agreed to debate with de Benoist was
Pierre- André Taguieff, the foremost scholar of the New Right, and this
caused such an uproar that in 1993 a manifesto was published in the daily
Le Monde warning his fellow (Left- leaning) academics against the perni-
cious influence of GRECE and the danger of “normalizing” de Benoist.42
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85
De Benoist was more successful in persuading contributors from the
other side of the spectrum to contribute articles to Krisis, among them Jean
Baudrillard, Raymond Boudon, Sebastian Budgen, Massimo Cacciari, the
Left- wing economist André Grjebine, the columnist Jean- François Kahn,
and Jean- Pierre Laurent, a scholar of perennialism. In addition, de Benoist
publicly met in 1992 with prominent cadres of the Communist Party’s
think tank, the Institut de Recherches Marxistes (Institute for Marxist
Research), who were consequently disavowed by the Party’s official organ,
L’Humanité- Dimanche.43
The launch of a newly- designed edition of Eléments in 2015 seems to
have diminished the isolation of the French New Right. Together with de
Benoist’s flagship editoria
l, respected academics from the Catholic con-
servative Right such as Pierre Manent, social democrats such as Jacques
Julliard, and philosophers such as Marcel Gauchet (he coeditor of the in-
fluential quarterly Le débat) agreed to be interviewed, and although they
have been criticized for having done so, the harshness of attacks against
the magazine and its inspirer is not as great as it once was.
De Benoist has been extensively translated into Italian and German
since the early 1980s. After he was discovered by young militants
belonging to the oppositional faction of Giorgio Almirante’s then neo-
Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement,
MSI), they used his thought, among other things by launching Elementi
in 1978 to rejuvenate the party’s doctrine by escaping narrow- minded
reference to the Fascist past, albeit without repudiating it in its entirety.
Later on, the Italian New Right (Nuova destra) was able, because of the
very specific local culture of dialog between radicals from both Left and
Right, to infuse some of its ideas into the Alternative Left and the post-
Fascist Aleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), a partner in the coalition
government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from 1993 onwards.
In Germany, his ideas were disseminated by the magazine Elemente from
1987, and then, on a much wider basis, by Junge Freiheit, a bridge between
the national-
conservatives and the nationalist, anti-
multiculturalism
party, Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD). The re-
ception of de Benoist has been marginal in the United Kingdom, where
historian Roger Griffin has argued that the New Right was aimed at
preserving Fascist culture under the claim of metapolitics.44
One controversial topic is de Benoist’s reception in Russia, especially
by the Eurasianist writer Alexander Dugin. De Benoist met Dugin, then a
member of the nationalist Patriotic Front Pamyat, in 1989, and traveled to
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postcommunist Russia in 1992, meeting with Dugin again, and with the
nationalist Right and the communist opposition to President Yeltsin.45 De
Benoist has since published a book with Dugin,46 who was a speaker at the
convention of GRECE for the first time in 1991, and for the last time in
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 16
