2016.47 De Benoist and Dugin share a common opposition to American in-
fluence in Europe and a belief in the role of Russia’s “heartland” in geopol-
itics, but Dugin is more attracted to Guénon and Evola than is de Benoist.
It is striking that in France, the New Right has failed in its goal of
promoting an economic and social organicist doctrine opposed to indi-
vidualism and globalization, despite the short period when, with Bruno
Mégret in an influential position during the late 1980s, the National
Front drew on its ideas. Under Marine Le Pen, this influence remains so
far as the criticism of the global ruling class, the condemnation of finan-
cial capitalism and the support for a multipolar world are concerned, but
the National Front has taken a very different direction from de Benoist
in promoting the republican model of assimilating minorities to the
Leitkultur (hegemonic common culture) as a solution to the multicul-
tural society. De Benoist’s writings are aimed at an intellectual reader-
ship and cannot easily be translated into the populist language of Le Pen.
Conclusion
Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s works has proved to be a mixed suc-
cess for de Benoist and GRECE, although on a theoretical level they were
able to refresh both the radical and the mainstream Right with their anti-
egalitarian thought. De Benoist was instrumental in lessening the in-
fluence on the French Right of Action française (French Action) and its
interwar leader Charles Maurras, whose reactionary and often Catholic
fundamentalist followers he saw as blocking the adaptation of the Right to
the contemporary world.48 Alain de Benoist has planted seeds as a philoso-
pher which will eventually take roots later on, most probably contributing
to critical thinking on both sides of the political spectrum than in the
mainstream, and even the populist Right.
Notes
1. Alain de Benoist: Bibliographie 1960– 2010 (Paris: éditions Les amis d’Alain de
Benoist, 2009). Most of his later works are available on the internet: see http://
www.alaindebenoist.com/ textes/ .
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Alain de Benoist and the New Right
87
2. Inspired by Alexandre Marc, Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, and Emmanuel
Mounier, the Non- Conformists rejected totalitarian ideologies as an answer to
the crisis of the 1930s and called instead for a “new order” going beyond individ-
ualism and liberalism.
3. Mohler’s 1949 dissertation on this topic was published in France as La révolution
conservatrice en Allemagne: 1918– 1932 (Puiseaux: Editions Pardès, 1993). Mohler
spoke at GRECE conventions as early as 1975.
4. In the December 2017 edition of Eléments, he speaks in favor of a “Revolutionary-
Conservative solution” to the contradiction between mainstream conservative
values and the political impotence of conservatives because of their alliance with
the liberal Right.
5. In the sense of Louis Dumont’s Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1983). Dumont makes a distinction between egalitarian individualism,
whose roots can be found in Christianity, and “individualism of the singular,”
which is specific to traditional societies.
6. De Benoist has published an account of his life ( Mémoire vive, Paris: Editions de
Fallois, 2012) and a sort of diary titled Dernière Année: Notes pour conclure le siècle
(Lausanne: L’age d’homme, 2001).
7. Jean- Yves Le Gallou, “’Mémoire vive’ de Alain de Benoist,” August 17, 2013,
https:// www.polemia.com/ memoire- vive- de- alain- de- benoist/ .
8. Coston was one of the most strident prewar anti- Semites, then a collaborationist.
He was obsessed with the Jewish- Freemasonic conspiracy theory, to which he
devoted his postwar writings as well.
9. De Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), 62.
10. Together with, among others, the Italian journalist, Giorgio Locchi, his fellow
countryman Antonio Lombardo, French students becoming academics Jean-
Claude Rivière, Pierre Bérard, Pierre Vial, and the journalist Jean- Claude Valla.
Nouvelle école, August- September 1968, 86.
11. Steuckers was once de Benoist’s assistant before breaking away and launching
his own movement, Synergies européennes (European Synergies).
12. Costanzo Preve, Eloge du communautarisme: Aristote– Hegel– Marx (Paris: Editions
Krisis, 2012).
13. The review of the Anti- Utilitarian Social Science Movement (Mouvement anti-
utilitariste en sciences sociales, MAUSS) of the academic economists Serge
Latouche and Alain Caillé.
14. Christopher Lasch: The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy.
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
15. First published in Paris by éditions Albin Michel in 1981, it was translated
into English as On Being a Pagan (Atlanta, GA: Ultra, 2004) with a foreword by
Stephen Flowers, also known as Edred Thorsson, an Odinist writer.
16. In an interview with the Italian monthly Area, politically close to Aleanza
Nazionale, March 2000.
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17. De Benoist, interview with Nietzsche Académie, October 14, 2013, http://
nietzscheacademie.over- blog.com/ article- alain- de- benoist- 120592080.html.
18. See his most exhaustive critic of capitalism in Alain de Benoist, Critiques,
Théoriques (Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2002).
19. De Benoist, Le moment populiste (Paris: PGDR, 2017). This book was written “in
memory of Paul Piccone and Costanzo Preve.”
20. See Martin Buber, I and Thou. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937).
21. In a conference held in Barcelona, and available on the Krisis website (http:// www.
revue- krisis.com/ 2017/ 08/ identites- alain- de- benoist.html), de Benoist contends that “We are first and foremost what we have become, and it is on this basis that we
can project ourselves into the future. There is no identity without transformation
and the important thing is to look at those two concepts in a non- contradictory way.”
22. Pierre- André Taguieff, La force du préjugé (Paris: La Découverte, 1988), 337.
23. De Benoist, “Phobies en tous genres et point Godwin: l’Etat se defend comme il
peut,” March 3, 2014, http:// www.bvoltaire.fr/ phobies- en- genre- points- godwin-
letat- se- defend- il- peut/ .
24. See Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1932).
De Benoist was introduced to Schmitt’s thought by Julien Freund, a French soci-
ologist who had sympathy for the New Right.
25. See his book Les traditions d’Europe (Arpajon: éditions du Labyrinthe, 1996), a
compendium of articles published in the bulletin of GRECE.
26. On immigration leading to “social pathologies” and on his condemnation of
Islamophobia, see his interview with Dugin’s website Katehon (26 August
2016), at http:// katehon.com/ fr/ article/ alain- de- benoist- burkini- il- faut- aborder-
frontalement- la- question- de- limmigration. On the link between immigration and capitalism, see Alain de Benoist, Survivre à la pensée unique (Paris: Krisis,
Paris, 2015),140– 143.
&
nbsp; 27. See his interview in Eléments 8– 9 (1974).
28. Eléments 72 (Winter 1991), 23.
29. Benoit Marpeau, “Le rêve nordique de Jean Mabire,” Annales de Normandie 43,
no. 3 (1993): 215– 241. De Benoist later published a bibliography of Mabire,
who is considered an iconic figure of the identitarian and radical Right
neopagan movements, Alain de Benoist, Bibliographie de Jean Mabire (Pont-
Authou [Normandie]: Editions Héligoland, 2008).
30. Mabire notes his debt to Augier (who wrote as “Saint- Loup”) in Jean Mabire,
“Ils ont rêvé l’Europe des patries charnelles,” Réfléchir et Agir 17 (2006), http://
www.terreetpeuple.com/ les- eveilleurs- de- peuples- memoire- 15/ 156- jean-
mabire/ 422- ils- ont- reve- leurope- des- patries- charnelles- par- jean- mabire.html.
31. In the fifth edition, published in 2001, the author claims sales of 25,000, a huge
figure for a 590- page volume conveying ideas that were against the tide of post-
1968 liberal ideology.
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Alain de Benoist and the New Right
89
32. De Benoist, Vu de droite (Arpajon: Editions du Labyrinthe, 2001), xii.
33. De Benoist, Vu de droite, xii. English translation by Robert A. Linndgren, taken
from View from the Right (NP: Arktos, 2017).
34. De Benoist, interview with Nietzsche Académie.
35. De Benoist, Quatre figures de la Révolution Conservatrice allemande– Werner
Sombart–
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck–
Ernst Niekisch–
Oswald Spengler
(Paris: Editions Les amis d’Alain de Benoist, 2014).
36. Tomislav Sunić, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right
(NP: Arktos Media, 2011), 95. The title of this work implies that the New Right
rebukes democracy, and the fact that de Benoist wrote the foreword seems to
acknowledge that he shares Sunic’s own antidemocratic worldview. Instead,
one can say he opposes modern, representative democracy and stands for di-
rect democracy, on the ground that participation is more fundamental than
representation.
37. De Benoist, “Types et figures dans l’oeuvre d’Ernst Junger: Le Soldat du front,
le Travailleur, le Rebelle et l’Anarque,” lecture in Rome, May 1997, https:// www.
centrostudilaruna.it/ types- et- figures- dans- loeuvre- dernst- junger- le- soldat- du-
front- le- travailleur- le- rebelle- et- lanarque.html.
38. De Benoist, “An Introduction to Ernst Jünger,” Occidental Quarterly 8, no. 3 (Fall
2008): 53.
39. Georges Naughton; Le choc du passé: Avortement, Néo- Nazisme, Nouvelle morale
(La Celle Saint- Cloud: GARAH, 1974).
40. Before the start of GRECE, de Benoist had authored a small book, Les Indo-
Européens (Paris: G.E.D., 1965), devoted to the Indo- European roots of Western
civilization, and Günther, an academic who had been involved in Nazi “race re-
search,” was briefly on the academic board of Nouvelle école, the first issue of
which was published in 1968, the same year he died.
41. See Taguieff’s seminal book, La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles
(Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
42. “Appel à une Europe de la vigilance contre l’extrême droite,” Le Monde, July
13, 1993.
43. Martine Bulard, “Le refus de l’amalgame,” L’Humanité- Dimanche, July 15, 1993.
44. Roger Griffin, “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The Nouvelle Droite’s
Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the ‘Interregnum’” Modern and
Contemporary France, no. 8 (2000): 35– 53.
45. Anton Shekhovtsov, “Alexander Dugin and the European New Right, 1989–
1994,” in Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe–
Russia Relationship, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2015), 35– 53.
46. Alexandre Douguine, L’appel de l’Eurasie: Conversation avec Alain de Benoist
(NP: Avatar éditions, 2013).
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47. Being under sanctions from the United States but not from the European
Union, because of his involvement in the Ukrainian conflict, Dugin was obliged
to speak via a satellite link from Moscow.
48. In “Maurras écrivain, artiste, poète,” Bulletin Charles Maurras, April 2001, de
Benoist writes that Maurras was a man of the nineteenth century.
91
6
Guillaume Faye and
Archeofuturism
Sté phane Franç ois
G U I L L A U M E FAY E , B O R N in 1949, is responsible for the doctrinal renewal
of French nativism and, more widely, for the development of the European-
American radical Right, including its concept of “archeofuturism,” which
was forged in the middle of the 1990s, combining postmodern philos-
ophy, some elements of Western counterculture, and racism. Faye defined
archeofuturism as the acceptance of technological- scientific advances in
a society that has remained traditional. He believed that postmodern phi-
losophy sanctions this alliance as the union of the Promethean, referring
to the “Faustian soul” and the “most ancient memory,”1 and the “reconcil-
iation between Evola and Marinetti.”2 This union also doubles up for the
dismissal of modernity, born from the Enlightenment, and of conserva-
tism, since modernity shows signs of fracture and conservatism leads to
nothing. To support his case, he points to the surge of Islam as the expres-
sion of an archaic form of belief and civilization.
Faye’s thought extends beyond the French context, and his work has been
read and discussed by both European and American activists. In this sense,
Faye is a key thinker of the European- American radical Right. His activism
spanned across two periods. During the first of these he was a member
of GRECE (Groupement d’Études et de Recherches de la Civilisation
Européenne) between 1970 and 1986, and is considered its second theo-
rist after Alain de Benoist. At the time, he defended a somewhat pro- Arab
Conservative Revolutionary thought. But after withdrawing from political
activism between 1987 and 1996 to work in the French media, he made
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M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
a comeback in the second period as an important theorist of nativism,
using a discourse focused on Islam and Arab Muslim migration. Faye is
a complex and sometimes baffling figure. Because of this, our comments
are structured in three parts. First, we retrace his biography and profes-
sional development. We then analyze the two main periods of his activism.
Finally, we examine his influence on the French, European, and American
radical Right.
Between political activism and the media
Faye occupies a special place in the small world of the radical Right. He
was born on November 7, 1949, in Angoulême, a medium- sized city in
southwest France. He was raised in a well- off bourgeois family close to
the authoritarian and nationalistic “Bonapartist” Right. Unlike many of
the founding members of GRECE, he did not come from a family that
had c
ollaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. He also did
not campaign as part of the groups that defended the French presence in
Algeria or in nationalist circles. He studied instead at the Paris Institute
of Political Studies (“Sciences Po,” one of France’s elite schools). Between
1971 and 1973 he ran the Circle Pareto and the Association GRECE.3 He
campaigned for the latter in 1970. A gifted speaker and bright theorist, in
the 1980s he became a permanent member of GRECE, where he acted as
Secretary for Studies and Research and one of its principal authors, writing
for most journals of the New Right— Eléments, Nouvelle école ( New School),
Orientations, and Études et recherches ( Studies and Research). During the
1970s and 1980s, he also worked as a journalist and published in several
major French national and counterculture newspapers and magazines.
Faye’s intellectual reference points included French figures such as
Henri Lefebvre, Jules Monnerot, Robert Jaulin, Julien Freund, Michel
Maffesoli, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord; German figures, including
Friedrich Nietzsche, Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, Jürgen
Habermas, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Carl Schmitt; British
figures such as Herbert Spencer and Robert Ardrey; and the American
Christopher Lasch. He recognized just one single influence from the rad-
ical Right, that of the Italian journalist and philosopher Giorgio Locchi,
who played a key role in the development of the first doctrines of GRECE.
Faye participated in the dissemination of nativist and Conservative
Revolutionary themes, including the defense of cultural and biological
identity, European nationalism, anti- Americanism, antiliberalism, and
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Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism
93
the dismissal of immigration in the name of respecting ethnic- cultural
particularism and differences. He also helped spread ideas that had been
defended before him by various nationalist- revolutionary or neo- Nazi
groups. Spiritually he was close to a form of paganism, which he defined
as an almost ideal religion that allows a rigid, holistic and organic society,
respect for natural and cosmic cycles, and for “beliefs and sensitivities.”4
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 17
