This is my second book about the French nouvelle droite (ND, New Right), a loose cultural ‘school of thought’ (Duranton-Crabol 1988) created in 1968 that shocked the French cultural and political milieux in the late 1970s with its anti-liberal and anti-egalitarian theses. My first book, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Bar-On 2007), focused on whether the ND was attempting to resurrect fascism with ‘another name, another face’. In Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity I utilize three conceptual tools for analysing ND intellectuals: (1) a challenge to the traditional right–left political spectrum; (2) a variant of alternative modernity within a broader modernist framework (Griffin 2007a, 2007b); and (3) a species of the ‘religion of politics’ (Gentile 2006) in a more secular age. It is my claim that ND thinkers embody all three conceptual tools.
Moreover, these three conceptual tools illuminate the ND’s central concerns surrounding modernity and postmodernity. It is my principal argument that modernity and postmodernity form the central backdrop to the ND worldview. The ND’s vehement rejection of right and left as political categories (a distinction dating back to the French Revolution), quest for a body politic grounded in an alternative modernity, and conversion to a religion of politics that emerged only in the late eighteenth century all highlight the ND’s seminal preoccupation with modernity.
Accusations of fascism will continue to haunt ND intellectuals until they completely break with authors of the revolutionary right-wing milieux as they provided ideological ammunition for fascist and Nazi regimes in power. Spencer Sunshine (2008) insists that the ND plays a double game by claiming that they are ‘against fascism’ (that is, fascist regimes in power) while redeeming ‘healthy’ and ‘left-wing’ variants of fascism unsullied by the constraints of fascism in power such as those of the Conservative Revolution (CR) (for example, Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt) and Otto Strasser (1897–1974), a Nazi expelled by the Party because he advocated land redistribution, nationalization of industry, and the detachment of the Nazis from banking interests. Sunshine (2008: 5) argues that the ND aims at ‘rebranding fascism’ using ‘sophisticated’ left-wing critiques of society, and their goal is ‘to create a new form of fascism, with the same core values of a revitalized community that withstands the decadence of cosmopolitan liberal capitalism’. Or, as Alberto Spektorowski (2007: 45) correctly points out, the ND ‘makes use of the intellectual contribution of old anti-liberal integralist sources at the fringes of fascism’. ND leader Alain de Benoist’s exhaustive 317-page interview in 2012 will do little to dispel charges of fascism as he never definitively breaks with revolutionary right-wing authors, omits key historical details such as the Nazi collaborationism of his key intellectual influences (for example, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger), or focuses on the way CR authors could have been a ‘real alternative’ to Nazism without telling readers how they would have been qualitatively different from the Nazis (for example, more or less elitist, militaristic, revolutionary, corporatist, anti-capitalist, or anti-Semitic).
Indeed, ND critiques of modernity, capitalism, communism, socialism, liberal democracy, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and the Rights of Man mimic interwar fascists. In addition, although the ND does not work from a fascist tradition per se but from the legacy of the German CR, ND texts abound with similarities with a fascist worldview: sympathy for elitist, authoritarian forms of governance; the exaltation of a warrior ethic; praise of a voluntarist creed as the key to historical change; a romantic, anti-materialist worldview; the ideal of an organic ethnically based homogeneous community; and the goal of a revolutionary political system superseding traditional conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.
Despite these accusations of fascism, ND thinkers are deadly serious about finding solutions for Europe’s contemporary problems. They diagnose profound changes wrought by modernity as being responsible for the continent’s ‘decadence’ and ‘decline’. The ND’s new political and philosophical framework for the twenty-first century is grounded in a modernist synthesis fusing the most redeeming features of the modern, postmodern, and premodern epochs (conceptual tool two). Moreover, in seeking to transcend ‘outdated’ categories such as right and left (conceptual tool one), as well as searching for a new, post-liberal ‘religion of politics’ (conceptual tool three), ND thinkers seek alternatives to modernity rather than destroying all aspects of modernity tout court.
Before tracing the main arguments of Rethinking the French New Right, I briefly highlight the ND’s intellectual and historical trajectory. As Jonathan Marcus (1995: 23) correctly observes, the ‘New Right’ label is ‘potentially misleading’: ‘For the French nouvelle droite has little in common with the political New Right that emerged in the English-speaking world at around the same time.’ The ND focused on the cultural terrain to differentiate itself from extreme right-wing political parties and ultra-nationalist terrorist movements. In 2012 its leader de Benoist (2012: 147) stated that the ND’s main goals were the European-wide ‘transformation of the intellectual landscape’ and ‘the advent of a new historical moment’. Second, the ND valorizes an illiberal, pagan political legacy that is antagonistic to counter-revolutionary, conservative, and Anglo-American (neo-liberal) right-wing traditions and uneasy about fascism. It was accused of ‘fascism with a human face’ by elements of the liberal-left intelligentsia in France in two mass-media ‘storms’ in 1979 and 1993. Third, the ND’s ideological syncretism and its anti-liberal and anti-capitalist, ‘leftist’ drift beginning in the 1980s puzzled political commentators. Yet, using Norberto Bobbio’s (1996) inequality–equality schism to position right and left, ND thinkers are more on the right than left because they reject administrative and legal equality, the republican heritage of the French Revolution, and what they call the ‘religion of human rights’. In short, the ND’s sincere attempts to transcend right and left (conceptual tool one) does not change the ‘rightness’ of the ND.
Moreover, the ND’s metapolitical path does not undermine its revolutionary commitments. Commenting on Hannah Arendt’s (1963) On Revolution, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (2007: 269) observes that revolution connotes ‘a wholesale political change in which men are conscious of introducing an entirely new epoch in human history’. Yet, for Hobsbawm (2007) revolutionaries are merely on the left: international communists, anarchists, anti-colonial guerrillas, and new leftists. Rethinking the French New Right challenges the notion that revolutions are the preserve of the left, that revolutions must necessarily take up arms, and that right-wing revolutionaries reject modernity. Rethinking the French New Right is a work about revolutionary right-wing intellectuals with a metapolitical vocation.
Let me clarify the aforementioned phrase ‘revolutionary right-wing intellectuals with a metapolitical vocation’. An intellectual is a person whose profession is centred on the production and dissemination of ideas. Antonio Gramsci (1982) distinguished between ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals, with the former wedded to a particular social class (bourgeoisie or proletariat) and the latter connected to the older socio-economic order and ‘hegemonic project’. ND intellectuals are neither completely agents of the bourgeoisie (and certainly not the proletariat due to their profound anti-communism), nor are they fully ‘traditional’ intellectuals because they recognize that in a modern (or postmodern) age it is impossible to completely return to the socio-economic order of the past. ND leader de Benoist (2012: 314–15) today acknowledges that ‘Gramscianism’ no longer has the same meaning it once did, yet insists in a Gramscian vein that ideologies cannot be ‘dissociated from social facts’ and that his role is to help us understand the ‘historical moment’ we currently live in.
‘Metapolitical vocation’ implies: (1) intellectuals rejecting direct and activist parliamentary or extra-parliamentary political interventions and focusing their energies on changing hearts and minds and the ‘conquest’ of civil society; (2) a fixation on what Robert Nozick (1974) called ‘the fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized’ (in Zaibert 2004: 113); and (3) a sophisticated form of politics that is not a flight from politics, but a continuation of ‘war’ through ‘non-violent’ means. In order to distance itself from fascist or Bolshevik strategies of a ‘frontal assault on the state’, the ND advanced Gramsci’s notion of a ‘war of position’, or the centrality of a politics of ideological struggle (Rupert 2007: 40). As its leading theoretician explained, the ND’s ‘metapolitical vocation’ was suited for changing times straddling the modern and postmodern ages; for an epoch where one could ‘acquire power’ yet no longer ‘take power’; for an age when ‘implosion’ rather than revolutionary ‘explosion’ was the rule; and for an era when cultural ‘dissidents’ and ‘rebels’ rather than violent activists would be the ‘real’ revolutionaries (de Benoist 2012: 302).
By ‘revolutionary right wing’ I mean: (1) individuals and movements that subjectively identify themselves more with the right than the left; (2) individuals and movements that can be objectively situated on the right (inequality) more than the left (equality), based on Bobbio’s (1996) right–left classification; and (3) individuals and movements that aim for a revolution, or what Hobsbawm calls ‘a wholesale political change in which men are conscious of introducing an entirely new epoch in human history’.
As astute scholars of modernity, it is no accident that the ND longs for a pan-European revolution in values and institutions to replace liberalism. Ironically, the ND’s revolutionary instincts are an offshoot of modern eighteenth-century liberal, republican revolutions (that is, the American and French Revolutions), radically rejected by the ND. Or, as Arendt (1963: 28) writes,
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century.
Rethinking the French New Right is based on the premise that intellectuals and their ideas matter in the processes of political history. Yet, I am not making the argument that ideas alone determine complex social and political processes. Undoubtedly the interaction of ideas and concrete material and political interests shape the choices of political actors. Charles Tilly (2003: 5–6) points out that the interaction of ideas, behaviours, and social and economic interactions determine differing political outcomes (for example, the prevalence of violence versus non-violence) in diverse societies. I am rather arguing that ideas, values, and identities can be the basis for shared interests (Wendt 1992). Or, ideas put into motion organizational energies in the form of cultural and political movements and parties, which challenge dominant ideologies of the age.
Without Karl Marx, French ND leader de Benoist (1979: 19) insisted, there would have been neither Lenin nor the Bolshevik Revolution. Although he is vehemently anti-liberal, de Benoist (2012: 149) expressed admiration for the Enlightenment philosophes of the eighteenth century because they were ‘ideologically coherent’ and prepared the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution. For the German sociologist Max Weber (et al. 2002), Martin Luther’s Protestant turn created the conditions for the rise of a powerful work ethic and accelerated capitalist accumulation, particularly in Calvinist, northern European countries. For the Israeli historian of fascism Ze’ev Sternhell (1994), without ultra-nationalism and socialist revisionism there can be no fascist synthesis. John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), the esteemed British economist, wrote these telling lines in 1936: ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.… Sooner or later it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil’ (in Pojman 2006: ix). For Keynes, ideas set in motion historical processes, which at the time seem invisible, but later produce changes of world historical significance. Major new ideas or paradigms alter consciousness, create alternative discourses and ideologies, and challenge ‘hegemonic’ conceptions of politics.
When we moved from an Earth-centred to Sun-centred universe with Copernicus, there was great resistance from the Church and other established authorities. Yet, this revolutionary new idea set in motion processes that ushered in a more modernist, scientific consciousness and turned us away from a dominant religious view of the world. When Barack Obama took office as the first ever black president of the United States of America (USA) in 2009, his victory would have been impossible without nineteenth-century abolitionists attacking the gross indignities of slavery and championing the equality of peoples. Abolitionists merely exhorted the USA to follow its guiding liberal and egalitarian principles, whether enshrined in the Declaration of Independence (1776), Constitution (1787), or Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Supreme Court decisions on desegregation, the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Voting Rights Act (1965) further paved the way for Obama’s meteoric rise to power. Between the American Revolution in 1776 and Obama’s electoral campaign in 2008, there was a stunning gap of 232 years. Yet, without the liberal republican principles of the American Revolution and the overthrow of British rule, there can be no black president mesmerizing us with his ‘Yes We Can!’
Extending my argument to ND intellectuals, today their impact can be felt on diverse publications, journals, think tanks, mass media and university discourses, and centre-right and radical right-wing political parties throughout Europe (Minkenberg 2000). Since the late 1970s the ND has helped shift Europe’s broader political culture towards questioning the merits of liberal democracy, liberalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and the European Union (EU). The ND understands that the gun, parliament, or mere opinion polls cannot shift the political landscape in a grand historical sense. To paraphrase Isaiah Berlin (1953), the ‘one big thing’ that ND intellectuals know as historical ‘hedgehogs’ is that changes in consciousness produce long-lasting changes in the political realm. Coups d’état or the arithmetic of parliaments can hand you power in an instant, but more durable power comes from ‘hegemonic’ control of key political ideas and platforms, which are diffused within the broader population as self-evident ‘common sense’. If these changes in mentalities take 232 years, as they did when Obama was elected, that is a small price to pay for achieving victory in the sweeping mists of political history.
In the case of the ND, the changing mentalities required encompass the European continent, the ‘new homeland’, and include the following positions:
Rethinking the French New Right challenges the standard ‘premodern’, ‘anti-modern’, or ‘reactionary’ interpretations of the revolutionary right. Such assessments of the revolutionary right also apply to some academic interpretations of fascism or interwar fascist movements. As A. J. Gregor (2004) points out, some discussions of ‘generic fascism’ today still view fascism as an ‘unregenerate agent of evil, driven by an irrational mysticism, and committed to mayhem and gross inhumanity’, as well as an enemy of ‘Western ideals’, the modern ‘Enlightenment tradition’, and ‘aspirations of the French Revolution’. Or, as Umberto Eco (1995) insists, fascism ‘implies the rejection of modernism’.
The bias against seeing the revolutionary right as anti-modern thugs incapable of a rational, coherent body of thought continues with the ND. For example, Piero Ignazi (2006: 23) insists that de Benoist’s scathing criticisms of liberal utilitarianism imply a questioning of ‘the acceptability of modernity’ and an ‘anti-modern perspective’. Highlighting the ND’s indebtedness to Gramsci, Rob van Kranenburg (1999: 14) stated: ‘We are in the process of losing our foremost thinker of and on concrete historical scenarios, Antonio Gramsci, to a reactionary right-wing cause.’
ND thinkers are children of modernity and the Enlightenment’s faith in reason. They are neither rural Luddites nor nostalgic for the monarchy. As de Benoist explained in a 2012 interview, ‘I am hostile to all forms of restorationism’ (2012: 205, my translation). Or, in the same interview he could declare that when he criticizes modernity, it is ‘not in the name of the past’, but in ‘the name of another idea of the future’ (that is, a non-liberal, revolutionary future). The ND rejects neither modern technology and communications systems nor the tools at the disposal of the modernist state. ND theorists are incorrectly dubbed ‘reactionaries’ or ‘anti-modernists’ by their opponents because they do not accept the political and cultural consequences of modernity: liberalism, socialism, multiculturalism, the triumph of market values, and egalitarianism. It is my claim that ND philosophers are searching for non-liberal, non-socialist alternatives to modernity.
I now trace the main arguments of Rethinking the French New Right based on my three conceptual tools and the plan of the book. My first conceptual tool traces the ND’s attempts to transcend right and left. I argue that despite the ND’s desire to forge a real alternative to liberalism and socialism, the right-wing positioning of the ND remains.
My second conceptual tool uses Roger Griffin’s (2007a, 2007b) notion of alternative political modernism to understand ND intellectuals. In line with a European tradition in culture and politics since the late nineteenth century, ND thinkers long for a modernist, pan-European alternative to liberalism and socialism as a response to the real and perceived crises of the modern world. While questioning many aspects of modernity, the ND does not fully reject all aspects of modernity and seeks the flowering of alternative modernities. These alternative modernities will simultaneously pay homage to a bricolage of modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies. Bricolage is a French word used in artistic and literary modernism and postmodernism, which I am adopting for the ND. Bricolage means the creative and resourceful use of whatever ‘materials’ are at hand, irrespective of their original purpose. In place of ‘materials’ you might think of the ND’s diverse philosophical and political influences, whether on the right, left, or beyond.
My third conceptual tool argues that ND thinkers are ‘converts’ to a secular ‘religion of politics’, which mimics and recreates all the hallmarks of established religions in a modern age where God has been banished from the public sphere. I also examine other historical and contemporary political forces of various ideological stripes and how they too were ‘converts’ to a ‘religion of politics’.
Rethinking the French New Right is split into three sections: (1) the history of the ND; (2) the three conceptual tools for understanding the ND; and (3) an analysis of the ND and an appraisal of the impact of its ideas. The first section is Chapter 1, which focuses on the history and development of the ND in France and Europe from a transnational perspective. The second section consists of Chapters 2 to 5 based on my three interpretations of the ND, all linked to their intellectuals’ appraisal of the modern and post-modern conditions. Chapter 2 examines my first conceptual tool: the ND’s challenge to the traditional right–left political divide and its relationship to the left and New Left (NL). Chapter 3 sets the foundations for my second conceptual tool, namely, the ND as a species of modernism. In Chapter 3, I attempt to differentiate between the modern, postmodern, and premodern, while also positing that the ‘malaises of modernity’ are central to the ND’s worldview. Chapter 4 examines my second conceptual tool based on the notion of alternative political modernity. This chapter also underscores the ND’s relationship to modernism and, more controversially, fascism. Chapter 5 tackles my third conceptual tool: the ND as ‘converts’ to a secular ‘religion of politics’. The third section consists of Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which analyse the positions and impact of ND thinkers in respect of the three conceptual tools. Chapter 6 focuses on the ND’s longing for a ‘Europe for Europeans’ that would restore premodern ethnic consciousness to the continent, banish immigrants and non-Europeans from the body politic, and make Europeans great players in history again. Chapter 7 analyses ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, the ND’s de facto manifesto, in line with the three conceptual tools and especially the quest for alternative modernity (conceptual tool two). I argue that ND thinkers seek the creation of ethnocracies to advance political dominance for Europe’s ‘original’ peoples, regions, and nations. Chapter 8 examines three key messengers of ND ideas: Guillaume Faye (France), Aleksandr Dugin (Russia), and Marco Tarchi (Italy). Chapter 9 highlights the impact of the ND on contemporary radical right-wing populist movements.
Contrary to the notion that the ND is an insular, nationalistic French school of thought, the ND is today pan-European. Through an oblique metapolitical strategy, the ND seeks to influence civil society and governments of all ideological persuasions. Radical right-wing or conservative right-wing thinkers, movements, political parties, and governments have been influenced by the ND (McCulloch 2006). In contrast, ND leader de Benoist claims that the ND is today a ‘marginalized’ school of thought with little impact on increasingly electorally successful radical right-wing populist parties such as the French Front National (FN, National Front), the Italian Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), or the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria).
I do not want to overstate the importance of the ND and its impact on complex political events and actors. Yet, the ND is significant in respect of contemporary political theory debates for numerous reasons. First, it could be argued that the ND rather than any movement on the contemporary left has crafted a sophisticated critique of contemporary liberalism and capitalism, as well as a coherent philosophical, political, sociological, and cultural appraisal of our age. This poses a challenge to left-wing movements as they have traditionally viewed right-wing movements as intellectually impoverished or as mere defenders of the status quo. Second, the ND’s faith in a metapolitical vocation since 1968 rather than fixation on power demonstrates that elements of the right are just as serious as their leftist counterparts on the battlefield of ideas. Third, the ND confuses us because although its origins are in the revolutionary right-wing milieux, it is nonetheless modernist in its appraisal and solutions for the crises of our age. Fourth, in its vehement rejection of liberalism and capitalism, the ND reminds us that the neo-liberal Anglo-American New Right does not have a monopoly on right-wing thought. Fifth, the ND presents challenges for liberal and left-wing scholars of multiculturalism because it ultimately supports what Spektorowski (2012) calls a ‘multiculturalism of the right’: a new, innovative way to publicly recognize foreigners and immigrants to Europe, while ultimately excluding them from the polity and refusing to assimilate them. Finally, contrary to de Benoist’s aforementioned claim that the ND has little impact on modern radical right-wing populist parties, the ND has wittingly or unwittingly provided the intellectual ammunition for legitimizing the new discourse changes of these political outfits. The ND has influenced the politically correct discourse changes of radical right-wing populist parties in Europe from the 1980s onwards by arguing that their liberal and left-wing opponents were the ‘real racists’ by promoting a universalist and assimilationist liberal multiculturalism, which ultimately destroys rooted cultural communities worldwide. Working from a long-term metapolitical perspective, the ND sought to promote a key idea across the political spectrum, namely, that immigration is a negative phenomenon. While the radical right-wing populist parties tended to generally blame immigrants for Europe’s ills, de Benoist put the blame squarely on a ‘heartless’ capitalist system and its homogenizing logic, which he saw as a threat to the existence of rooted European and non-European cultures alike. His calls to halt immigration into Europe nonetheless echoed the radical right-wing populist parties.
Ultimately, the ND sought to influence European debates in respect of immigration, multiculturalism, and national and regional identities. They sought to shift the broader European political culture in a decidedly European-wide, chauvinistic direction based on two principles: (1) excluding immigrants and foreigners from the body politic (for example, through referenda on immigration) by in the first instance paradoxically recognizing their existence; and (2) the implementation of national or regional and European preference programmes in welfare benefits or government jobs based on ethnic origin. Should national preference one day become a reality in Europe, foreigners and immigrants (including those born in Europe) would be reduced to second-class citizens, liberal multiculturalism would be abolished, and a new post-liberal and modernist body politic would arise, cemented by the ethnic dominance of ‘original’ (native-born, white, Christian, and non-immigrant) Europeans.