“Identitarians of all countries, unite!”
An Interview with Jean-Yves Le Gallou on Remigration
In this interview with Breizh-Info, Jean-Yves Le Gallou makes the case for remigration as an urgent civilizational necessity, laying out a step-by-step framework for reversing immigration flows across Europe.
Énarque1, essayist, former Member of the European Parliament, founder of the Fondation Polemia, co-founder and vice-president of the Institut Iliade, Jean-Yves Le Gallou dedicates his latest book — published by La Nouvelle Librairie (FR) and Arktos (EN) and prefaced by the Austrian Martin Sellner — to one of the most debated political concepts of the decade: remigration.
In a deliberately short format — 120 pages conceived as a manifesto rather than an essay — the author sets out to define, document, and justify a notion still largely misunderstood by the general public, while offering a concrete operational framework for implementing it. Remigration — For the Europe of Our Children is the direct continuation of his previous books on national preference and civilizational preference.
Breizh-info.com: Your previous books were devoted to national preference, then to civilizational preference. Why remigration now, and why in the form of a short book — 120 pages — that you explicitly claim as a manifesto rather than an essay? What, in the political context of 2026, convinced you that it was time to move from analysis to proclamation?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: Urgency, urgency, urgency. If we continue on this path, between 2030 and 2050, European newborns will progressively become a minority in maternity wards across every country in Europe. We must organize to prevent this (through remigration) or to cope with it (through communautarization2). It is true that I have been addressing this question for more than 40 years, through books, speeches, and actions. This earned me a ban for “extremism” by the bien-pensant3 media establishment, even though my analyses erred on the side of optimism and were contradicted by a reality WORSE than the one I had foreseen.
Breizh-info.com: The word “remigration” remains, for the general public, a vague term — even a repellent one. You offer a definition, a genealogy, and a justification. If you had to explain in a few sentences to a reader encountering this concept for the first time — the center-right voter you yourself mention — exactly what remigration does and does not cover, how would you formulate that definition?
It’s simple! It is what was once called the reversal of migratory flows: more departures than arrivals. We must proceed in stages:
— a halt to new arrivals (500,000 per year), the Great Pause;
— the expulsion of illegal immigrants (over one million);
— the expulsion of criminals;
— the non-renewal of residence permits for those foreign nationals who live off social assistance and are dragging down our welfare systems;
— and, at the end of the process, the return of those second-generation immigrants who are both unassimilated and hostile.
Of course, assimilated French citizens of foreign origin are not affected by this policy — which will, moreover, be beneficial for them.
As for the center-right voter who hesitates: ask him whether he wants for his children, his grandchildren, and all his descendants the fate of white South Africans. And incidentally — where does he live, and where does he school his brood? We will no longer allow ourselves to be guilt-tripped — let us guilt-trip them instead!
Breizh-info.com: You recall that up until the 1970s, what we now call remigration was simply ordinary administrative practice in Western Europe. How do you explain that what was taken for granted half a century ago has become, within a few decades, an absolute taboo? In your view, was there an identifiable turning point — a decision, a law, a treaty, a doctrine — or was it a diffuse drift, as much cultural as juridical?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: From the 1970s onward, in the wake of May 1968, we witnessed the establishment of a dominant ideology — globalist, cosmopolitan, and human-rights fundamentalist — unwilling to take into account anything but the interests of individuals, regardless of their origin. The distinction between the national and the foreign was progressively abolished and even criminalized by the Pleven Law of 19724. On top of that, the Conseil d’État created a right to immigration under the rubric of family reunification and asylum. It became an open bar.
Breizh-info.com: You identify in your book the principal obstacle to any remigration policy: not public opinion, but the power of judges — the Conseil d’État, the Constitutional Council, the ECHR. Hence your formula, destined to be much quoted: rather than a FREXIT, a “JUGEXIT.” Concretely, what would this JUGEXIT look like? Does it involve revising the Constitution, denouncing treaties, or building a political balance of forces that would compel the government of judges to retreat?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: JUGEXIT means the restoration of popular sovereignty through laws that must prevail over judges. How? Through a constitutional reform:
— prohibiting the Constitutional Council, as General de Gaulle had wished, from censuring the content of laws;
— reestablishing the supremacy of later law over prior treaty;
— prohibiting judges — administrative and judicial alike — under pain of dereliction of duty, from refusing to apply the text of enacted laws on the pretext that those laws conflict with these judicial functionaries’ own interpretation of general texts.
Breizh-info.com: You cite Sweden and Denmark as examples of policies that can already be described as remigrationary. Yet both countries have pursued these policies without leaving either the European Union or the ECHR. Does this mean the legal room for maneuver is wider than commonly said, and that what France lacks is not the law but the political will? What, in your view, distinguishes the Scandinavian situation from French impotence?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: It is more than French impotence — there is, on the part of France’s media, administrative, and judicial oligarchies, a deliberate will to do ever more for “migrants.” The European Parliament adopted, by a majority of the right (the Patriots and EPP groups), a more restrictive returns directive: the Macronist authorities immediately signaled that they would not implement it. You see — no need for a FREXIT to be even more lax than the European Union itself… And for the record, before BREXIT Great Britain was receiving 300,000 entries per year from the Third World; after BREXIT, 600,000. We must not set Europeans against one another — we must unite them around the defense of their common identity.
Breizh-info.com: Among your proposals are a halt to immigration (”the Great Pause”), the deportation of illegal immigrants, the stripping of nationality from criminals, and return assistance packages. Taken individually, these measures already appear in the platforms of several European parties, including moderate ones. What is it in your book that transforms this pragmatic inventory into a genuine doctrine of rupture? Is it the whole, the coherence, or the underlying philosophy?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: We must not merely hold forth — we must act. Break with the universalist doxa. And reaffirm the right of the historical people to continuity. The European population comes from the depths of the ages: 40,000 years for our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Chauvet, Lascaux); 9,000 years for our Anatolian farmer ancestors (the megaliths, Knossos); 5,000 years for the Indo-Europeans (our languages, our worldview). Christendom constantly defended itself against Muslim invasions in the southwest (the Reconquista, nine centuries), in the Mediterranean (Lepanto, 1571), and in the east in the Balkans (Vienna, 1683). The European population remained sheltered from external invasions until the 1960s, when Great Britain and France opened themselves to immigration.
Breizh-info.com: Opponents of remigration raise two recurring arguments: a moral argument — one cannot undo what has been done, especially for people born in France — and the practical argument that it is unachievable at the desired scale. How do you respond to these two objections? And what distinction do you draw between the legally resident foreigner, the binational, the recently naturalized, and the citizen born on French soil?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: For identity-card holders of African or Asian origin, I distinguish three cases:
— those who are both unassimilated and hostile — the racaillisés5 — they must be stripped of their nationality and repatriated to the land of their ancestors;
— those who are unassimilated but not hostile: they should be encouraged, for their own good (and ours), to return, and assisted if necessary in this voluntary process;
— those who are assimilated, who may of course remain.
Breizh-info.com: Martin Sellner opens your book with the line: “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.” Your work thus inscribes itself explicitly within a European dynamic — Austrian, German, Italian, Scandinavian — that transcends the strictly French frame. Would you say that a genuine international of remigration exists today, with its own networks, thinkers, and political footholds? And, in this landscape, is France at the vanguard or trailing behind?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: YES! Identitarians of all countries, unite! That is my call. France was rather at the vanguard of the intellectual struggle, with thinkers like Guillaume Faye or Renaud Camus, and through the work of the identitarians. Today, the Austrian Martin Sellner and the Dutchwoman Eva Vlaardingerbroek are at the cutting edge of this metapolitical struggle. And certain major parties, such as the AfD in Germany and the FPÖ in Austria, have inscribed remigration in their platforms. Bravo! With the exception of Reconquête, that is not the case in France. Through intellectual laziness or moral cowardice, hopelessly outdated assimilationist fantasies still serve as crutches for the others.
Breizh-info.com: You present remigration as a “mobilizing myth” capable of transcending the internal divisions of the national camp — sovereigntists, identitarians, Christians, secularists, ecologists, liberals, statists. Is there not a risk that this federating function will, in practice, dilute the radicalism of the argument? And concretely, how do you bring to the same table a traditionalist Catholic and an agnostic liberal, a Jacobin, and a regionalist — a Breton attached to his language and his land, for example — around a shared political horizon?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: How to sit at the same table? It is simple: around what is essential — the defense of the ethnic, cultural, civilizational, and religious identity of Europeans. Look: the largest identitarian gathering in France is the Institut Iliade colloquium — more than 1,500 people gather around lectures, exhibitors, booksellers, and artists. Each person comes with their own sensibility, but all are united in the defense of our identity.
Breizh-info.com: The conclusion of your book states that “all the great victories of the last two millennia will count for nothing if we lose this struggle. Neither Thermopylae, nor Poitiers, nor Vienna, nor Lepanto were more important than our fight.” That is a declaration of extreme gravity. By what deadline do you think it will be too late? What, in your view, is the demographic, cultural, and political point of no return — and are we already in the process of crossing it, or is there still an open window for “the Europe of our children”?
Jean-Yves Le Gallou: It will never be too late! As long as Europeans of blood and spirit remain, the great European adventure can begin again!
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Interview conducted by YV.
Originally published on Breizh-Info on April 24th, 2026.
Translated by Alexander Raynor.
TN: Énarque: Graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), France’s most elite civil-service and political training school. The term carries strong connotations of technocratic establishment credentials.
TN: communautarisation: the institutionalization of parallel ethnic or religious communities within a society
TN: bien-pensance / bien-pensant: Literally “right-thinking.” Refers to the conformist, progressive media and intellectual establishment.
Pleven Law (1972): France’s first anti-racism law, formally loi n° 72-546 du 1er juillet 1972 relative à la lutte contre le racisme, which criminalized incitement to racial discrimination, hatred, or violence.
TN: racaillisés: Le Gallou coinage’s, from racaille, a charged French term meaning rabble, riffraff, or scum (famously used by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2005 regarding banlieue youth). The neologism implies those who have been “racialized into the criminal underclass.”
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