Save the Date: Iliade Institute Conference 2026
In June 2014, at the summit of Mount Olympus, on the posthumous wish of Dominique Venner, the Institut Iliade was founded. The Iliade Institute’s primary vocation is to promote and transmit the European heritage to new generations, enabling them to find their bearings and a sense of direction to face and shape history anew. The Iliade Institute is the new torchbearer of the European New Right.
“The Soviets without the Gulag”: thought police, censorship, denunciation, judicial harassment, arbitrary closures of bank accounts, illegitimate prohibitions of meetings or colloquia, the inflation of absurd regulations, and generalized surveillance. The “camp of good,” at the moment when its illusions are shattering against the wall of reality, is undertaking to radicalize itself and claims to condemn to social death any mind that would still dare to call into question its sacrosanct “values,” the credo of universal and indefinite progress.
Freedom is nevertheless one of the fundamental aspirations that runs through the history of our peoples in various forms. From the dawn of our history, it bursts forth brilliantly in the poems of Homer, where man, standing upright, opposes servitude. It is sung in the eleuthería of the Greek cities, where the dignity of the citizen is rooted in fidelity to common law. It is engraved in the stone of Roman tablets, where the freedom of the citizen is identified with the destiny of the Republic. It blossoms further in medieval charters, from enfranchised communes proclaiming their right to govern themselves, to corporations ordering the life of trades in the name of a shared good. It blazes in national revolutions, when the peoples of Europe rise up to defend their independence, their sovereignty and their memory.
Freedom has always been for Europeans something more than an addition of individual rights. It is first a consented bond, an assumed belonging. It rests on the affectio societatis: the will to associate to form a political community. Without this will, no city, no people, no civilization – and therefore, no incarnated freedoms.
This civilizational impulse is today confronted with unprecedented perils. Freedom finds itself travestied into unbridled libertarianism, which claims to abolish all anthropological limits and all connection with tradition. But this hypertrophy of individual rights engenders its opposite: as boundless emancipation is proclaimed, a surveillance society unfolds. We frame, we constrain, we censor – and always in the name of freedom. The old maxim of Saint-Just, “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” thus finds its ultimate confirmation: no real freedoms, rooted in concrete social and specific communities, for the enemies of abstract and universal Freedom, of ideological and revolutionary essence.
Never have individuals been incited to claim with so much virulence the right to free themselves from all constraint, by a system that nevertheless reduces their concrete freedoms of thought, speech, and action with each passing day; and never have the political freedoms of peoples been so called into question. Everyone is guaranteed the “freedom” to consume and to renounce their roots, but nations and peoples are denied the capacity to decide for themselves, to preserve their memory and their coherence, and above all to exercise their sovereignty over their own territory.
Yet, Europe has always known how to conjugate individual freedoms and collective freedom. Germanic freedoms, the franchises of cities, peasant revolts, national and popular struggles: all have testified to this ancient truth, according to which man is truly free only within a free community. Such is the spirit that must animate institutions in the service of the common good. Freedom is not a solipsism: it is a will to share a destiny.
It is the path toward this self-evidence that we must rediscover. True freedom does not blossom in isolation, but in trust. It does not prosper in generalized mistrust and constant surveillance, but in the rooting of shared norms, living traditions, and solid bonds. Where society disintegrates, repression unfolds. Where mores are strong, laws are lenient in contrast. Aristotle already warned us: tyranny is always born from the rupture of trust between citizens.
To reaffirm freedom for Europeans today is thus to reconnect with the civilization of trust against the society of mistrust. It means opposing freedom-destroying anarcho-tyranny with a lofty conception of freedoms based on responsibility and rootedness. It is to recall that freedom is not a universal and unlimited right, but a shared duty; not the wandering of the individual without attachments, but the fidelity of a people to itself. The time has come to break with the illusions of a freedom reduced to caprice, which can only lead to nihilism and chaos.
Such is the spirit of this colloquium: to incite the peoples of Europe to awakening, to denounce the freedom-killing measures that lead to security suffocation and to renounce liberal-libertarian illusions to rediscover the meaning of an authentic freedom, carried by the breath of a civilization that does not resign itself to the soft servitude of markets and surveillances, but that chooses the honor of a common destiny.
Information about the Conference
XIII Colloquium of the Institut Iliade
Freedoms: Thought – Speech – Action
Saturday, April 11th, 2026, from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Maison de la Chimie, 28 rue Saint-Dominique 75007 Paris 📍
Ticket purchasing details to come.
Speakers at the conference come from all parts of Europe and will deliver speeches in their native languages. Live translation is provided for the audience.
The Arktos team will be in attendance. Please stop by our table to talk with some of our staff and purchase some books!
Institut Iliade books are brought to you in English by Arktos:
