Spotlight on the French New Right
by Michael Walker
Michael Walker examines the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) movement, particularly focusing on G.R.E.C.E. (Research and Study Group for European Civilization), founded in May 1968. The piece explores how this intellectual movement positioned itself as distinct from both traditional right-wing politics and the American/British ‘New Right’, instead sharing some philosophical similarities with the New Left while rejecting its conclusions.
The article details how G.R.E.C.E. and its key figures — including Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye — developed a ‘metapolitical’ approach focused on cultural influence rather than direct political engagement. Their philosophy rejects ‘reductionist’ ideologies (including Marxism, monotheistic religions, and biological racism), champions cultural diversity and European identity, and strongly criticizes Western consumer society and American cultural influence. Walker also examines the movement’s growth, its media controversies, its influence across Europe, and offers critical observations about its limitations and contradictions.
Unless denoted EN (editor’s note), all translations/notes have been provided by Michael Walker
This article was originally published in Scorpion magazine, autumn 1986.
A problem of terminology firstly. ‘New Right’ is a label of convenience which arose in the course of an intense media campaign in 1979 launched with the apparent purpose of discrediting the spokesmen of the New Right and their ideas. The designation ‘right’ has been criticized by many supporters who felt it too political or too conservative. The epithet ‘new’ also displeased friend and foe, the latter objecting to what to them was an untruth, since they argued there was nothing ‘new’ in the phenomenon at all: only a very old right in new clothing. The media label has stuck, however, partly because there is no better appellation which has come to hand and partly because there is at least some sense in the name. The movement has been innovatory (to say the least) in respect of many established opinions and dogmas of the conservative right and the far right. At the same time there is indisputably a closer association with the right than with the left, both in respect of the political background of most of the supporters of the New Right and in terms of their values. The term is nevertheless fraught with ambiguity and should be used with caution. Perhaps the issue was best dealt with by Alain de Benoist, one of the best known figures of the French New Right, who characterized himself in his book Vu de Droite (View from the Right: Volume I, Volume II, Volume III) as being a thinker who finds himself on the right but who would not wish to be characterized as of the right.
The French New Right, and the European New Right which is now growing out of it, should not be confused with the ‘New Right’ of America and Britain. The New Right in the United States is a collective term for the forces opposed to the liberal consensus established in the nineteen-sixties and is chiefly associated with the Moral Majority. This ‘right’ is determined to restore ‘traditional values’ of God and country and ultimately ‘save the West’. As we shall see, this is very far from being the aim, ultimate or otherwise, of the European New Right. In Britain ‘New Right’ is a term sometimes describing this trend and sometimes that of economic liberalism, which has been undergoing a revival in recent years. The European New Right is similar to neither of these ‘New Rights’. In some important respects it is radically opposed to them. Paradoxically the European New Right probably bears more similarity to the New Left. Both grew out of the tumultuous events of 1968 and both were created out of a rejection of some of the principal dogmas of the established political orthodoxy. Orthodox Marxism had proved inadequate as a vehicle for interpreting and acting in the modern world. Far from being radicalized, the industrial proletariat was being dragged deeper into ‘false consciousness’ and bourgeois complacency. The Soviet Union was no longer the ‘first homeland of the workers’ but a traitor government, a state-capitalist empire. The new idols were Mao and Guevara. The new apostles were Marcuse and Reich, who emphasized the importance of culture in the formation of the social superstructure. Instinctively, where not consciously, these and other writers of the left were aware of the need to change cultural norms as a prerequisite of political change. They condemned the consumer society for reducing mankind to a kind of gentle slavery — Marcuse called it ‘consumer terrorism’. Dialectical materialism was no longer material.
The New Right’s rejection of the dogmas of the old right follow similar lines: a sense of the inadequacy and outdatedness of so many prejudices of the right in the modern world. The White race, Western civilization, Christendom — all these were notions which required to be understood and where they were found to be not understood or misunderstood they were to be rejected or modified. The emphasis on culture and metapolitical initiative was common at the beginning to both the New Right and the New Left, but according to the New Right the New Left did not set about developing a system which would replace the consumer society which they claimed to detest and they were therefore doomed to become part of it. Events have shown this analysis to be substantially correct. The European New Right is a force and influence today. The New Left has passed into history. The majority of the angry young men and firebrands of the hippy revolution have become either uninfluential dropouts or actual champions of the system. Fifteen years ago the expressions ‘anti-establishment’, ‘anti-American’, were taken for granted to imply left-wing. Today almost the contrary is the case. The most vociferous anti-Americanism in Europe indisputably can be traced to the European New Right, which has developed the inherent anti-Americanism of many Europeans and given it cultural content. The attack on consumer society which the left, mainly because of its hedonistic, utilitarian and materialist outlook, could not sustain, has been taken up and developed by the French New Right. In a speech made at the fifteenth conference of G.R.E.C.E., Guillaume Faye told his audience that ‘the best of the rebels of 1968 are now with us!’
The original and still most important group belonging to what is termed the European New Right is G.R.E.C.E., a cultural organization based in Paris. The letters stand for Le Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilization). The word is an acronym for the French word for Greece, which underlines the group’s strong sense of attachment to the Greek heritage in particular, with its cult of heroism, elitism and beauty, and perhaps most importantly, its pagan values and outlook. The group was created on 5th May 1968 by the sons and daughters of mainly very conservative parents. The young founders of G.R.E.C.E. had, to quote Jean Desperts in a recent article on the New Right for Éléments magazine, ‘lost faith in the totems of their tribe’, the holy Gospel according to Joan of Arc, General de Gaulle, the twelve apostles or Adolf Hitler. The baggage of the old right, were it the nationalist right, the nazi right, the Christian right, the imperialist right, the liberal right, with its simplistic slick solutions to the issues of the day, left these young people profoundly unsatisfied. The far right, shrill, monotonous and wholly predictable, was an insult to the intelligence. The unwritten credo of those years adhered to by all, including most of the right, was that intelligence belonged to the left. To be an intellectual was to be ipso facto left. All the right could do was to cry for ‘instincts’, ‘common sense’, ‘decency’ and a host of other high-sounding but intellectually void shibboleths. The choice was simple: join the left if you wished to retain your intellectual self-respect or join the right and lose it. ‘Have you half a mind to join the National Front? That’s all you need.’ This slogan of the early seventies summed up what nearly everybody believed about the British right, and with reason. In Britain as elsewhere, whoever was in any way considered to be ‘right wing’ was assumed to be of inferior intellectual calibre. The left-wing intellectualism à la mode associated with the ‘brainy professions’ was at least in part the result of this lack on the right. Pragmatic, suspicious of all doctrine and theory, conservatives took it for granted that left-wingers should be more ‘bookish’. They preferred to rely on what they believed was their natural ‘populist’ constituency made up of instincts and prejudices. They failed to grasp the importance of the media, education, the arts, and culture generally in forming new ‘instincts’ and ‘prejudices’. In much the same way a far right which clung to its preconceived dogmas about the origins and meaning of social and political developments never seriously considered the need to convert the intellectuals, whom it regarded as natural enemies. This was a self-fulfilling myth: to disregard the role of culture or intellect on the grounds that the creators of cultural and intellectual beliefs are hostile to you is to leave the way open to those who will indeed make the norms of the day hostile to you.
The starting point of G.R.E.C.E. was to undertake an analysis of the meaning of ideas. They wished to preserve an identity, a collective identity as Europeans: on that they were agreed from the beginning; but that was all. Nothing else would be ‘assumed’, not the sanctity of the White race, nor the need to defend Christendom, nor the Western world, nor NATO, nor any of the other bastions of the old right. All would be examined critically in order to grasp their complete meaning. Taking its example from Nietzsche’s creation of a genealogy of morality, G.R.E.C.E. examined the history of ideas in order to better understand the relevance of each idea in the modern world. By this process, which never consisted in a ‘platform’ but was always a process of discovery, many of the old right-wing dogmas were modified, some abandoned altogether. Their work was never political in the commonly accepted sense of the word: G.R.E.C.E. never put political pressure on its adherents: the political loyalties and affiliations of the members and supporters of G.R.E.C.E. remain their own affair.
Starting from a defence of Europe’s right to be different, G.R.E.C.E. identified what it called ‘reductionism’ as the chief vehicle of the destruction of differences. Reductionism is the name given to any creed or dogma which reduces all social, economic and political phenomena in history to a ‘key’, a single root ‘cause’. According to this theory, Marxism is reductionist because it reduces all human history to the history of class struggle and interprets all human conflict and association in class terms. Monotheistic religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam are also reductionist in theory, although some might well argue that in practice Islam and Christianity have in many ways adopted outside influences which have diluted the original reductionist Weltanschauung. Biological racialism is also identified as reductionist, seeking to interpret all human history in terms of race in the same way that Marxists use the notion of class. G.R.E.C.E. does not deny that factors like class or race are important; on the contrary, they are essential elements in human history — but we cannot reduce everything that is human to one eternal omnipresent and eternal ‘truth’. This argument immediately put G.R.E.C.E. beyond the pale of the Christian right and the hardline ‘orthodox’ fascist right, although many who had formerly considered themselves as Christians and national socialists began to re-examine their beliefs. To make matters worse, G.R.E.C.E. poured scorn on one of the most sacred cows of the far right: the conspiracy theory. The belief that history can be interpreted in the light of irrefutable evidence pointing to a ‘dark conspiracy’ was repudiated by G.R.E.C.E. as a Christian-inspired reductionism.
Reductionism in ideas is the source of what G.R.E.C.E. calls ‘intellectual terrorism’. By creating certain essential and unquestionable ‘truths’ which are crucial to the reductionist creed, a ‘totalitarian’ system develops, in which the naturally inquiring mind of the European is forever frustrated by the limitations imposed by the prevailing dogma of the day. All this might have been acceptable to liberals and the liberal left if G.R.E.C.E. had not had the temerity to apply these criteria to modern Western society and found that liberalism as it exists in our society is totalitarian too. Certain taboos are created around the reductionist dogma that all men are created equal, have an equal right to happiness, and that the individual is the measure of all things cultural, both in what he creates and in what he judges. Turning the old liberal catchwords against the liberals themselves, G.R.E.C.E. denounced ‘totalitarian liberalism’, which sought to create a one-world system and in so doing destroys all the cultural, racial, economic, national and environmental elements which stood in its way. The message of world liberalism, according to G.R.E.C.E., was ‘convert to the Western way of life or perish’.
Reductionism seeks to make all things equal in value. Even creeds which claim to seek the betterment of mankind (and don’t they all?) are egalitarian insofar as they seek to eliminate what they deem to be ‘inferior’ (inferior according to their preconceived ideas of inferior and superior, of course). For a long time the New Right has argued that ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ cannot or should not be used as abstractions. We should speak of inferior and superior particulars only. To use these terms in the abstract is to implicitly affirm an underlying creed which reduces all things to one scale of values. The New Right took up the old clarion call of Zarathustra: ‘all things are not equal — that is justice’ and used it in their campaign for the right of all peoples to be different. If individuals have a right to certain freedoms, as the old right argued, then why not peoples? ‘The Rights of Peoples’ became a favourite battle-cry of the New Right.
At an early stage G.R.E.C.E. acknowledged a debt to the Italian Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci developed a theory of the source of political power which departed radically from orthodox Marxism. Gramsci underlined the importance of what he called ‘implicit power’ in establishing and maintaining hegemony in a society. Implicit power exists outside the state apparatus and persists through a socio-cultural medium. What he called the ‘cultural hegemony’ Gramsci identified as a prerequisite of political power. In other words, political power can only be won after the cultural battle has been won, not, as Lenin believed, before it. Therefore, according to the New Right, all those who are opposed to egalitarianism, universalism and economic liberalism, must acknowledge the importance of culture. Political gains and losses can only be interpreted, can only take place, after a change in cultural allegiances. Culture is therefore not just the ‘icing on the ideological cake’ nor an ‘intellectual indulgence” but an indispensable part of political commitment. It is not, according to this analysis, the consequence of political change, but the cause of change.
If this is correct, then all radical political movements, of whatever hue, which fail to seize the cultural initiative, are doomed to failure. According to Jean-Claude Valla, the first general secretary of G.R.E.C.E., this lesson was long ago learned by the egalitarians. He argued that it was the task of G.R.E.C.E. to teach the right the same lesson. It was for this reason that G.R.E.C.E. has always been sympathetic to many of the premises of the New Left, though not obviously to the aims. G.R.E.C.E. even organized a conference with the theme ‘For a Gramsci of the Right’. Is this initiative political at all? In an interview given to Éléments in 1977, Jean-Claude Valla called it metapolitical, which means literally that which goes before the political. He defined metapolitics as ‘the domain of values which do not involve immediate political issues but which act indirectly on the political consensus. To raise the question of politics is to raise the question of ideology. In our sense of the word, “ideology” is the mental system which results from the manner in which the world is perceived and acted upon. Historically, it is the putting into practice of ideology which constitutes culture.’1 Culture then is something more than the ‘arty-farty’ and the esoteric. It is the manifestation of the way in which we see the world, and it is here that enemies of any political status quo should begin their assault on that status quo in order to dispose the minds of men and women in their favour. This is what G.R.E.C.E. means by ‘metapolitics’ and the ‘cultural war’.
‘From small acorns mighty oaks do grow.’ The official name of G.R.E.C.E. for the small group which had convened in Lyons in May was launched in the same year in Nantes, Toulouse, Lyons and Paris. In the same year the magazine Éléments was founded. Beginning as a round robin for members of G.R.E.C.E., it became a few years later an independent paper in general support of G.R.E.C.E. From the beginning, G.R.E.C.E. was organized on a strictly undemocratic basis, in which membership was considered a privilege only accorded to those known personally to members of the organization. Being a self-styled ‘society of thought’ gave G.R.E.C.E. an advantage over any political party. Disagreements over particular beliefs and issues do not ‘split’ the organization since the group is under no pressure to produce a uniform view on any issue of the day. G.R.E.C.E. has thus been able to demonstrate a unity of purpose which makes the leaders of political organizations turn green with envy. Many political activists sympathetic to G.R.E.C.E. have conceded the point while countering it with the argument that the New Right is shut up in an intellectual ivory tower, unable to face the tussle of the real (political) world. In the interview referred to above, Jean-Claude Valla had this criticism made to him and replied, “We are not against political commitment. We just want to extend the meaning of that phrase, which is far from the same as being unconcerned by what happens from day to day. The dimension which is so often lacking in politics is an examination of problems in depth, at the level of original principles, a definition of a methodology. In short, we draw the particular out of the general instead of the general out of the particular. We do not adopt a position on a given subject unless we have examined the problem from all angles, something which requires a lot of time and an intellectual discipline which is too often absent in political debate.’2
Valla went on to argue that the intention of G.R.E.C.E. was to ‘put ideas into life and life into ideas’. To espouse ideas requires a responsibility to promote ideas that are coherent and valid, given that this is not an intellectual game but a metapolitical struggle. As was pointed out by Jean Desperts in his recent article on the New Right in Éléments, the New Right has forced many thinkers on the left to state openly what they had previously preferred to imply, for example that they were opposed to any attempt by Europeans to revivify a sense of a European tradition, that they were in favour of the Western alliance, and why. The New Right also obliged many other thinkers on the left, according to Desperts, to take stock of their own position and reassess it. As a result of the campaign of the New Right to force the issue concerning the Western world, it is usual in internal political debate in France to hear references to the ‘American left’, or the ‘American party’.
The philosophical purpose of G.R.E.C.E.’s campaign was to give new meaning to life which for many people lacked the necessary spiritual dimension. In an interview given by Michel Marmin to one of the best-known figures in G.R.E.C.E., Alain de Benoist, de Benoist described his allegiance to Europe as ‘what you could call the fixed point of my life’, but beyond or behind that is a conception of what Europe ought to be and potentially is. Not only can we argue that we wish to create a ‘certain idea’ of Europe economically and politically, but also a Europe which is attached to the values which are most dear to us. This is why a knowledge of history is very important to the New Right. Our values are derived, according to the New Right, from our identity, but to understand our identity we must know our history, our origins. As we have seen, the New Right rejects the notion that any single factor can interpret human phenomena and therefore is clearly opposed to a notion of Europe which championed just race, just economics or just geopolitics at the expense of everything else. Culture is seen as supremely important because culture develops through all the aspects of history and therefore can only be understood in terms of them all. European culture is what it is by virtue of racial, geographical, economic and political identity. In short, ‘culture is the crucial point’. Reductionist creeds seek to strip men of their cultural particularities. How does it do this? According to G.R.E.C.E., the danger today is from materialism, which is the most successful way that an egalitarian doctrine can reduce us all to an equal level. It progressively reduces us to our common materiality as human animals by stripping us of our cultural identities, leaving us with nothing but our biological being. The chief vehicle of this egalitarianism, according to the New Right, is not communism but the West.
Many of the leading spokesmen of the New Right spent their early political careers on the far right of politics defending one or other cause of the West. For Alain de Benoist, it was French Algeria and later the American intervention in Vietnam. At the time that the European powers were being hastily stripped of their empires, it was easy to indiscriminately identify this as ‘an attack on the West’, ‘an attack on Europe’, ‘an attack on civilization’, ‘an attack on the White world’, ‘an attack on Christianity’, as though these were all the same thing and would always be identified as the same thing. Conspiracy theories on the right at this time were all-prevalent. Like all conspiracy theories, that of the reactionary right interpreting the fall of the European empires was breathtakingly simple. The enemy was: number 1, ‘International Finance’ ("World Jewry for hard-core nazis hooked on the hard stuff); and 2, ‘International Communism’, its tool. Anti-colonial agitation was in its turn the ‘tool’ of International Communism! One of the most striking things about this application of the conspiracy theory is its simultaneous fatuousness and impregnability. It was an ideal theory for those too limited mentally and above all with too little capacity to adapt. It explained everything and gave the believer a sense of higher moral well-being, especially when, as is very often the case with conspiracy theorists, he actually did very little for the cause he believed in.
For the New Right, it is not a conspiracy but a system which constitutes ‘the enemy’. To this extent, the New Right shares the outlook of the greater part of the revolutionary left, but differs in arguing that the system includes the cultural ‘opposition’. Consumer society can be ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’. What characterizes it is the dictatorship of economics. It is what G.R.E.C.E. called the société marchande, the buy-and-sell dictatorship. From this argument, it rapidly became clear to thinkers like Alain de Benoist that a knee-jerk defence of colonialism in Algeria or support for America in Vietnam was not necessarily identical with the defence of Europe. In the course of ten years, the New Right became increasingly skeptical of the value of ‘the West’ and by 1980 the term was only used in a pejorative sense. That year an issue of Éléments, which now called itself the ‘New Right review’, appeared entitled Pour en finir avec la civilisation occidentale (To Hell with Western Civilization). Pierre Vial, the general secretary of G.R.E.C.E., Michel Marmin, film critic and leading G.R.E.C.E. member, and Guillaume Faye, a new and passionate advocate of G.R.E.C.E., confirmed the total break of the New Right with one of the most sacred cows of all in the old right corral: the West. The leading article in that issue of Éléments was written by Guillaume Faye: ‘This is the hideous face of a civilization which, with an implacable logic, has forced itself onto every culture, gradually levelling them, bringing all peoples into the gamut of the one-world system. What use is the cry ‘Yanks out!’ when those who shout the slogans are Levi customers? More successfully than Soviet Marxism, this civilization is realizing the project of abolishing human history in order to ensure the perpetual well-being of bourgeois man... this system, this civilization, which is eradicating the identity of the peoples of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas has a name: it is called Western civilization.’3
After Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye is probably the best-known member of G.R.E.C.E. He is certainly the most popular speaker of the French New Right. Unlike most of the members of G.R.E.C.E., he enjoys playing to his audience, and his hostility to America and the Western world is the most uncompromising and dramatic of all. He is a member of the ‘second generation’ of G.R.E.C.E. members who was not part of the founding group. Unlike Jean-Claude Valla and Alain de Benoist, Faye has no use for the term ‘right wing’ at all, and with his help G.R.E.C.E. moved gradually from qualifying its support of the West to turning against the West altogether. In 1975, Faye spoke at the ninth G.R.E.C.E. colloquium with Anthony Burgess and Jean Cau whose journalistic acridity is well known in the French world of letters. The subject of the colloquium was typical of the methodology of the New Right: ‘Does History have a Meaning?’. Clearly for Faye, history does have a meaning but not a moral one. As Faye developed his anti-Western and anti-bourgeois critique, Alain de Benoist was also strengthening his anti-American leaning. This culminated in a seminal issue of Alain de Benoist’s own magazine, Nouvelle École, a violent attack on the United States, which was published in 1975. The principal arguments laid out were reiterated in Issue 7 of The Scorpion.
The ‘anti-Americanism’ of Alain de Benoist, Michel Marmin, Pierre Vial, Guillaume Faye and Robert Steukers (to mention a few) is neither as original nor as simple as friends and foes of the New Right have often assumed. The American cultural invasion of Europe had been documented and deplored before the establishment of the French New Right. Even books like The Greening of America by Charles Reich, let alone the works of Ney and Gobard, had paved the way for a cultural critique of America. There are different aspects to the anti-Americanism of the New Right. There is firstly the inherited French resentment against all things American, a distrust which is mingled with envy for the United States as superpower and ‘leader of the Free World’, a distrust of the Anglo-American special relationship, a distrust simply of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Many members of G.R.E.C.E. are sympathetic to the aims of de Gaulle to create a strong French state based on co-operation with Germany and a distancing from the Anglo-Saxons, Britain and the U.S.A. There is resentment that English and not French has become the first language of international trade and technology, of industry and commerce, throughout the world. There is ambition too, to wrest power from the United States: political and economic power, but firstly cultural power.
The anti-Americanism of the New Right is something more than Gallic chauvinism, although it has undoubtedly received initial impetus from this Gaullist legacy. Like the Frankfurt School and the New Left generally, the New Right decried the consumer society, the société marchande (which is impossible to precisely translate) and the ‘bourgeois’ man for whom this society is created and who is created by it. This, according to G.R.E.C.E., is the legacy of Judaeo-Christianity and in particular the Anglo-Saxon adaptation of Judaeo-Christianity: Business and the Bible. ‘All societies’, argues Robert de Herte (EN: This was a pseudonym of Alain de Benoist) in no. 28-29 of Éléments ‘are based on a community of values. The one in which we live today is based on the rule of lucre.’
Alain de Benoist has adopted a famous aphorism of Oscar Wilde for his own use: the société marchande is one which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is echoed in Faye’s assessment of liberalism as the creed which ‘tolerates everything and respects nothing’. To quote Robert de Herte again: ‘The inherent materialism of liberalism and Marxism is nothing other than the dissolution of the soul, the abandonment of all human motivation, which cannot be rationalized in terms of personal interest or immediate existence. The only world which is permitted to impinge on our minds is the here-and-now of my world. There exists no place in “my” world for what has a value beyond me, which constrains me, which gives me a form. The “rule of quantity”, to use René Guénon’s expression, is formless, hic et nunc, nothing more. The paradigm of decadence: a falling off from spiritual to material, from soul to spirit, to body alone; the era of Homo economicus, linked closely to the coming of the bourgeois, the bourgeois not so much as the representative of a class as a type who imposes a certain system of values. The aristocrat seeks to preserve what he is, the bourgeois what he has.’4
For G.R.E.C.E., the société marchande is unable to satisfy our needs because our needs cannot be measured in exclusively quantitative terms. Man cannot live by bread alone, even if he cannot live without it. Writers like Alain de Benoist argue like the New Left that to achieve happiness we must reject a belief that our exclusive quest for material betterment will bring it to us. In some ways more strongly influenced than any other member of G.R.E.C.E. by the writings of the Frankfurt School and the New Left in general, Guillaume Faye argues beyond the need for the achievement of material happiness. In fact, Faye frequently casts scorn on the notion that human beings should seek happiness at all. His contribution to the issue of Éléments rejecting Western civilization was significantly entitled ‘La Dictature du Bien-Etre’, (The Dictatorship of Happiness). Faye rejects all notions of peace, comfort, resolution of conflict, as desirable ends in themselves. His writing is the culmination of the amoral and the nihilistic elements in New Right thought. He champions Machiavelli against Locke, Bentham and Hume.
In his book La Système à tuer les Peuples (EN: The System for Killing People) and in subsequent monographs, he extends the New Right critique of the New Left to include an attack on the belief in personal freedom from the société marchande. Marcuse and Reich rejected consumer society in the name of the freedom of the individual: a monumental fallacy, argues Faye, for it is precisely in the name of the freedom of the individual and the rights of man that the ‘system which destroys peoples’ extends its tentacular grasp around the world. It is not a conspiracy which we have to fear, that old bug-bear of the ultra right: it is a system, a system which attacks us from within. It strikes a chord in us: it seduces us by making us ‘happy’. It promises us ‘peace’, which Faye, quoting Konrad Lorenz, calls ‘tepid death’. Marcuse believed that ‘commodity fetishism’ could be overthrown by the ‘new proletariat’ of students, racial minorities in the West and the Third World. Agreeing with Marcuse, Baudrillard and others, that commodity dictatorship, consumer terrorism, the société marchande, constituted a system which had to be destroyed in the name of freedom, Faye argues that the system is destroyed by championing the cause of politics and rejecting the anti-political, utilitarian West.
Characteristic of all members of G.R.E.C.E. and the European New Right generally is a rejection of any kind of economic or biological determinism. So far as immigration into Europe is concerned, Faye argues that it is a wholly natural phenomenon: a symptom of Europe’s decadence, not a cause of it. For Alain de Benoist, neither racial hatred nor hatred based on class are appropriate to the European: racial and class hatred are the destructive manifestation of reductionisms. Racialism is identified as typical of the Anglo-Saxons, a product in part of biblical monogeny. Racialism is the ‘rejection of the other’ because ‘the other’ cannot be accepted for what he is: ‘other’. Racialism and class hatred are implicitly genocidal and reductionist because they seek to impose one model on the world, reduce different human beings to one type. Taking the war into the enemy camp, the New Right accuses professional anti-racist bodies of being themselves racist insofar as they wish to make all peoples conform to their image of an emancipated fully fledged Westerner. Always quick to denounce the violation of ‘human rights’ at an individual level, liberal campaigners are more reluctant to champion the cause of peoples. The reluctance, observes Alain de Benoist, turns into outright refusal where Europeans are concerned.
The rejection of racialism as a guiding doctrine in politics has reinforced the rejection of the Western world in theory and in political reality. The fact that a man, an American for example, is White and may be of ‘good European stock’ is considered less important than his cultural allegiance, not to speak of his political attachment to the United States, which, according to G.R.E.C.E., is obliged by the laws of geopolitics to be the enemy of Europe, whoever governs there and whatever their race. This constitutes a major break with the extreme old right, which, it must be said, always suffered from trying to simultaneously ride the two horses of nationalism and racialism. Neither race nor class is rejected as a contributory factor in history: on the contrary, the New Right is fully conscious of both, but it rejects the notion that history, and by extension, politics, should be reduced to the level of any one such factor. Where ‘race’ or ‘class’ or ‘God’ or any other moral determinant officially directs political will at the expense of all the others, we have, according to G.R.E.C.E., the most pitiless wars, the ‘moral’ ones.
America, and to some extent Britain, are seen in this light as primitive, even anti-European. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ moralizing is condemned as part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Puritan inheritance, which has its origins in the Bible. The Bible, according to G.R.E.C.E., is a work which advocates a ‘totalitarian’ system. Only one god can be tolerated, as Marxists will tolerate only one class, as nazis will tolerate only one race, as liberals will tolerate only one kind of individual. While it may be natural for nomadic, Semitic tribes to worship only one god, it is not the ‘natural religion’ of Europe; it is an outside imposition and one of the tools for our subjection to the Western world. Christianity predisposes us to accept one truth, one morality, one code of behavior, one kind of mind for everyone. It takes the divine outside the world and leaves the world to Caesar, but a Caesar devoid of soul. The economy is left to ‘invade’ what should be the non-economic spheres of social life. Alain de Benoist and other spokesmen of G.R.E.C.E. have entered into many lively debates with Christians who have been stung to argue that Christianity is not responsible for the rule of Mammon and indeed at its best has always been opposed to it. The end result is that states become non-political and thus incapable of defending the people against the growth of the bourgeois system, the société marchande, the American way of life.
The New Right argues strongly for a better understanding among statesmen and analysts of the role of geopolitics in world affairs. The attitude could be summed up as ‘more strategy, less moralizing’. In a recent issue of Éléments (No. 56), Guillaume Faye reviews the work of the German Jordis von Lohausen who argues for the formation of a powerful Franco-German military and industrial axis to challenge the United States. Less reluctant than many New Right spokesmen to draw political conclusions from metapolitical strategy, Faye expressed his enthusiastic support for von Lohausen’s thesis. In Brussels, the amiable intellectual Robert Steuckers, editor of Vouloir, has been ploughing the same furrow for many years. Unhindered by nostalgic nationalism, this ‘Belgian’ voice of the New Right has consistently argued for a strong united Europe free of superpower interference. A book by Guillaume Faye, Nouveau Discours à la Nation Européenne (The New Emerging European Nation) had also emphasized the geopolitical imperatives of the coming era and the need for a strong, united Europe.
Singularly lacking from the ‘geopolitical discourse’ is any sense of spiritual Weltanschauung. Faye’s book, even by the standards of the New Right, never strong on moralizing, is devoid of moral feeling, provocative for the sake of being provocative, destructive for the sake of being destructive. ‘Once you were nationalists’, says Faye, ‘circumstances have changed — now you must be pan-nationalists, European nationalists.’ Faye makes no attempt to answer the question why? If the bourgeois worships lucre, one is tempted to suggest that the Machiavellians like Faye and von Lohausen worship power! His review of the von Lohausen book already referred to shows an indication that Faye senses this failing. To the argument that von Lohausen’s strategy could eventually lead to a nuclear conflict, that Europe’s renewal will make war more likely, not less, we are told: ‘Of all the peoples of the world, only Europeans nurse the illusion that they are at peace. The truth is that they are losing a war. “And”, you say, “where are the victims then?” The victims are in the children we no longer bring into the world, the victims are the generations who will succeed us and who will pay dearly for our pusillanimity: they will pay in terms of seeing Europe slowly go under and finally succumb to the rule of others... the war which is destroying us has not been officially declared, but we are losing all right; birth rate, cultural decline, immigration. We are losing... It is at this time of so-called peace that Europe is losing all the battles and prepares for its enslavement in the coming century.’5
True to its original promise to search for the meaning of ideas au fond, G.R.E.C.E. ignored no aspect of culture in its fight for what it called a ‘new culture’. Alain de Benoist’s own magazine, Nouvelle École, rapidly established itself in academic circles and gathered an impressive list of supporters and readers throughout the world. The conferences organized by G.R.E.C.E. every year on a wide variety of subjects soon became well-attended and popular events. An emphasis on a sense of identity and a reavowal of the role of origins in moulding a people made G.R.E.C.E. increasingly sympathetic in the seventies to the small nations, although this was not without ambiguity, given the strongly Gallic, if not Parisian, flavour of G.R.E.C.E. discourses. Great emphasis was always placed on ‘form’: man, to quote Jünger, as master of not only destiny but of the form which his life takes. Alain de Benoist went so far as to say that it was an attachment to the importance of style which constituted the major attraction of the right as opposed to the left. The New Right can be described as a revolt against the formless: formless politics, formless culture, formless values. That modern society pays scant attention to measure, order, style, is self-evident, nowhere more so than in the United States. According to the New Right, utility and ugliness are the deadly twins of the Western world. When a society reduces all facets of life to the dictatorship of economics, then beauty, honour, loyalty — in a word everything we call intangible — is made tangible, rentable, and is thus destroyed. If it is true that style maketh the man, then the man created by the modern world is inhuman, deprived of what is specifically human, cultural, and reduced to his materiality.
‘There is nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so’ — or, the New Right would say, willing makes it so. Aggression is necessary; total peace is... death. This opposition to a scale of fixed values has inevitably earned the New Right in general and G.R.E.C.E. in particular the wrath of the churches as well as left-wingers and right-wing extremists. Pro-Soviet communists have been comparatively reticent about the New Right, which has led Christian right-wingers to suggest that G.R.E.C.E. might be financed by the K.G.B.! One of G.R.E.C.E.’s most notable successes was to reveal the intellectual feebleness and rottenness of the left. Certainly the same was done to the old right, but the inability of the left to score off G.R.E.C.E. intellectually is remarkable. It was, after all, the point of departure of the New Right that right-wing thinking, was, to quote a phrase of Anthony Wakeford, a thing of ‘cobwebs and corpses’. Less obvious was the irrelevance of most of the left. After all, the intellectuals of society were assumed for many years to be men of the left; but far from being capable of arguing convincingly against G.R.E.C.E., the left was obliged to suffer the humiliation of having G.R.E.C.E. carry the arguments even onto its chosen stamping grounds and show that it had read, and read more thoroughly, any ‘progressive'‘ writer one cared to mention. Previously, right-wingers would shrug off sociology with a witticism, hotly deny their 'racism’, or in the case of the far right proudly and obtusely affirm it; all actions which did little to earn it the respect of the intellectually discerning. For the first time, a group on the right (or at least certainly not on or of the left!) was able to throw back the charge of ‘totalitarian’ and ‘racialist’ in the teeth of its accusers. Even the most precious cause of all for the left — the cause of the Third World — has been adopted by the New Right, who now call for a strategic alliance with the Third World against the superpowers. G.R.E.C.E. has been singularly successful in achieving the aim laid out by Jean Claude Valla of ‘putting ideas into action and action into ideas’.
By 1977, it was becoming difficult to ignore G.R.E.C.E. in the French intellectual world. The twelfth conference, ‘The Illusions of Equality’, which took place that year was attended by a record audience of nearly a thousand people, most of them professors, academics, professional people of one kind or another. Spokesmen included Thierry Maulnier of the French Academy, the author of a well-respected anthology of French poetry, Henri Gobard, who had written one of the first books attacking American cultural imperialism, and Professor Eysenck. In ten years, starting from nothing, G.R.E.C.E. had created a support group which assured it of a considerable and regular income. It had organized summer schools and forums, debates and conferences. Its influence had extended beyond France, notably to Belgium and Italy. Even the revival of summer solstice celebrations was due in large part to G.R.E.C.E. Books by Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye were being or had already been translated into Italian, German and Dutch.
In 1979, the deluge began. The media, which had until that time not breathed a word about G.R.E.C.E., unleashed a campaign to ‘warn’ the public about the ‘danger’ of being seduced by the New Right. Pierre Vial, then general secretary of G.R.E.C.E., counted five hundred mainly or wholly hostile articles and radio programmes in the space of six months. The socialist newspaper La Matin warned its readers not to be taken in by a ‘New’ right which was just the worst of the old right in a new wrapping. Time magazine also weighed in, as well as a medley of liberal, right-wing and left-wing papers; and even France's gutter press (France Soir) had to have its say. As Alain de Benoist was to subsequently remark, what was lacking in all the commentaries was any suggestion that the commentators might have listened to a speech or read an article by any member of G.R.E.C.E. The immediate result of the campaign, which stopped as abruptly as it began, was an influx of inquiries and attention from the more sympathetic elements in the media which led to Alain de Benoist being invited for the first time to appear on television that Autumn to discuss his new book, Les Idées à l'Endroit (Ideas Right Side Up).
In December 1979, the fourteenth G.R.E.C.E. conference, ‘Against all Totalitarianisms’, was attacked by a group of armed men claiming to belong to a hitherto unknown ‘Jewish Defence Committee’. It was not clear whether the attack was motivated by the belief that G.R.E.C.E. was an anti-Semitic conspiracy or because of the emphasis on the New Right generally for closer European-Arab co-operation. The attack was a spectacular failure: the perpetrators failed in their objective of breaking up the conference and they provided another G.R.E.C.E. member (Guillaume Faye this time) with the opportunity to appear on television with the claim that the opponents of the New Right were ‘resorting to violence because they are intellectually bankrupt’, a view echoed by Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vial and Michel Marmin holding a press conference after the event. There have been no more physical attacks since then and the media have fallen silent again.
By 1980, the influence of what was now in people’s minds ‘the New Right’ was firmly established. Publications influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the French initiative had been founded in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Germany. Books by Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye had been translated into most major European languages. The two significant exceptions remain English and Russian. The most successful initiatives have been those which have not taken after G.R.E.C.E. too slavishly but which have attempted to give their own national or regional character to their efforts. In Belgium, after the demise of Pour une Renaissance Européenne, which represented the Belgian G.R.E.C.E., the New Right found its voice in two magazines edited by the indefatigable Robert Steuckers, Orientations and Vouloir. With remarkable single-mindedness and self-discipline, Steuckers has established with Vouloir a magazine which more closely approaches the political than anything produced regularly by G.R.E.C.E., while sharing G.R.E.C.E.’s disdain for party politics and electioneering. In Italy, early attempts to produce an Italian Éléments (Elementi) have never got off the ground and the Italian New Right has found its voice through Diorama Letterario, edited by Marcho Tarchi. The Italian New Right commands an especially impressive book list. In both Belgium and Italy, there have been many conferences and debates, organized by groups friendly to G.R.E.C.E. In Germany, Spain, Portugal and Greece, there are signs that the initiative of the French New Right is influencing groups there. In Britain, both Iona and The Scorpion owe a debt to G.R.E.C.E. In addition to Éléments and Nouvelle École, Etudes et Recherches, the official G.R.E.C.E. publication, and Panorama des idées actuelles, edited by the historian Professor Jean Varenne, demonstrate the energetic qualities of the organization.
It is not all a bed of roses. Both at the practical level and concerning its understanding of what it calls ‘a new culture’, G.R.E.C.E. is open to many criticisms. Dealing with the practical problems first of all: while it is true that G.R.E.C.E. has been able to avoid ‘splitting’ over ideological issues in the way we have come to expect from political parties, particularly radical ones, nevertheless there have been personality clashes aplenty, and many former supporters of G.R.E.C.E. have left the organization because they found it impossible to work with the leading members of the group. Many G.R.E.C.E. publications have ceased, while at least one, Etudes et Recherches, appears only infrequently. There is a strong sense at the moment that the original enthusiasm having paled, G.R.E.C.E. is at a loss to know where to go next. Many of its ‘students" have been converted to liberal economics: for example, Le Club d'Horloge (The Clock Club) was a G.R.E.C.E. affiliate group which was supposed to have influenced young conservatives in the direction of the New Right; instead the Clock Club was itself won over to a traditional right-wing, ‘Western’ outlook. The fashion conscious elite who once found the New Right ‘in’ have now gone on to new fads and G.R.E.C.E. has lost some of its former clout.
G.R.E.C.E. calls itself a ‘society of ideas’ but it has always suffered from friend and foe alike so far as an examination of its ideas is concerned. Too many supporters of G.R.E.C.E. adulate the organization and its members as though it were a political party which they wanted to see come to power: in other words, without a modicum of discernment or intelligence. The detractors of G.R.E.C.E. can be divided into two main groups: those who seek to unmask a neo-nazi conspiracy, and those (often right-wing) who are only interested in defending their sacred cow which they believe, rightly or wrongly, has been threatened by G.R.E.C.E. Very few of its hostile critics have taken the trouble to study what is written in G.R.E.C.E. publications or said at the conferences. Unfortunately, much the same can be said for many of G.R.E.C.E.’s supporters! G.R.E.C.E. makes matters worse by disallowing spontaneous debate at its conferences, preferring to have a system whereby all questions to the speaker are written in advance and ‘sent up’ to the speaker, who only reads out the questions he wishes to answer.
Many of the writings of G.R.E.C.E. members also show a tendency to deal with only those aspects of a problem which the writer feels will highlight his case, as though G.R.E.C.E. were a propaganda society, not a society of ideas. Éléments no. 21-22, for instance, carried a critique of the ecology movement which made some incisive and valid points about the danger of ‘pure’ ecologism, but as though all ecologists shared the extreme points of view that were criticized. In the context of an overall hostility to population control and a quasi-religious veneration of atomic power, this reads uncomfortably like arguing on the ground of one’s choosing, in order to gain a rhetorical advantage. G.R.E.C.E. inherits from Gaullism a visceral contempt for Malthus and Malthusian doctrines (in this at least entirely in accord with Christianity) and will not countenance the possibility that there is a population problem as such in the world at all. This is certainly remarkable from a group which condemns the société marchande for ushering in the ‘reign of quantity’. What is the obsession with a France of 200 million (Michel Debré) if not an obsession with quantity? To divorce ecology from demography is absurd, but this is precisely what G.R.E.C.E. does, in the name of ‘strength’ and ‘optimism’.
There is a yet more serious point to this: the writers of G.R.E.C.E. take their veneration for the separate destiny of peoples and cultures so far that they apparently think that they, or rather we, in no way share a common destiny. In an article entitled ‘From Ecology to Ecomania’, Alain de Benoist writes, ‘The planet is not a boat, but a sea of many boats, with different traits and problems, and each with its particular destiny.’6 Like Spengler before him, Alain de Benoist seems to believe that cultures in the twentieth century can sustain a completely separate existence. Ecologists are therefore wrong to talk of global problems or a global destiny. Taken with the support that G.R.E.C.E. spokesmen give to the nuclear bomb and nuclear power, the politest thing one can say about such a view is ‘wishful thinking’. Unfortunately, ecological problems show little respect for man-made frontiers, as the recent nuclear accident at Chernobyl has shown. Furthermore, for a group which is so vociferous in its defense of human variety, the apparent contempt for variety in nature is astonishing. It is true, as Alain de Benoist and others point out, that ecology represents a balance between human and natural forces, an environmental equilibrium and not a natural utopia. This should not allow us to overlook the impoverishment of the variety of nature which has taken place in Europe and throughout the world. G.R.E.C.E. is also inclined to underplay the role of natural environment in fashioning the human cultures and ways of life it is so keen to defend.
A problem common to both the French and the British, but the French most of all: a total lack of any sense of what the Germans call Heimat. The French are incapable of loving their country as a land but only in terms of a French culture or language or glory or destiny or even... bomb. Keenly advocating a Europe of the regions, G.R.E.C.E. retains a nostalgic affection for the centralized state created by the French Revolution. One spokesman for G.R.E.C.E. spent a quarter of an hour explaining the problems for G.R.E.C.E. of finding a suitable Paris location for its activities. He was talking to a Belgian group.
The slogans of G.R.E.C.E. are often facile. The ‘rights of man’ is dismissed as an ‘ideology’ and nothing else. True, the ‘rights of man’ is often the tool of liberal propagandists — who can deny it? This leaves unanswered the question of torture, the question of how far we can define the ‘rights of peoples’ in relation to the ‘rights of governments’. After all, most governments justify harsh measures as being the ‘right of the people’ to defend itself. The nuclear bomb is considered to be a likely weapon of defense and, one cannot help thinking, attack. Some G.R.E.C.E. arguments are childish, with ‘big words’ replacing detailed discussion. (Never mind the dangers of war, it is all part of the exciting ‘risk’ of ‘history’.) It needed the Belgian New Right to consider some of the practical problems relating to defense. A favorite complaint of the spokesmen of G.R.E.C.E. is that history has come or is coming to an end, that it is blocked. This is hard to sustain. Not a year has passed since 1945 without a war erupting in some part of the world. The battle of ideas has always existed.
A deceptive point of reference in many G.R.E.C.E. discourses is the so-called ‘far right’. Guillaume Faye refers to the ‘far right’ many times only to reveal that he has the liberal economists and the Reaganites in mind. By claiming that the New Right is opposed to this ‘far right’, the impression is given to the very superficial observer that the far right has been rejected on an equal footing with the far left. This is simply not the case. The relationship between the New Right and the old fascist right is an ambiguous one. It is regrettable that G.R.E.C.E. is not more insistent on its major differences: its rejection of racialism is the only point on which it insists, but it could certainly make more of its rejection of the conspiracy theory of history.
A few serious criticisms of G.R.E.C.E. have been made here, and there are others to be made. The achievement of the French New Right, however, outshines any adverse criticism. The tenacity, courage and sheer energy of the young founders of G.R.E.C.E. should silence more critics than it does, or at least compel them to be respectful. Many of those on the far right who criticize G.R.E.C.E. do so out of envy at the success of an organization which has refused to play the political game. Commendable too is the cheerfulness of G.R.E.C.E. members (arm-chair doom-and-gloom merchants please note!), the distrust of moralizers and proselytizers and the ‘holier-than-thou’ brigade (all drearily familiar on the far right ‘scene’). Their intellectual capabilities have routed a left-wing ‘intelligentsia’, which in France as elsewhere is the Emperor with no clothes, a school living on a reputation from the past. In some respects the New Right is ‘liberal’: its discussion of the abortion issue was an example of how the New Right can stand up for cool-headedness and moderation on a subject where extremism thrives. A remarkable and courageous debate on the subject of the sexual age of consent was begun in Etudes et Recherches and will hopefully continue. G.R.E.C.E. has none of the puritanism of the old right. In the future it may have much to say on the subject of sexuality.
Above all, G.R.E.C.E loves life and with irrational resilience will champion the cause of excellence against the mediocrity of the egalitarians and the hypocrisy of the sectarians. For those of us who felt disillusioned and depressed by the level of political and philosophical debate in a Europe which is rapidly losing all identity, the French New Right has initiated a kind of revolution. We need to think through all our notions again from the beginning. Someone has opened the windows and brought a fresh breeze into a muggy, malodorous study.
Reprinted in Pour une Renaissance Culturelle, a collection of essays by members of G.R.E.C.E. edited by Pierre Vial, p. 36.
Ibid. p. 43.
Éléments no. 34 p. 5.
Pour une Renaissance Culturelle p. 49 (Éléments no. 28-29).
Éléments no. 56 p. 6.
Pour une Renaissance Culturelle p. 87 (Éléments no. 21-22).