Guillaume Faye | |
|---|---|
 Faye in 2015 | |
| Born | (1949-11-07)7 November 1949 Angoulême, France |
| Died | 6 March 2019(2019-03-06) (aged 69) Paris, France |
| Philosophical work | |
| Notable works | Archeofuturism (1998),Why We Fight (2001)[3] |
| Notable ideas | New right[1][2] Futurism |
Guillaume Faye (French:[ɡijomfaj]; 7 November 1949 – 6 March 2019) was a French political theorist, journalist, writer, and leading member of theFrench New Right.[4][5]
Continuing the tradition ofGiorgio Locchi,[6] his various articles and books sought to posit Islam as a nemesis necessary to unite the white non-Muslim peoples of Europe and the former Soviet Union into an entity named "Eurosiberia". Faye considered regional and national grievances to be counterproductive to this goal and was supportive ofEuropean integration.[7]
ScholarStéphane François describes Faye as "pan-Europeanrevolutionary-conservative thinker who is at the origin of the renewal of the doctrinal corpus of the FrenchIdentitarian Right, and more broadly of the Euro-American Right, with the concept of 'archeofuturism'."[4]
Guillaume Faye was born on 7 November 1949 inAngoulême from a family close to theBonapartist right.[6] He attended theParis Institute of Political Studies, where he ran the student's associationsCercle Pareto and Association GRECE between 1971 and 1973.[8][6]
On the advice ofDominique Venner, Faye joinedGRECE in 1970, anethno-nationalist think tank led byNouvelle Droite thinkerAlain de Benoist.[1] He soon became the head of movement's Secretariat for Research and Studies, and one of the major Nouvelle Droite theorists. Faye wrote at that time for many New Right journals such asÉléments,Nouvelle École,Orientations, andÉtudes et Recherches.[6] From 1978, he became a promoter of the strategy of "metapolitics" embodied by GRECE, although he eventually failed his project of entryism within the mainstream right-wing newspaperFigaro Magazine.[9]
After intellectual and financial disagreements with de Benoist, Faye was marginalized in GRECE. He is said to have been ousted from the think tank in late 1986, although his departure was only officially announced in August 1987 via a letter wrote byPierre Vial to the newspaperLe Monde.[10]
Faye then distanced himself from political activism and became actively involved with the media industry. Between 1991 and 1993, he worked as an entertainer under the name of 'Skyman' at theurban radio stationSkyrock.[9] He was also a journalist atL'Écho des Savanes andVSD, and appeared on theFrance 2 talk-showTélématin.[11] Faye taught the sociology of sexuality at theUniversity of Besançon,[12] and he has also claimed to have acted in pornographic films.[9][13]
"In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination, and which aims to abolish thought in favour of spectacle, the main goal must be to awaken people’s consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas."
Faye went back to political activism in 1998 with the publication of his bookArcheofuturism, followed in 2000 byThe Colonization of Europe.[15] The latter, criticized as "strongly racist" by de Benoist, earned him a criminal conviction for incitement to racial hatred.[16] Faye organized conferences with GRECE sympathizers,Monarchists,Traditional Catholics andneo-Pagans. At the request of de Benoist, however, he was excluded once again from GRECE in May 2000.[15]
Faye then became close toTerre et Peuple, a neo-Pagan movement founded in 1995 by former GRECE membersPierre Vial,Jean Mabire andJean Haudry, but he was also expelled in 2007 after the publication of his bookThe New Jewish Question ('La Nouvelle Question Juive'),[15] regarded within some revolutionary-nationalist and Catholic traditionalists circles as too overly "Zionist".[17] In 1999 and 2002, he was invited to speak at conferences organized by theClub de l'Horloge, a national-liberal think tank led byHenry de Lesquen.[18]
Faye died on 6 March 2019, after a long battle withcancer.[19] While his death received limited media coverage in the mainstream press, he was praised by many far-right activists, includingJean-Marie Le Pen,Dan Roodt,Daniel Friberg,Greg Johnson,Jared Taylor,Richard Spencer, andMartin Sellner.[20]
A key concept of Faye's thought is thatpaganism – viewed as a quasi-ideal object aligned on the cosmic order that allowed for aholistic andorganic society – is a rooted anddifferentialist religion, and thus a solution to the dominant "mixophile" anduniversalist worldview of the West.[9] Faye has also participated in the diffusion of an identity defined as biological and cultural.[21] In 1979, he argued that immigration, rather than immigrants, should be combated in order to preserve cultural and biological "identities" on both sides of theMediterranean Sea.[22]
His first books, published in the early 1980s, developed a rejection of the consumerist society and the standardization and Westernization of the world, one of Faye's intellectual constants. For him, a multiracial society is by essence "multiracist", and he has called for the return of non-European immigrants to their respective "civilizational areas".[21] In 1985, Faye stated that Zionist "opinion circles" in France had forced the French government to break ties with theBa'athist regime ofSaddam Hussein, and he has denounced "Zionist lobbies" in the US that wished to influence geopolitics in favour ofIsrael.[21] After his return to politics in the late 1990s, however, Faye reversed from his pro-Arab position and became a supporter of Israel as a potential political ally of circumstance against Arabs and Muslims.[23]
Through several books Faye published from the late 1990s onward, which he conceived as an appeal to the "ethnic awareness" of Europeans, Faye became an important ideologue ofnativism and advocated a form ofracialism that scholarStéphane François has described as "reminiscent of the 1900s to the 1930s".[23] The "ethnic foundations of a civilization", Faye argued, "rest on its biological roots and those of its peoples."[17] He has also made references to the "loyalty to values and to bloodlines", promotednatalist andeugenicist politics to resolve Europe's demographic issues, and adopted a racialistDarwinian concept of the "struggle of the fittest", regarding other civilizations as enemies to be eliminated.[23]
Faye believed the West to be threatened by its demographic decline and decadent social fabric, by a supposed ethnoreligious clash between the North and the South, and by a series of global financial crisis and uncontrolled environmental pollution. To avoid the announced civilizational and ecological collapse, Faye has promoted an authoritarian regime led by a "born chief", a charismatic and providential man protecting the people's identity and ancestry, and taking the right decisions in emergency situations.[12] Faye also condemned what he has called "ethnomasochism", defined as the self-hating of one's own ethnic group.[21][24] InWhy We Fight, originally published in 2001, Faye defined 'metapolitics' as the "social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for the sake of provoking profound, long-term, political transformation."[25]
"Archeofuturism", a concept coined by Faye in 1998,[26] refers to the reconciliation oftechnoscience with "archaic values".[27] He argues that the term "archaic" should be understood in its originalAncient Greek, that is to say as the 'foundation' or the 'beginning', not as a blind attachment to the past.[15] According to Faye, anti-moderns andcounter-revolutionaries are actually mirror-constructs of modernity that share the same biased linear conception of time. Defining his theories as "non-modern", Faye was influenced byFriedrich Nietzsche's concept ofeternal return andMichel Maffesoli's post-modern sociological works.[15] Political scientistStéphane François has described archeofuturism as a combination of "post-modern philosophy, some elements of Western counterculture, and racism."[28]
This, Faye himself argues, can only proceed in a manner similar to theConservative Revolution:
Today it is not a matter of ‘conserving’ the present or returning to a recent past that has failed, but rather of regaining possession of our most archaic roots, which is to say those most suited to the victorious life.[29]
We should avoid being backward-looking, concerned with restoration and reaction, for it is the last few centuries that have spawned the pox that is now devouring us.It is a matter of returning to archaic and ancestral values, while at the same time envisioning the future as something more than the extension of the present.[30]
In the 1980s, his work was translated into English, Italian, German, or Spanish, and Faye spoke at numerous conferences organized byEuropean New Right groups. Although he had initially abandoned all political activities in the late 1980s, his first books and articles continued to be discussed among American activists of the nascent movement that was later called the "Alt Right".[12] Following his comeback to political writings, Faye renewed his links with GRECE and nationalist-revolutionary militants between 1998 and 2006. He became an important figure of "national-westernism", finding himself alongside Europeanfar-right militants the likes ofGabriele Adinolfi,Pierre Krebs,Ernesto Milá,Pierre Vial orGalina Lozko to defend the "future of the white world", as one conference organized in Moscow in June 2006 was entitled.[31]
After 2006, Faye took part in conventions organized by theAmerican Renaissance association led byJared Taylor, and his ideas have been discussed by the American Alt Right websiteCounter-Currents.[17] His works from the second intellectual period have been translated into English byArktos Media,[17] described as the "uncontested global leader in the publication of English-languageNouvelle Droite literature."[32] The writings of Faye and Alain de Benoist, especially theirmetapolitical stance, have also influenced American far-right activistRichard B. Spencer, SwedishIdentitarianDaniel Friberg, and theIdentitarian movement at large.[33][20] As for de Benoist, Faye's writings were discussed in the AmericanNew Left journalTelos, founded by philosopherPaul Piccone.[34] According to Stéphane François, Faye "is responsible for the doctrinal renewal of Frenchnativism and, more widely, for the development of the European-American radical Right".[28] The translation of his booksArcheofuturism andWhy We Fight in English by Arktos in 2010 and 2011 made Faye into a "celebrity-intellectual" within the global New Right network.[5]
