Alain de Benoist | |
|---|---|
 Alain de Benoist in 2012 | |
| Born | (1943-12-11)11 December 1943 (age 81) Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | University of Paris |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Nouvelle Droite |
| Notable ideas | Modernization and secularization of Christian values, repaganization of the West,pensée unique,Nouvelle Droite,ethnopluralism |
Alain de Benoist (/dəbəˈnwɑː/də bə-NWAH;French:[alɛ̃dəbənwa]; born 11 December 1943), also known asFabrice Laroche,Robert de Herte,David Barney, and other pen names,[1] is a French political philosopher and journalist, a founding member of theNouvelle Droite (France'sNew Right), and the leader of theethno-nationalist think tankGRECE.
Principally influenced by thinkers of theGerman Conservative Revolution,[2] de Benoist is opposed toChristianity, theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,neoliberalism,representative democracy,egalitarianism, and what he sees as embodying and promoting those values, mainly the United States.[3] He theorized the notion ofethnopluralism, a concept which relies on preserving and mutually respecting individual and bordered ethno-cultural regions.[4][5]
His work has been influential with thealt-right movement in the United States, and he presented a lecture on identity at aNational Policy Institute conference hosted byRichard B. Spencer; however, he has distanced himself from the movement.[6][7]
Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien (now part ofTours),Centre-Val de Loire, the son of a head of sales atGuerlain,[8] also named Alain de Benoist, and Germaine de Benoist, née Langouët.[9] He grew up in a bourgeois andCatholic family.[8] His mother came from the lower-middle class ofNormandy andBrittany, and his father belonged to the Belgian nobility.[1]
During theSecond World War, his father was a member of theFrench resistance armed groupFrench Forces of the Interior. He was a self-declaredGaullist, whereas his wife Germaine was rather left-leaning,[8] and the extended de Benoist family was divided betweenFree France andVichy France during the conflict.[10] His paternal grandmother, Yvonnes de Benoist, was the secretary ofGustave Le Bon.[11] De Benoist is also the great-nephew of FrenchSymbolist painterGustave Moreau.[12]
De Benoist was still in high school atMontaigne andLouis-le-Grand lycées during the turmoils of theAlgerian War (1954–1962),[13] a period that shaped his political views.[1] In 1957, he met the daughter of theantisemitic journalist and conspiracy theoristHenry Coston.[8] From the age of 15, de Benoist became interested in the nationalist right; he started a career as a journalist in 1960 by writing literary pieces and pamphlets for Coston's magazineLectures Françaises, generally in defence of theFrench colonial empire and the pro-colonial paramilitary organizationOrganisation Armée Secrète (OAS).[8][14][15] De Benoist stayed away from Coston's conspiracy theories on theFreemasonry and the Jews.[15]
Aged 17 in 1961, de Benoist metFrançois d'Orcival,[8] with whom he became the editor ofFrance Information, an underground pro-OAS newspaper.[16] The same year, he started to attend theUniversity of Paris and joined the far-right student societyFederation of Nationalist Students (FEN).[13][8] In 1962, he became the secretary of the group's magazine,Cahiers universitaires, in which he wrote the main articles along with d'Orcival.[8] As a student in law and literature, he began a period of political activism and developed a passion forfantastique cinema.[10] According to philosopherPierre-André Taguieff, de Benoist possessed an intellectual curiosity that was lacking among his elder colleagues likeDominique Venner (1935–2013) orJean Mabire (1927–2006), and the young journalist led them to discover a conceptual universe "that they could not imagine", no more than its "possible ideological exploitations".[17]
De Benoist metDominique Venner in 1962.[8] The following year, he took part in the creation ofEurope-Action, awhite nationalist magazine founded by Venner and in which de Benoist began to work as a journalist.[18] He published at that times his first essays:Salan devant l'opinion ("Salan faces the [public] opinion", 1963) andLe courage est leur patrie ("Braveness is their motherland", 1965), defendingFrench Algeria and the OAS.[8][18]
Between 1963 and 1965, de Benoist was a member of theRationalist Union; he probably began to readLouis Rougier'scriticism of Christianity during that period. De Benoist met Rougier, who was also a member of the organization, and his ideas deeply influenced de Benoist's own anti-Christianity.[19] In 1965, de Benoist wrote: "We oppose Rougier toSartre, as we oppose verbal delirium to logics ..., because biological realism is the best support against those idealistic chimeras".[8] De Benoist became in 1964 the editor-in-chief of the weekly publicationEurope-Action Hebdomaire, renamedL'Observateur Européen in October 1966.[20] He also wrote in theneo-fascist magazineDéfense de l'Occident, founded in 1952 byMaurice Bardèche.[18]
After a visit to South Africa at the invitation ofHendrik Verwoerd'sNational Party government, de Benoist co-wrote with Gilles Fournier the 1965 essayVérité pour l'Afrique du Sud ("Truth for South Africa"), in which they endorsedapartheid.[21] The following year, he co-wrote with D'Orcival another essay,Rhodésie, pays des lions fidèles ("Rhodesia, country of the faithful lions"), in defence ofRhodesia, a breakaway country in southern Africa ruled at that time by awhite-minority government.Ian Smith, the then prime minister of the unrecognized state, prefaced the book.[22] Returning from a trip to the United States in 1965, de Benoist deplored the suppression ofracial segregation in the United States, and wrote as a prediction that the system would survive outside the law, thus in a more violent way.[23]
In two essays published in 1966,Les Indo-Européens ("TheIndo-Europeans") andQu'est-ce que le nationalisme? ("What Is Nationalism?"), de Benoist contributed to define a new form ofEuropean nationalism in which the European civilization – to be understood as the "white race"[24] — would be considered above its constituting ethnic groups, all united within a common empire and civilization superseding the nation states. This agenda was adopted by theEuropean Rally for Liberty (REL) during the1967 French legislative election (de Benoist was a member of the REL national council), and later became a core idea of GRECE since its foundation in 1968.[25]
The successive failures of the far-right movements de Benoist had supported since the early 1960s – from the dissolution of OAS and theÉvian Accords of 1962, to the electoral defeat of presidential candidateJean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965 (in which he had participated via thegrassroots movement T.V. Committees), to the debacle of the REL in the March 1967 election – led de Benoist to question his political involvement. In the fall of 1967, he decided to make a "permanent and complete break with political action" and to focus on ameta-political strategy by launching a review.[25][26] During theMay 1968 events in France, then aged 25, de Benoist worked as a journalist for theprofessional magazineL'Écho de la presse et de la publicité.[18]
TheGroupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) was founded in January 1968 to serve as ametapolitical,ethnonationalist think-tank promoting the ideas of theNouvelle Droite. Although the organization was established with former militants of the REL and FEN, de Benoist has been described by scholars as its leader and "most authoritative spokesman".[27][28] In the 1970s, de Benoist adapted his geopolitical view-points and went from a pro-colonial attitude towards an advocacy ofThird-Worldism against capitalist America and communist Russia,[29] from the defence of the "last outposts of the West" towardsanti-Americanism,[30] and from a biological to a cultural approach of the notion ofalterity, an idea which he developed in hisethnopluralist theories.[31]
De Benoist's works, along with others published by the think tank, began to attract public attention in the late 1970s, when the media coined the termNouvelle Droite to label the movement.[32] He started to write articles for mainstream right-wing magazines, namelyValeurs actuelles andLe Spectacle du Monde from 1970 to 1982, andLe Figaro Dimanche (renamed in 1978Le Figaro Magazine) from 1977 to 1982; he then wrote for the videos section ofLe Figaro Magazine until 1992.[33] De Benoist was awarded in 1978 the prestigiousPrix de l'essai by theAcadémie française for his bookView for the Right (Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines).[34] Between 1980 and 1992, he was a regular participant in the radio programPanorama onFrance Culture.[35]
Although de Benoist had announced his retirement from political parties and elections to focus onmetapolitics in 1968,[25][26] he ran as a candidate for the far-rightParty of New Forces during the1979 European Parliament election.[36] In the1984 European Parliament election in France, de Benoist announced his intention to vote for theFrench Communist Party, and justified his choice by describing the party as the most credible anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-American political force then active in France.[37]
De Benoist met Russian writerAleksandr Dugin in 1989 and the two of them soon became close collaborators. De Benoist was invited in Moscow by Dugin in 1992, and Dugin presented himself as the Moscow correspondent of GRECE for a time. De Benoist briefly served as a board member of Dugin's magazineElementy in 1992.[38] The two authors eventually broke off their relationship in 1993 after a virulent campaign in French and German media against the "red and brown threat" in Russia. Whereas de Benoist acknowledged ideological differences with Dugin, especially onEurasianism andMartin Heidegger, they have maintained regular exchanges since then.[39]
In 1979 and 1993, two press campaigns launched in French liberal media against de Benoist damaged his public reputation and influence in France by claiming that he was in reality a "closet Fascist" or a "Nazi". The journalists accused de Benoist of hiding his racist and anti-egalitarian beliefs in a seemingly acceptable public agenda, replacing the doomed hierarchy of races with the less suspicious concept ofethno-pluralism.[1] Although he still frequently comments on politics, de Benoist chose in the early 1990s to focus on his intellectual activity and to avoid media attention.[1] Since the 2000s onward, public interest for de Benoist's works have re-emerged.[40] His writings have been published in several far-right journals, such as theJournal of Historical Review,[41]Chronicles,[42] theOccidental Quarterly,[43] andTyr,[44] and theNew Left academic journalTelos.[45] De Benoist was one of the signatories of the 2002Manifesto Against the Death of the Spirit and the Earth,[46] reportedly because "it seemed to [him] that it reacts against the practical materialism that is part of a dominant ideology, an ideology for which there is nothing beyond material concerns".[47]
In a 2002 republication of his bookView from the Right, de Benoist reiterated what he wrote in 1977 that the greatest danger in the world at that time was the "progressive disappearance of diversity from the world", including biodiversity of animals, cultures and peoples.[40] De Benoist is now the editor of two magazines: the yearlyNouvelle École (since 1968) and the quarterlyKrisis (since 1988).[48]
Although the extent of the relationship is debated by scholars, de Benoist and theNouvelle Droite are generally viewed as influential on the ideological and political structure of theIdentitarian movement.[49][50] Part of thealt-right has also claimed to have been inspired by de Benoist's writings.[49]
In his early writings, de Benoist was close to pro-colonial movements and followed an ethno-biological approach of social science,[51][24] endorsingapartheid as the "last outpost of the West" at a time of "decolonization and international negrification".[21] From the 1970s onward, he has gradually moved towards the defence of theThird World againstAmerican imperialism, and has adopted a cultural definition ofdifference, which is theorized in his concept ofethnopluralism.[1][31] Scholars have questioned whether this evolution should be regarded as a sincere ideological detachment from the biological racism of his activist youth,[52] or rather as a meta-political strategy set up to disguise non-egalitarian ideas behind more acceptable concepts.[53][54] De Benoist is also an ardent critic ofglobalization, unrestricted mass immigration, liberalism,postmodern society, and what he calls the "ideology of sameness".[1]
Political scientistJean-Yves Camus describes the key idea of de Benoist in those terms: "[T]hrough the use ofmeta-politics, to think the ways and means that are necessary for European civilization, based on the cultural values shared on the continent until the advent of globalization, to thrive and be perpetuated."[55] Although de Benoist embodies the core values of GRECE and theNouvelle Droite, his works are not always identical to those of other thinkers of the movements.[55] He is opposed in particular to political violence, and he has declared that he had been building "a school of thought, not a political movement."[56] In 2000, he disavowedGuillaume Faye's "strongly racist" ideas regarding Muslims after the publication ofThe Colonization of Europe: Speaking Truth about Immigration and Islam.[55]
In 2006, de Benoist definedidentity as a dialogical phenomenon, inspired byMartin Buber'sphilosophy of dialogue andIch und Du concept. According to him, one's identity is made of two components: the "objective part" coming from one's background (gender, ethnicity, religion, family, nationality), and the "subjective part" freely chosen by the individual. Identity is therefore a perpetual evolution rather than a definitive notion.[55] In 1992, de Benoist dismissed theFront National's use of ethnopluralism on the grounds that it portrayed "difference as an absolute, whereas, by definition, it exists only relationally."[57][a]
In 1966, he had written: "Race is the only real unit encompassing individual variations. The objective study of history shows that only the European race (white race, caucasian) has continued to progress since its appearance on the rising path of the evolution of the living, unlike races stagnant in their development, therefore in virtual regression."[24]
If scholars likePierre-André Taguieff have characterized theNouvelle Droite as a form of mixophobia due to its focus on the notion of difference, de Benoist has also criticized what he calls "the pathology of identity", that is to say the political use of identity by thepopulist Right to push an "us versus them" debate escorted by what he considers to be "[systematic] and [irrational] hating". The difficulty of understanding de Benoist's views on identity rests upon the fact that his writings have experienced multiple re-synthesis since the 1960s. In 1974, he said "there is no superior race. All races are superior and each of them has its own genius."[58] In 1966, he had written: "The European race does not have absolute superiority. It is only the most capable of progressing in the direction of evolution ... Racial factors being statistically hereditary, each race has its own psychology. All psychology generates value."[24] De Benoist has been influenced byCarl Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy as the core issue of politics. Despite this, he sees immigrants as eventually victims ofglobalization, and has argued that immigration was first of all a consequence of multinational companies being greedy for profits and preferring to import cheap labor.[58]
De Benoist rejects thenation state andnationalism on the grounds that both liberalism and nationalism eventually derive from the samemetaphysics ofsubjectivity,[59] and that what he describes as the centralized andJacobin state established by the French Republic had destroyed regional identities in its project of a "one and indivisible" France.[40] He stands instead for the political autonomy of each and every group, favouring an integral federalism built on the principle ofsubsidiarity, which in his views would transcend the nation state and give way for both regional and Europe identities to thrive.[55][60] De Benoist believes that knowledge of ethnic and religious traditions is a duty that must be passed on to following generations, and he has been critical of the idea of a moral imperative tocosmopolitanism.[58]
De Benoist is a critic of the primacy ofindividual rights, an ideology that he sees embodied inhumanism, theFrench Revolution, and the ideas of theFounding Fathers of the United States. While not a communist, de Benoist has been influenced by theMarxist analysis of the nature of capitalism and conflicting class interests developed byKarl Marx inDas Kapital. As a result, another of his core ideas is that the world is facing the "hegemony of capital" and the "pursuit of self-interest", two typical trends of the postmodern era.[58]
According to scholarJean-Yves Camus, if de Benoist can share anti-capitalist analysis with leftists, the nature of his goal is indeed different since de Benoist considers the unlimited expansion of the free market andconsumerism as key contributors to the erasure of peoples' identities. Furthermore, de Benoist acknowledges the existence of the working class and thebourgeoisie but does not make an essential distinction between the two of them. He rather divides society between the "new dominant class" and the "people".[55] In 1991, the editorial staff of his magazineEléments described the danger of adopting a "systematic anti-egalitarianism [that could] lead tosocial Darwinism, which might justifyfree-market economy".[58]
De Benoist is opposed to themodern American liberal idea of amelting pot.[61] A critic of the United States, he has been quoted as saying: "Some people do not accept the thought of one day having to wear the Red Army cap. In fact, it is a terrible prospect. However, this is not a reason to tolerate the idea of one day having to spend what we have left to live on by eating hamburgers in Brooklyn."[62][63] In 1991, he described European supporters of the firstGulf War as "collaborators of the American order".[64]
De Benoist has supported ties withIslamic culture in the 1980s,[65] on the grounds that the relationship would be distinct from what he saw as the consumerism and materialism of the American society and from the bureaucracy and repression of theSoviet Union alike.[66] He also opposes Christianity as inherently intolerant, theocratic, and bent on persecution.[67]
De Benoist's influences includeAntonio Gramsci,Ernst Jünger,Martin Buber,Jean Baudrillard,Georges Dumézil,Ernest Renan,José Ortega y Gasset,Vilfredo Pareto,Karl Marx,Guy Debord,Arnold Gehlen,Stéphane Lupasco,Helmut Schelsky,Konrad Lorenz, theConservative Revolutionaries includingCarl Schmitt andOswald Spengler, thenon-conformists of the 1930s,Johann Gottfried Herder,Johannes Althusius, interwarAustro-Marxists, andcommunitarian philosophers likeAlasdair MacIntyre andCharles Taylor.[55]
Critics of de Benoist likeThomas Sheehan argue he has developed a novel restatement offascism.[68]Roger Griffin, using anideal type definition of fascism, which includes "populist ultra-nationalism" and "palingenesis" (heroic rebirth), argues that theNouvelle Droite draws on such fascist ideologues asArmin Mohler in a way that allowsNouvelle Droite ideologues like de Benoist to claim a "metapolitical" stance but which nonetheless has residual fascist ideological elements.[69] In response to accusations of fascism, de Benoist notes his support ofdirect democracy andlocalism, as well as his opposition to authoritarianism,totalitarianism, andmilitarism, characteristics of historical Fascism.[70] De Benoist's critics also claim his views recallNazi attempts to replace German Christianity with its own paganism.[71] They note that de Benoist's rejection of the French Revolution's legacy and the allegedly abstractRights of Man ties him to the sameCounter-Enlightenment right-wing tradition as counter-revolutionaryLegitimists, fascists,Vichyites, and integral nationalists.[72]
Identifying asneo-pagan,[73] de Benoist married Doris Christians, a German citizen, on 21 June 1972. They have two children.[15][9] He is a member ofMensa International, ahigh-IQ society whose former president of the French branch was a member of the patronage committee ofNouvelle École.[74] De Benoist owns the largest private library in France, with an estimate of 150,000[75] to 250,000 books.[1]
Certains ne se résignent pas à la pensée d'avoir un jour à porter la casquette de l'Armée rouge. De fait, c'est une perspective affreuse. Nous ne pouvons pas, pour autant, supporter l'idée d'avoir un jour à passer ce qui nous reste à vivre en mangeant des hamburgers du côté de Brooklyn.
Pages 66–67: To summarize: De Benoist's fascism is at odds with Evola's metaphysics but agrees with his social and political philosophy.... [F]or de Benoist, the organic State is an ideal that men can set for themselves and perhaps, with force, establish.
In the age that is heavily laced with the Biblical message, many modern pagan thinkers, for their criticism of biblical monotheism, have been attacked and stigmatized either as unrepentant atheists or as spiritual standard-bearers of fascism. Particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Alain de Benoist came under attack for allegedly espousing the philosophy which, for their contemporary detractors, recalled the earlier national socialist attempts to "dechristianize" and "repaganize" Germany.See notably the works by Alfred Rosenberg,Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts(München: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1933). Also worth noting is the name of Wilhelm Hauer,Deutscher Gottschau (Stuttgart: Karl Gutbrod, 1934), who significantly popularized Indo-European mythology among national socialists: on pages 240–54 Hauer discusses the difference between Judeo-Christian Semitic beliefs and European paganism.
Bousquet, François (2023).Alain de Benoist à l'endroit : Un demi-siècle de Nouvelle Droite. La Nouvelle Librairie, coll. Les Idées à l'endroit. p. 180.ISBN 978-2386080081.
