The search for a Fascist menace
Sam White
Paris Ever since de Gaulle emasculated it — first after the Liberation, and then in the course of the Algerian war — the French extreme right has been a sad limpid thing reduced to day-dreaming about its virile past. This has left everyone disorientated — and none more so than the left in France, which has sadly missed the compass guidings provided by its traditional enemies on the other side of the barricades. It is often forgotten that, as recently as the middle Fifties, it was fashionable to pretend that de Gaulle himself was the incarnation of the Fascist menace, a menace so essential to the functioning of a political system dependent on intricate and often incomprehensible compromises. All this changed with his retirement and death; now both Mitterrand and Marchais rival themselves in incantations in his praise. And so for some years, we have been in this bleak situation: with no convincing Fascist menace on the horizon.
Or rather, to put it more precisely, there was none until this summer. Then with drums beating, and with eyes almost visibly rolling heavenwards in gratitude, the left discovered a movement among a few intellectuals which seemed to bear all the marks of the genuine article — racism, elitism, authority — and which styled itself rather self-consciously as 'La Nouvelle Droite'. What made the movement seem even more sinister than its already sinister-sounding doctrines was that it appeared to have the backing of the weekend supplement of Le Figaro. The editor of the Figaro magazine, Louis Pauwels, was an open supporter and the movement's leading theoretician, Alain de Benoist, was a regular contributor. But who is the present owner of both Figaro and its magazine? None other than Robert Hersant, a man who in recent years, with the connivance of the Elysee, has built up a monolithic press empire and who was himself at one time a Nazi sympathiser. It looked as though everything was in place — a former Fascist placing his newly acquired power as a newspaper proprietor at the disposal of a newly created ideological movement of the extreme right. In fact nothing was in place, and Hersant has played his apparent association with the 'Nouvelle Droite' warily. As soon as the Figaro magazine's sympathies became all too evident, Le Figaro itself cracked down on it with two stinging editorial attacks, both bearing the signatures of two of its most eminent writers.
In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that at the moment a state of almost civil war rages in the Figaro offices over both Pauwels and the 'Nouvelle Droit'. A hasty truce, in which the proprietor's hand can be seen, has been patched up by the academician, Jean D'Ormesson, himself an important contributor to both publications. But no one knows how long the truce will last and when hostilities will flare up again. It is easy to recognise what it is about the philosophy of the `Nouvelle Droite' which sticks in the throats of Figaro mandarins, many of whom have swallowed antisemitism in the past and even all the balderdash of the pre-war royalist movement. It is its basic anti-Christian outlook: its exaltation of Europe's, pagan and so-called 'Aryan' ancestry and its denunciation of the 'Judaeo-Christian' heritage with its emphasis on humility and human equality. It would seem from the new doctrinaires of the French right that the rot began with Clovis and his conversion to Christianity. Christianity, according to Alain de Benoist, is 'a cult of weakness' responsible 'for crippling and guilt-inducing myths'. Since it is also responsible for the myth of egalitarianism it is therefore, in the final analysis, responsible for Communism itself. Oddly enough, it is the attack on Christianity and egalitarianism which dominates the movement's propaganda while racialism remains very much in the background: so much so that it is never more than implied in a passage in an occasional article. This enables de Benoist with a reasonably clear conscience to reject the suggestion that the movement is racialist or, to be more precise, anti-semitic.
All this says little that is new to those who know their Nietzsche and their Spengler, to say nothing of their lesser and more notorious imitators. But a new 'scientific' gloss is added to it by frequent references to recent or fairly recent studies in genetics and biology. The classic French right, however, could never support such doctrines since its links with the Catholic church are too strong and too ancient to make the new paganism acceptable. Even in this, however, there is a certain irony — for they received some of their ideology from the founder and leader of the Action Francaise, Charles Maurras, who while a defender and admirer of the Church was himself a self-confessed nonbeliever. When, therefore, in the early Thirties Rome decided to make its peace with the Republic and finally lay the ghost of Dreyfus, it was precisely on the charge of 'paganism' that it ex-communicated the entire movement. If no Catholic could receive communion if he remained a member of the Action France:use, it is inconceivable how any Catholic could join the movement led by M de Benoist.
Meanwhile, of course, there has been a flurry of indignation in left-wing intellectual dovecots— stemming partly from outrage at the idea that someone should even begin to challenge their post-war domination of the French intellectual scene. They recall the grim pre-war years when it was the extreme right, and not they, who dominated the major university faculties and they are understandably apprehensive of a rightwing intellectual revival. They are especially anxious because they, like the rest of the left, are now both demoralised and divided. There is a gap to be filled in the intellectual life of this country as a result, and there are fears that the 'Nouvelle Droite' may be preparing to fill it. At the moment the movement enjoys something of the glamour of an unmasked and now besieged conspiracy. There is no doubt that it was forced into the open by some premature revelations concerning its activities and connections, after a series of attacks on it in Le Monde. Up till then it had been operating as little more than a research centre anct pressure group, The organisation has two bodies — one a centre for the study of European civilisation and the other, the Club d'Horloge, composed of graduates of France's elite schools who are now carving careers for themselves in various ministries. The stated aim of the club is `to create strong links between certain politicians and part of the academic and scientific community'. This link is being forged by holding seminars for politicians and businessmen. The club has also published a book, The Politics of the Living, which, though not necessarily an accurate reflection of de :. Benoist's thinking on many important points, is an accurate one of the movement as a whole. On race, for example, we get this 'systematic hybridisation can be a privileged route to genocide's And, on the aim for, we read this: 'an egalitarian soma. kind of social structure that France should can neither progress nor even survive. Only hierarchical organisation gives a social group its force and cohesion.' Needless to say, the book attacks both the Soviet and American systems — the one apparently because it has shown itself incapable of Producing a consumer society, and the Other for succeeding in doing so. The insistence on the importance of hierarchy is somewhat puzzling since, to some observers Of the French social scene, it seems to reflect things as they already are in this country rather than as they should be.
All in all, one tends to agree with Raymond Aron that although many of the views expressed by the 'Nouvelle Droite' are Unobjectionable, taken together they have an ominous ring about them. They seem to be the echo of an awful past — not only a German past, but a French one also. They recall de Gobineau's speculations in the 1850s on the Aryan origins of Europe, and there exists a letter from Alexis de Toqueville to de Gobineau which deserves quoting since it is as appropriate today as it was when it was written, over 100 years ago: 'Surely among the different families which compose the human race there exist certain tendencies, certain proper aptitudes resulting from thousands of different causes. But to believe that these tendencies are insuperable, one would not only have to know the past but also the future.
'I am sure that Julius Caesar would have willingly written a book to prove that the savages he met in Britain did not belong to the same race as the Romans. The consequences of your theories is 'that of a vast limitation, if not a complete abolition, of human liberty. Thus I confess that, having read your book, I remain opposed in the extreme to its doctrines. I believe that they are probably quite false, I know that they are certainly very pernicious.'
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