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Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

Book · August 2007

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3681.1846

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 Introduction
I will always salute as I did yesterday because it gives
me a sense of belonging to my people.
– Paulo Di Canio, Italian footballer, justifying his fascist salute in 2005

Tim Parks, the author of a study of Italian soccer hooliganism, argues that “Ferocious
taunting is a staple of Italian football matches… Hard-core supporters of the competing
teams occupy opposite ends of the stadium generating a wild energy of chants and
offensive gestures that electrifies the atmosphere” (Parks 2002). In a December 2005
Serie A soccer match between Rome outfit Società Sportiva (SS) Lazio and Livorno,
Italian footballer Paulo Di Canio gave the infamous fascist salute to the hard-core
Lazio fans with ties to fascism and neo-Nazism. Lazio was Benito Mussolini’s
favourite team. The salute had even more political resonance because Livorno’s ultras
(hard-core fans) have pro-communist sympathies. Di Canio was in hot water before.
He brandished the fascist salute in another match against Associazione Sportiva (AS)
Roma and was unapologetic about his fascist sympathies.
Facing possible sanctions from the Italian Football Federation, Di Canio said:
“I will always salute as I did yesterday because it gives me a sense of belonging to
my people” (The Independent 21 December 2005). Di Canio received unqualified
support from Ignazio La Russa, a member of the Alleanza Nazionale (AN – National
Alliance), formerly the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – Italian Social
Movement): “Let everybody salute as they like. It doesn’t seem to me a violent
gesture. There’s nothing dramatic about it” (The Independent 21 December 2005).
Daniela Fini, the wife of Gianfranco Fini (the leader of the AN), Italy’s deputy
minister at the time, said Di Canio was the victim of media bias against the right
and argued there was little criticism of the closed-fist communist salutes of Livorno
fans. “It should be his own affair, but every time it happens it becomes a matter
of state” (Yahoo Sport! UK 14 December 2005), said Fini, a Lazio supporter. The
controversial Di Canio received a one match suspension from the Italian Football
Federation and was fined 10,000 euros ($12,000).
If a member of the AN gave his support to Di Canio, it is more understandable,
given the party’s roots in neo-fascism. Yet, what explains Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi’s suggestions that Di Canio was not a fascist, saying the Lazio
striker was merely an exhibitionist and his salute had no significance? Di Canio
might be an exhibitionist, but he also consciously plays to Lazio’s hard-core neo-
fascist and neo-Nazi constituencies. In 1999, when Lazio played Roma, a team
widely supported by Rome’s Jewish population, Lazio’s ultras reached dizzying
anti-Semitic heights when they unfurled a 50-metre banner around their section of
Rome’s Olympic Stadium that read: “Auschwitz is your town, the ovens are your

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  Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
houses” (Molinaro 2005). Seeking to appeal his one-match ban, the Italian footballer
defensively stated, “I am a fascist, but not racist.”
At the height of its strength in the late 1920s, many Jews joined the Italian Fascist
Party before the adoption in 1938 of Nazi-style race laws and most Italian Jews
survived the Holocaust. Cyprian Blamires points out that 230 Jews were involved
in the fascist March on Rome in 1922 and one of those Jewish fascists, Ettore
Ovazza, later founded a pro-fascist journal (Blamires 2006, 47). He estimates that
by the mid-1930s one-third of adults in Italy’s small Jewish community (47,000 in
1938) were members of the Fascist Party (Blamires 2006, 47). Mussolini also had a
Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti-Grassini, who he met at the 1911 Socialist Party
Congress. An art critic and speechwriter for Mussolini, Sarfatti-Grassini participated
in producing the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals in Bologna; organized important
salons for leading Italian fascists; and played a key role in “endowing Italian Fascism
with a cultural aura that counterbalanced the general impression of philistinism
which clung to a movement that was addicted to violence and brutality.” (Blamires
2006, 586-7) But could Lazio’s ultras care for the distinctions between fascism and
racism, or neo-Nazism and neo-fascism? Had the Lazio ultras not held up swastikas
and banners of Arkan (Zeljko Raznjatovic), the Serb paramilitary leader during the
wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s who was responsible for
the worst crimes of ethnic cleansing?
Racism today is rife in many European soccer stadiums. In a match in November
2005, Ivory Coast defender Marc Zoro was reduced to tears after the racial taunting
of Inter Milan fans and threatened to leave the pitch. What was rare about Di Canio’s
fascist salute was that it was an overt display by a player with fascist sympathies.
Di Canio has an obsession with Mussolini and even tattooed Dux, the Latin word
for Duce and nickname of the dictator, on his arm. His salute conjured memories of
the Italian World Cup winning squad of 1934 saluting the fascist dictator. For others
it must have resurfaced painful memories associated with the crimes of the fascist
period. Yet others see it as the playing out of ritualized tribal games. Di Canio’s
gesture called into question the post-war fascism taboo. Outside of theocratic Iran
where a 2006 state-sanctioned pseudo-academic conference sought to assess the
“scientific” evidence for the Holocaust, small nostalgic neo-Nazi and neo-fascist
circles, or some Arab press outlets where in Orwellian doublespeak Holocaust
negation is stated as fact, open displays of fascism and Nazism are more rare today
in Europe. Few people today are as honest as Di Canio, although he later claimed his
salute was not a political act.
Di Canio, like most fascists in a “post-fascist” age, plays a clever double game.
On the one hand, he provokes with the infamous fascist salute. On the other hand,
he claims it is normal, banal and apolitical. His double game is mirrored by the far
right throughout Europe. Jean Marie Le Pen, the French leader of the anti-immigrant
Front National (FN – National Front), refuses the fascist label and even calls himself
an anti-racist. He calls the anti-racists anti-French racists. Gianfranco Fini, the leader
of the Italian AN, has rehabilitated a formerly fascist party and now calls it a “post-
fascist” political outfit. Fini was rewarded by joining the government in a right-wing
coalition led by Forza Italia in 1994 and again in 2001. He has won praise for
distancing the party from the fascist past and virulent displays of anti-Semitism. He

Bar-on Book.indb 2 06/06/2007 16:49:05

 Introduction 
visited Israel as Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister in 2003 to ask forgiveness for Italy’s
treatment of the Jews and described fascism’s racial laws as “an absolute evil.” From
2004 until 2006 Fini was Italy’s Foreign Minister.
Hardly any contemporary European will say that they are a blackshirt or
brownshirt. Where have all the fascists gone? This book seeks to answer this
question by examining how former neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist intellectuals,
known as the nouvelle droite (ND) or European New Right (ENR), have contributed
to the demise of conspicuous fascism and a “post-fascist” discourse. Whether these
thinkers have buried the fascist or proto-fascist longings of the past is open to serious
question. I have serious reservations on this question, owing to my careful reading of
ENR texts, fascists of the past and the important works of historians of fascism from
Stanley Payne and Ernst Nolte to Ze’ev Sternhell and Roger Griffin. The ENR is
still facing polemical storms because it has never fully distanced itself from aspects
of the far right or neo-fascist milieu, while left-wing intellectuals find the ENR a
convenient scapegoat for the left’s demise after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Moreover, I insisted elsewhere that “the greatest danger to the European body politic
in terms of a ‘fascist threat’ comes from within: the steady slide towards what Jean
Baudrillard saw emerging as an anti-immigrant, white, fundamentalist, protectionist
Europe through metapolitical, democratic, and legal means” (Bar-On 2004, 308). In
a post-September 11th climate, this threat is multi-dimensional and does not merely
involve the ENR, but also political actors from mainstream parties on the right and
left who have increasingly co-opted ENR themes vis-à-vis issues such as culture,
immigration, race and national identity. Or more menacingly, as in Italy and Austria,
when far right-wing parties join national coalition governments.
Very few English-language works have been dedicated to the continental ENR
intellectuals or ND (Sunic 1990; O’Meara 2004). Moreover, the two exceptions
were penned by ENR partisans. Tomislav Sunic was included in a 1998 collection
of ENR sympathisers celebrating the group’s thirtieth anniversary, while Michael
O’Meara argues that Europeans face extinction as a race and culture and the ENR is
the most credible anti-liberal, revolutionary antidote to the destruction of European
civilization in the post-war era. While admittedly the tone of Sunic’s work on the
subject is descriptive and objective, O’Meara’s book is an unabashed defense of the
ENR. Both scholars are ill-equipped to seriously grapple with the ENR’s origins in
the ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist milieux. This work aims to fill the gap with a
more critical appraisal of the ENR project. Having said that, this book does not claim
to definitively account for the rehabilitation of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism in two
key countries, namely, post-communist Germany and Russia. Others have recently
tackled these important subjects (Griffin, Loh, and Umland 2006; Umland 2005).
Born around the May 1968 wave of political unrest sweeping industrialized
countries, the ENR is composed of clusters of think tanks, cultural institutes and
journals formed initially in France and later other European countries. Its intellectuals
are mainly editors, writers, liberal professionals, academics and professors of various
disciplines. ENR intellectuals now claim to be one of the few remaining cultural
or political forces along with the Greens, which challenge liberal democracy and
triumphalist global capitalism. Its contemporary theoreticians are heavily influenced
by the ideals of the New Left and emulate the example of the 1968 revolutionaries

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  Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
who pined for a more humane and spiritualised post-liberal social order. ENR
intellectuals are currently scattered throughout most Western and numerous Central
and East European nations. Furthermore, ENR intellectuals attempted to spread their
ideas in the post-communist, post-Cold War confusion and chaos of Russia in the
1990s.
Despite the serious protestations of many journalists and academics about a
more subtle and sinister fascism dressed in new emperor’s robes, the ENR is not
necessarily a homogeneous body of thought (Duranton-Crabol 1988), but has
meant different things according to differing contexts, time periods, countries,
regions, ideological strands and rival personalities. This heterogeneity on the right
correspondingly applies to the important distinctions, which exist on the left between
social democrats, communists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists and various
anarchist tendencies. Historically, there have also been many “rights,” including the
counterrevolutionary/monarchical, Catholic integralist, Nazi, fascist, Evolian, neo-
liberal and republican traditions, and they have meant different things in differing
countries, contexts and periods of time (Bar-On 2001, 333; Giddens 1994, 8-9). To
this long list of “rights,” we should add the ENR intellectuals.
With the proliferation of social issues such as immigration, the environment or
the war in Iraq that transcend traditional right and left political categories, the end of
the Cold War, the fall of communist regimes in the East after 1989 and the historical
movement of the left in Europe towards an accommodation with liberal capitalism,
the ENR has argued that the terms “right” and “left” have lost much of their meaning
and significance.
Contemporary ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier
of France insist that there is a general trend towards the implosion of right-wing
ideologies and that there are now a whopping 36 different right-wing political
groupings belonging to the general spiritual family of the right! (De Benoist and
Champetier 1999). With the fall of the right’s traditional communist enemy, Europe
does not have a political landscape based on unanimous right-wing support for the
neo-liberal, new world order. Rather, the ENR represents one of those right-wing
currents of thought that, on the exoteric plane, resembles the left in its radical anti-
liberalism and anti-capitalism, and its revolutionary stances vis-à-vis the dominant
ideologies of the age.
The ENR’s main tasks since 1968 have been the publication of intellectual
journals on various ideas and subjects, and conducting cultural and political debates
and conferences throughout the learned centres of opinion within Europe. The ENR
thinkers have sought to offer a theoretical response to the main existential problems
of the contemporary period. In the process, they have attempted to rehabilitate
the cultural and political legacies of the non-Nazi, revolutionary right. The most
prominent ENR journals include the following: Nouvelle Ecole, Eléments, Krisis
(France), The Scorpion (England) and Trasgressioni and Diorama letterario (Italy).
Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain and Russia also have their respective ENR
journals. Several ENR national branches, namely, the English, French, Italian,
German and Russian sections of the ENR, are well represented on the Internet (e.g.,
http://www. grece-fr.net/accueil.php; http://www.alaindebenoist.com). In the current
post-communist age of triumphant liberal capitalism, these ENR journals generally

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 Introduction 
represent an eclectic and outwardly ambiguous synthesis of revolutionary right-wing
and New Left ideals. This post-modern synthesis unites the various ENR tendencies.
At the same time, ENR thinkers remain a loose, heterogeneous cultural “school of
thought” (Duranton-Crabol 1988), to use Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol’s phrase,
rather than a larger, centrally co-ordinated movement or political party.
What makes the ENR a relatively coherent cultural “school of thought”? In the
first place, contemporary ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Charles
Champetier (France), Michael Walker (England), Marco Tarchi (Italy), Pierre Krebs
(Germany), Robert Steuckers (Belgium) and Marcel Rüter (Holland) generally share
a long-term, right-wing metapolitical strategy akin to the Italian Marxist thinker
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). His Prison Notebooks were penned while imprisoned
by Mussolini’s Fascist regime and gave him an international reputation as a Marxist
scholar. Yet his real innovation was that “political movements need to attain ‘cultural
hegemony’ in society in order to be successful” (Bar-On and Balmires in Blamires
2006, 286).
The ENR advanced the notion of right-wing Gramscianism designed to awaken
certain individuals, namely, intellectual, political and economic elites, to new ways
of seeing and being, to change hearts and minds and to gain support for alternative,
counter-hegemonic conceptions of the world (Badinter 1985; Levitas 1986; Griffin
1995). For Gramsci, like the ENR, the precondition for all successful revolutions in
history has first been a revolt against both the dominant spirit and cultural apparatus
of the age. This non-violent, metapolitical stance is directed primarily at European
societal elites and intellectuals rather than the masses and has been a practical and
tactical choice conditioned by the public’s negative historical associations with the
right since World War Two, particularly the legacies of fascism and Nazism. In the
case of the French New Right, the choice of focusing on the cultural, metapolitical
realm was also influenced by the bitter debacle of the revolutionary right’s ill-
fated attempt to maintain Algérie française (French Algeria) and the eventual de-
colonization of Algeria, which began in 1962. In Italy, the New Right sought to
use the metapolitical terrain in order to supersede the sterile and outmoded debates
that had characterized the neo-fascist parliamentary-based MSI, as well as to escape
violent and fringe elements of the radical right such as Ordine Nuovo (ON – New
Order).
A second factor makes the ENR a cohesive cultural “school of thought.” ENR
thinkers share a number of recurring anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian and anti-capitalist
themes. The ENR’s intense valorization of anti-egalitarianism and le droit à la
différence, or the “right to difference” of all local cultures and regions around the
globe, what Martin Lee has dubbed “cultural ethnopluralism” (Lee 1997, 168-83),
is one such set of themes in ENR works. In the summer of 2004, Robert de Herte,
a pseudonym for ENR leader Alain de Benoist, argued that the major malaise of
modernity is the obliteration of differences or collective identities (De Herte 2004).
ENR thinkers see both anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference” as almost
natural, God-given absolutes. For the ENR, the “right to difference” of individuals
and communities must constantly be nourished and promoted in order to allow
all world cultures to maintain their uniqueness and distinctiveness against what is
viewed as the grey, drab, lifeless and levelling materialism and egalitarianism of

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  Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
liberal and socialist doctrines. The latter two ideologies, seen as rooted in Judeo-
Christian biblical monotheism, are viewed as “totalitarian” and “intolerant.” For the
ENR, liberalism and socialism are full of missionary zeal because they allegedly
originate from a culturally insensitive and universalistic belief in one god, which
respects neither Europe’s polytheistic, pagan past, nor the differing values and
cultural standards of other peoples around the world.
In post-communist Europe, liberalism and the United States, viewed as the liberal
nation of the world par excellence, became the ENR’s dominant enemies. The ENR
argues that both the United States and liberal ideology seek to accelerate an insidious,
hyper-materialist and “soft totalitarian” capitalist worldview and ignore the richness
of the world’s cultural diversity and organic principles of community and solidarity.
The ENR insists that the liberal capitalist worldview is egoistic and essentially views
the entire planet as one large, vulgar supermarket where all cultures and nations fall
under the homogenizing prey of the profit principle and the spell of ethnocentric,
cultural Westernization. In addition, while the old communist enemy is dead, the
United States and other Western countries have used the new discourse on human
rights and the “war on terrorism” to justify post-communist military adventures in
Iraq (1991 and 2003), Kosovo (1999) and Afghanistan (2001). In the wake of the
tragic events of September 11, 2001, the ENR argues that the United States might
take further pre-emptive military action against “terrorists” and “rogue states” around
the world, thus necessitating a pan-European military force capable of curtailing the
United States’ global military hegemony and unilateralism (De Benoist 2001a). In
2005, Alain de Benoist argued that a third Gulf War led by the United States against
the nuclear ambitions of Iran is a distinct possibility in the near future (De Benoist
2005d). Anti-Americanism, which is especially virulent in Europe among the far left,
radical right, certain sectors of the ecology movement and Islamic fundamentalists,
as well as many mainstream political forces such as the Gaullists in France, can be
easily tapped by the ENR to spread its message. In the Kosovo and Iraq wars, the
ENR circulated anti-war petitions, which were often signed wittingly or unwittingly
by left-wingers and peace advocates. The unprecedented, mass, worldwide anti-war
demonstrations before the war in Iraq in February 2003 warmed the hearts of the
ENR and radicals of all political stripes precisely because the main enemy became
the United States rather than the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Centered around the intellectual mentor of the ENR, Alain de Benoist of France,
Groupement de recherche et d’étude pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE –
Group for Research and Studies on European Civilization) was founded in 1968 and
is the leading nouvelle droite cultural institute and publishing house in continental
Europe. If his 1978 prize from l’Académie française for Vu de Droite (Seen From
the Right) is an indication, de Benoist is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and
lucid of the ENR intellectuals. His works have been translated into several European
languages from Italian to Romanian and Croatian to English. He continues to publish
an array of books, articles and interviews, while providing commentary on the events
of September 11, the loss of French and European identity, the European Union (EU)
referenda, the youth riots in France in November 2005 or the Muhammad cartoon
scandal in Denmark in 2006 (De Benoist 2005c; 2005d; 2005e).

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 Introduction 
An impressive list of personalities have collaborated with GRECE either as
members of the think tank, editors of its various journals or as influential writers.
These include the following: neo-fascist political theorist Maurice Bardèche (the
most important post-war fascist ideologue, a defender of Vichy-Nazi collusion
and brother-in-law of French fascist writer Robert Brasillach) (Bardèche 1961;
Griffin 1995, 319-21), writer Jean Cau, university professor and philosopher Louis
Rougier, Thierry Maulnier of l’Académie française, sociologist Julien Freund, Swiss
philosopher Armin Mohler (who deserted the Swiss army to join the Waffen-SS; a
former secretary of the “conservative revolutionary” idol Ernst Jünger from 1949
to 1953; and “an unrepentant fascist to the end of his life”) (Blamires 2006, 431),
journalist Jean Parvulesco, founder of French daily Le Figaro Louis Pauwels and
English novelist Anthony Burgess. Nouvelle Ecole, a principal GRECE journal,
has featured among its major writers and influences several towering intellectual
figures of this century: the neo-Gnostic writer Raymond Abellio (a former French
collaborator), Mircea Eliade (who flirted with the fascism of the Romanian Iron
Guard), the psychologist Hans Eysenck, the former communist Arthur Koestler and
the ethnologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz (who expressed regret for
his pro-war Nazi writings, yet used pro-Nazi language to commend the Nazi regime
for advocating policies to preserve racial purity) (Billig in Blamires 2006, 392;
Duranton-Crabol 1991, 251-58).
This trend of attracting high profile intellectuals to the cause has been mirrored by
right-wing theoreticians like Derek Turner, editor of the patriotic, right-wing British
publication Right Now! Turner, in conjunction with Michael Walker, editor of the
ENR publication The Scorpion, has introduced British and American audiences to
the ideas of the ENR. Turner’s board of patrons has included such outstanding names
as Victor Serebriankoff of Mensa, Professor Antony Flew and Hans Eysenck. When
asked in an interview how he gathered such a reputable advisory board, Turner gave
this reply: “Simple – I asked them! There are still some people in important places
who believe strongly enough in patriotism and in freedom of expression to permit
the use of their names as patrons. They do not necessarily agree with everything that
appears in the magazine – but then nor do I!” (Turner 2000).
It must be stressed that the ENR is a coherent “cultural school of thought” with
historical origins in ultra-nationalism, the revolutionary right and fascism. Yet, ENR
theorists consciously separate themselves from both the parliamentary and extra-
parliamentary wings of the revolutionary right milieux by working on a long-term
project to win hearts and minds. Nonetheless, ENR intellectuals have influenced the
style and discourse of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist political parties, such as
France’s FN, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ – Freedom Party of
Austria), the German Republikaner (REP – The Republicans) and the Italian MSI-
AN, although many of its principal theorists have distanced themselves from what
they view as the “vulgar,” populist extreme-right and neo-fascist political outfits
(Simmons 1996, 207-36). In the ENR manifesto “The French New Right in the
Year 2000,” the call for restrictive immigration echoes the sympathies of far right-
wing politicians such as Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria (De Benoist
and Champetier 1999). In the early 1980s, a number of prominent ENR theorists,
including former GRECE secretary-general Pierre Vial, joined the FN. Despite

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  Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
internal divisions between the ENR and extreme right-wing political parties, most
contemporary extreme right-wing or neo-fascist political parties have mirrored the
ENR’s metapolitical orientation. This metapolitical fixation was heavily influenced
by the rise of the New Left and the events of May 1968. The right, the ENR believed,
had to outflank the left on the cultural terrain in order to gain political respectability
and success. Like the ENR, the political parties on the far right also deny any
association with the extreme-right or fascist labels, but instead focus on the so-called
“novelty” of the New Right. In addition, like ENR thinkers, the extreme-right and
neo-fascist political outfits attempt to distance themselves from overt forms of anti-
Semitism and affinity for the symbolism of the discredited fascist and Nazi past.
Finally, the ENR’s formulation of the ambiguous notion of the “right to difference”
has been picked up by the extreme-right and neo-fascist political parties in order to
legitimize their ultra-nationalist, chauvinist and anti-immigrant politics.
The relationship of the ENR to right-wing populist, ultra-nationalist, extreme-
right or neo-fascist political parties has attained a new significance in light of the
revival of the right-wing parliamentary forces in recent years. The most dramatic
and publicized rise of the far right has come in France. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader
of the FN, first survived challenges to his authority from his second-in-command,
Bruno Megret, who subsequently left to form the Mouvement National Républicain
(MNR). Yet, the FN still garnered an unprecedented 17 per cent of the first poll in
the presidential election in 2002 and entered the second round in what amounted
to an international black eye for France and a terrible defeat for the Socialist Prime
Minister Lionel Jospin. Although President Jacques Chirac won 82 per cent of the
vote in the second round, Le Pen’s dramatic ascent to mainstream French political
life was wildly interpreted by some commentators as a threat to the Fifth Republic.
In other parts of Europe, the far right was also scoring impressive victories. In
Austria, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) won 22 per cent of the popular vote in
1996 and three years later 27 per cent. Like France, Austria received international
condemnation for allowing Haider’s anti-immigrant party to join the national
coalition government. In Italy, the far right also gained national prominence by
joining a unity government. After the Italian elections in 2002, media giant Silvio
Berlusconi again broke the taboo of co-operating with the far right by including
in his Forza Italia-led government, Gianfranco Fini and Umberto Bossi, leaders
of the AN and the xenophobic, anti-southern, anti-immigrant Lega Nord (Northern
League) respectively. In Denmark, the right-wing Danish People’s Party plays a
key role in the coalition government and the same is true for a similar right-wing
party in Norway. Finally, in Holland, a land with an international reputation for
liberalism and multiculturalism, has also seen the meteoric rise of the far right. After
the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, his Lisjt Fortuyn Party took nearly one fifth of
the seats in the May 2002 Dutch election and a number of Dutch far right-wing
political parties scored impressive gains in the 2006 national elections. While the
British far right has had major difficulties due to historical reasons, infighting and
the co-optation strategies of the Conservatives, a sanitized British National Party
(BNP) was able to win three seats in local elections in Burnley by playing on racial
divisions.

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 Introduction 
It should be pointed out that the ENR did not get its start in the parliamentary
political arena. Rather, the ENR reached its intellectual and cultural apogee in the
late 1970s by penetrating various mass media outlets and publishing houses. The
prestigious French daily Le Figaro even opened its pages to Alain de Benoist and
other ENR thinkers in the late 1970s. In 1977 Le Figaro editor Louis Pauwels sought
to distinguish between an “Old Right” and “New Right” and to rid the right of its
“irrational” anti-Semitism. The year 1979 is considered the ENR’s “hot summer”
of widespread press attention in France. Its ideas influenced the French mainstream
political right in the mid-1970s. In 1993, it received important media attention once
again in France and Western Europe generally with some sustained coverage in the
prestigious daily Le Monde. On both occasions, numerous ENR critics, especially
prominent liberal and socialist thinkers, movements and political parties, raised the
spectre of fascism and Nazism, thus marginalizing the ENR’s theorists and possibly
missing the “novel” features of the ENR ideological synthesis.
The ENR, then, is not a political party or new social movement, but rather a
collection of varied European cultural organizations, study groups and intellectual
networks. Its real originality might lie in its right-wing Gramscian ideological message
and the cultural strategy of attempting to capture what it views as the “real” power
centres of civil society and the cultural apparatus. For the ENR thinkers, the cultural
realm is the main vector of political contestation because it seeks to displace the
dominant societal consensus through the creation of a coherent counter-hegemonic
conception of the world. This ENR counter-hegemonic ideology is intended to
undermine the hegemonic legitimization and rationalization of the existing liberal
capitalist order. The fact that the ENR is a pagan, anti-Christian and anti-Western
Right might be another example of its originality. Finally, born in 1968 at around the
same period as the political rise of the New Left and the May student and worker
protest movements in France, ENR intellectuals have co-opted a number of New
Left ideas in combination with their older, revolutionary right-wing worldview. A
number of critics see this New Left-New Right synthesis as a revival of the “neither
right, nor left” fascist synthesis of the inter-war era, while others contend that it
represents a break with the revolutionary right-wing view of the past and fascism,
and even constitutes a new political paradigm.
While ENR thinkers have vehemently denied the association and label of
fascism, they simultaneously continue to pay homage to a pantheon of “conservative
revolutionary” authors such as Oswald Spengler (author of The Decline of the West
in 1923) and Ernst Jünger (who penned The Storm of Steel in 1920, his homage
to soldierly virtues and the mystic communion of the trenches) and other writers,
including revolutionary leftists and syndicalists from Georges Sorel to Vladimir
Lenin, which theoretically inspired Italian Fascism or German Nazism. (Griffin 1995,
351-54) The term “conservative revolution” was popularized by Jünger’s private
secretary Armin Mohler in his 1950 work Die Konservative Revolution. It connoted
a complex catalogue of non-Nazi variants of fascism and other anti-democratic ideas
under the Weimar Republic. Mohler actively promoted ENR leader de Benoist in the
1980s. Of the five book-length texts reprinted on Alain de Benoist’s website, one
is about conservative revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) and
another a savage critique of the Rights of Man. There is also a lengthy “critical” text

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 10 Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
published in 2002 devoted to Julius Evola, the editor of the Italian Fascist journal
Regime Fascista in the 1930s and the inspiration for violent neo-fascist groups such
as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale (AN – National Vanguard) in the post-
war era (De Benoist 2002).
It must be pointed out that the major contemporary ENR intellectuals, particularly
Alain de Benoist, Michael Walker and Marco Tarchi, all began their careers as
figures connected with right-wing extremism or even neo-fascism. In France, de
Benoist was involved in extreme nationalist and pan-European, revolutionary right-
wing student politics in the 1960s; Michael Walker was a former British National
Front (BNF) organizer for central London; and Marco Tarchi became disillusioned
with the Italian neo-fascist MSI (Duranton-Crabol 1991, 68-72; 113-14).
In order to counter the perception of a revival of revolutionary right or quasi-
fascist ideals, the ENR has tended to cultivate an aura of what can be termed
“constructive ambiguity” and a stance of intellectual victimisation (a “New
Inquisition” is the common ENR cry) vis-à-vis the “hegemonic” European liberal-
left cultural establishment (De Herte 1974; De Benoist and Champetier 1999). One
ENR strategy might be to maintain its core of revolutionary right-wing intellectual
support, while also enhancing its levels of acceptance and support among liberal
and left-wing intellectuals. Some intellectuals on the left, including those associated
with the American critical theory journal Telos, are now completely free of the stable
ideological anchor of Marxism after the shock of 1989. Consequently, these former
leftists have found the ENR ideological synthesis appealing and have actually been
published in ENR journals. In turn, ENR intellectuals have increasingly published
their works in Telos. At the same time, Alain de Benoist initiated a sort of opening
to the left when he began the publication of his limited-circulation journal Krisis in
1988. The debates in Telos and Krisis resemble each other in that both journals tend
to pursue a double critique of Marxist and liberal democratic ideologies, as well as
publish decidedly “leftist” and anti-liberal authors. Moreover, the two journals focus
on similar anti-capitalist themes and offer a scathing critique of Western notions of
“progress.” Both the former New Left-influenced journal and the ENR seek to re-
invigorate cultural, regional and ecological bonds of communal solidarity as a reply
to the homogenising logic of capitalism, nationalism, bureaucratic life and “New
Class” forms of domination. New Right criticisms of the United States’ “imperialist”
war in Iraq also mirrored those of the far left throughout Europe.
Aware of the right’s historical lessons from the experiences of fascism and de-
colonization, ENR thinkers have attempted to gradually rehabilitate the cultural and
political legacies of the non-Nazi, revolutionary right. In the mid-1970s and again
in the early 1990s, the ENR gained some support among the haute intelligentsia in
continental Europe. A number of cultural and political trends tended to give the ENR
intellectuals more public exposure and credibility. In the first place, the star of the
left rose so high after World War Two because fascism and Nazism were thoroughly
discredited and associated with the right. The communist Red Army’s decisive role
in the defeat of Nazism and the Soviet Union’s massive loss of life in the world
war served to create an anti-fascist consensus in both East and West. However,
the left’s Stalinist-like excesses in the East and the far left’s perceived intellectual
and cultural hegemony and dogmatism in continental Europe (e.g., the slavish pro-

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 Introduction 11
Soviet, Stalinist historical record of the French Communist Party and prominent
European intellectuals) made the cultural and political revival of the right almost
inevitable. Second, the crumbling of communist states in Eastern Europe after 1989
left an ideological vacuum, which the ENR intellectuals could tap into with their
distinct New Left influences. Finally, unlike the Anglo-American world, continental
Europe has deep ideological and historical affinities for a peculiar anti-liberal, anti-
capitalist revolutionary right. The ENR is seriously indebted to this revolutionary
right-wing intellectual tradition, whether it is the writings of the nineteenth century
French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, the German jurist Carl Schmitt
who willingly joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became its “crown jurist,” or the
“Marcuse” of the Italian post-war radical right Julius Evola, to use the memorable
expression of former Italian MSI leader Giorgio Almirante.
In spite of new opportunities presented by the changing political landscape,
there has been a constant attempt to publicly marginalize the ENR intellectuals,
throughout continental Europe and especially in France. The prevailing journalistic
view was that ENR intellectuals were re-hashing pernicious fascist and Nazi ideas
from the past. Furthermore, the ENR’s own post-modern denunciation of most
intellectual and political cliques and fads of the age likely frightened the existing
cultural and intellectual authorities. Its appropriation of quasi-leftist ideas and anti-
Western, anti-Christian pagan orientation tended to threaten liberal and socialist
cultural and political elites, the ultra-nationalist, Catholic right and the neo-liberal
right. The ENR’s ideological synthesis of revolutionary right-wing and New Left
traditions gave the ENR a sense of constant intellectual vigour and energy, which
could not be fully ignored by even its harshest critics. Could it be that as existing
cultural and political elites were marginalizing ENR ideals in order to score political
points, they were simultaneously accepting the school of thought’s valorization of
cultural particularism within Europe’s social and political system?
In both 1979 and again 1993, particularly in France, the ENR intellectuals
received some important media coverage for a brief period of time, but only to be
largely dismissed as closet fascists by most of its intellectual opponents. French
scholars willing to engage in dialogue with the ENR, including the late French
philosopher Raymond Aron and the contemporary political scientist Pierre André
Taguieff, have been criticized by some sectors of the left for giving the ENR an aura
of legitimacy. Also, this dialogue with the ENR has unleashed polemical guilt-by-
association tactics against “lax” liberals and leftists from a dogmatic wing of the
hard left intelligentsia nostalgic for the clear and unambiguous left-right dichotomy.
In 1993, forty European intellectuals signed “An Appeal to Vigilance” in Le Monde
as a result of a supposedly “alarming” ENR dialogue with former communist
theorists, what Roger-Pol Droit called a revival of “national Bolshevism” (Droit
1993-4, 145-6; 157-8). A year later the Appeal was republished and signed by 1500
additional intellectuals. Some critics, like those from Telos, have suggested that
a defeated cultural left staged the entire affair in order to maintain outdated left-
right boundaries in the post-communist era (Adler 1993-4, 23-33). The Appeal was
curious since it failed to even name its opponents. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN, a greater
political threat for many critics than the ENR, is not even mentioned in the Appeal.
Thus, one scholar has even concluded that the aim of the Appeal was to keep liberal

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 12 Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
and left-wing scholars who study or engage in dialogue with the ENR on a sort
of hard left dogma leash: A Europeanized variant of the North American political
correctness “thought police” (Adler 1993-4, 23-33).
In contrast to what they consider the “dinosaurs” on the Old Right and Old
Left, ENR thinkers denied the fascist label of their opponents and flaunted an
aura of tolerance based on an eclectic, heterogeneous body of thought without a
common platform or dogmatic interpretation of the world (Sunic 1990, 159-60).
ENR political thought has been influenced by radically different sources from the
conservative revolution to ecologism, from the New Left to federalism and from
paganism and feminism to scientism (Caillé 1993, 74-130). Critics have noted the
repression and intolerance in ancient, pagan Greece and Rome, the chilling “racial
paganism” of Nazi Germany and the revival of paganism by some contemporary far
right-wing political movements (Sunic 1990, 154-5; Biehl and Staudenmaier 1995).
Despite these protestations, others have hailed the ENR’s “novel” positions such
as feminism, paganism, federalism, pro-Third World solidarity, anti-imperialism,
anti-totalitarianism, anti-racism and the valorization of the “right to difference”
(Tonini 2003-4). These positions have been the product of several facelifts between
the late 1960s and 1990s (Taguieff 1993-4a, 34-54; 1993-4c). The ENR’s “open”
attitude towards issues once dominated by the left and use of authors concerned
with pressing existential and spiritual questions, including Friedrich Nietzsche,
Julius Evola, Arthur Koestler and J. R. R. Tolkien, even appealed to the subjective
aspirations of a particular segment of European youth in the early 1980s and 1990s.
In the 1990s, many of the ENR’s primary concerns reflected those of the New Left,
born in the wake of the American anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s. This
ENR intellectual overhaul and opening to the left has led the most reputable scholar
of the ENR phenomenon, Pierre-André Taguieff, to suggest that the French nouvelle
droite journal Krisis now falls outside the orbit of right-wing extremism or neo-
fascist taxonomic categories (Taguieff 1994, 313). Despite Taguieff’s optimistic
interpretation of the ENR’s most avowedly leftist journal, Krisis still contains a
mixture of revolutionary right and New Left influences.
The ENR’s harshest critics argue that its esoteric, aristocratic elitism and violent
revolt against Enlightenment-driven reason and progress, positivism, materialism,
capitalism, communism, egalitarianism, universalism and liberal parliamentarism
were all menacingly echoed in this century by fascist ideologues. These critics
also point out that the ENR’s attempt to transcend categories like left and right
found echoes in European fascist theoreticians of the past, whether Georges Valois
in France, Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile in Italy or Primo De Rivera
in Spain. In addition, the ENR’s radical and violent anti-liberalism mimics anti-
bourgeois forces from previous epochs: Latin inter-war anarcho-syndicalists,
“non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s that oscillated between right and left
and conservative revolutionaries. One recent historical work has linked Alain de
Benoist’s elitist, metapolitical non-conformism of the nouvelle droite, fascism and
Alexandre Marc’s communitarian “third way” under Ordre Nouveau in the 1930s
and 1940s (Hellman 2002, 192-200).
One must also remember that during the inter-war years the revolutionary
right and left resembled each other as mirror, polar opposites in their radical anti-

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 Introduction 13
bourgeois, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary and anti-materialist worldviews. The
ENR is still indebted to both right-wing and left-wing revolutionary poles, but from
a cultural rather than explicitly political perspective. As Professor Stephen Holmes
elegantly explained, the cultural curiosity of the post-communist 1990s is that anti-
liberalism became a common pole of attraction for the ENR, as well as numerous
American leftist and communitarian critics of Western liberal democracies, such as
Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Roberto Unger and the editors of American
critical theory journal Telos (Holmes 1996). These American communitarians,
contends Holmes, echo classical fascists and ENR intellectuals in their revolutionary
anti-liberalism. De Benoist’s Krisis devoted an entire journal issue in 1994 to the
thought of North American communitarian thinkers, including Alasdair MacIntyre,
Christopher Lasch, Amitai Etzioni and Charles Taylor.
Using these aforementioned examples as models for a new radical synthesis
between right and left against bourgeois liberalism and deflecting claims of a
revival of cultural fascism, ENR theoreticians, in a manner reminiscent of the New
Left, argue that they seek to spiritually rejuvenate European societies with more
refined and humane values. That is, the ENR thinkers seek to reverse the trances
of Americanization, rampant capitalist egoism, the notion of unlimited economic
growth as the ultimate standard of “progress,” the dominant reign of materialism,
techno-utopianism and the scientific “religion.” In a Schmittian tone, the ENR wants
to restore the political rather than economic or moral realms to its ascendant role
in European societies. In the ENR’s view, ancient, pagan, hierarchical and organic
European societies would serve as models for the creation of a social order where the
political and military realms are sovereign entities, which supersede the economic
realm in the chain of social imperatives. Finally, the ENR calls for a plurality of
significant political opinions and conflicts internally, and several great power blocs
on the world stage rather than what they view as the homogenizing, unipolar and
dangerous world order dominated by the United States. During the Cold War era, the
ENR called for a “spiritual” European-Third World alliance as one such power bloc
against the “materialism” of the Russian and American superpowers (De Benoist
1986). This last point has even more resonance for the ENR today in a world under
the “decadent” spell of Pax Americana.
The goal of this book, then, is to examine the emergence of the intellectual New
Right, particularly in France, but in Europe more generally, from the late 1960s and
into the new millennium. Its basic assumption is that the cultural and political activity
of this group of intellectuals must be taken seriously. In the first place, the ENR
represents the most theoretically coherent right-wing current of thought in continental
Europe in the post-World War Two period. No similar ideological overhaul exists
on the left. While the ENR ideological synthesis between revolutionary right and
New Left worldviews appears contradictory, it is both intellectually and politically
cultivated for our changing “post-fascist” times. In an age when socialist ideology
has been seriously discredited after the fall of communist regimes in the East in
1989 and the rise of neo-liberal capitalist ideology in the West, the ENR ideological
synthesis could conceivably fill a contemporary ideological void within European
societies. Moreover, the ENR’s ideas have helped to directly and indirectly influence
the discourse, nature and shape of European cultural and political life, particularly the

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 14 Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
increasing salience of cultural questions, national and regional identity, immigration,
the roles of the United States and Europe on the world stage and the critique of the
dominant liberal capitalist model. Finally, the ENR’s marginalization from political
debate is not a sign of its insignificance and might one day be its strength. Do we
forget that Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 which would lead to the fascist
conquest of the state only involved 25,000 blackshirts and would not have been
possible without the vacillation and fear of King Victor Emmanuel III and other
established authorities? Was Hitler’s Mein Kampf not written only a decade before
the Nazis swept to power in 1933 and changed the course of European history?
This book is especially a genealogical history of ideas, in this case, the ideas
and ideological programs of the ENR. I will seek to understand why the ENR arose
in the late 1960s, why it achieved public notoriety in France in 1979 and 1993 and
why it appeals to a cross-section of European intellectuals. Furthermore, I will also
briefly examine the ENR’s ideological programs, rhetorical strategies, organizational
activity in civil society (and linkages across Europe) and relations with conventional
actors in state structures, party systems and social movement sectors. This work will
attempt to address these important questions by tracing the historical, political and
intellectual trajectory of ENR theorists.
Since the major French New Right organization GRECE was formed in 1968, this
date will form the starting point of my analysis. For both the French New Right and
American New Left intellectuals, the year 1968 can be viewed as a critical turning
point; a death-blow to their most cherished hopes and ideals for a post-liberal,
revolutionary order; a period which provoked intense personal and societal reflection;
and also a reference point of reconciliation for the two anti-liberal “enemies” in the
post-communist period. By the 1990s, ENR intellectuals had appropriated many of
the themes of the American New Left from the 1960s. This reconciliation between
sectors of the New Left and New Right was clearly apparent in the nouvelle droite’s
manifesto published in the French New Right journal Eléments in February 1999.
In a sense, both the French New Right and certain remnants of the American New
Left were attempting to re-kindle the idealistic flames of the student radicals from
the 1960s. Both the French New Right and American New Left lamented that these
New Left ideals were either co-opted by the cultural and political establishment, or
shattered as a result of the more institutionalized and conservative climate of the
post-1968 era. An important dimension of the ENR’s “newness” resides with this
pronounced New Left influence, its exclusively Gramscian metapolitical orientation
and its anti-Western and anti-Christian paganism. In essence, the ENR is, in part,
a “new” right-wing cultural movement, deeply indebted to the cultural ideas of
the New Left, which hitherto had not existed before the late 1960s. The thesis of
this book, then, will attempt to demonstrate that the ENR worldview draws on two
dominant yet antagonistic political traditions, namely, the conservative revolutionary
right and New Left.
The fundamental contribution of this book will be an investigation of the ENR’s
primary sources, including books, articles, journals, interviews and histories of
principal ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist, Charles Champetier, Marco
Tarchi and Michael Walker. This type of careful reading of ENR sources has
generally been absent from the Anglo-American literature on the subject and, aside

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 Introduction 15
from Pierre-André Taguieff and Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, even from its French-
language counterparts. Since Alain de Benoist is the most brilliant and prolific of the
ENR intellectuals, I will especially focus on his works.
The question of whether ENR thinkers practice a refined and more subtle form
of cultural fascism, what Umberto Eco has dubbed “Ur-fascism” (Eco 1995), will
be an integral aspect of this study. This undertaking is not without difficulties
for several reasons. In the first place, the issue of what constitutes fascism is a
messy one because there are so many competing and contradictory definitions and
interpretations of the term. Roger Griffin claims that there is a growing consensus in
the Anglophone world of fascist studies to define fascism as a “a palingenetic form of
populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin 2003, 5). Ze’ev Sternhell insists that the fascist
ideological core was formed around World War One and involves a simple equation:
ultra-nationalism + socialism = fascism (Sternhell 1986; 1994). More to the point,
syndicalists and left-wing activists like Henri De Man in Belgium sought to revise
and supersede materialist Marxism by creating an “ethical socialism” reflected in
the slogan socialisme national (national socialism). Others like Stanley Payne have
produced exhaustive checklist definitions of fascism (Payne 1980). In his 2004 work
The Anatomy of Fascism, R.O. Paxton defines fascism (in a manner that would omit
the ENR) as

a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline,

humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity,
in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but
effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues
with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing
and external expansion (Paxton 2004, 218).

Contrary to mainstream historiography on the subject, Ernst Nolte includes the

French Action française led by Charles Maurras as “fascist” in conjunction with
Germany’s National Socialists and the Fascist Party of Italy (Nolte 1965). Given
the diversity of interpretations of fascism, do we accept minimalist or maximalist
conceptions of what constitutes fascism? Was fascism merely epochal? Did fascism
spread beyond Europe to Japan or Brazil? So, for example, Payne argues that
Peronism in Argentina had most though not all the characteristics of fascism.
Second, the fascist label carries an intense historical stigma and polemical ring,
which has possibly prevented more serious academic investigation of ENR texts.
There is no doubt that that the Holocaust, the culmination of the most extreme
manifestation of fascism in its racialist Nazi permutation, was unique in the twentieth
century in that it targeted “for extermination men, women and children because they
were born as they were” (Furet in Nolte and Furet 2001, 66). A vigilant anti-fascism
was an understandable reaction to the excesses of fascism and Nazism. Yet, I am also
reminded of what François Furet said shortly before he died about Hitler’s defeat:
“History seemed to give a certificate of democracy to Stalin” (Furet in Furet and
Nolte 2001, 16). Stalin’s Red Army played a major role in the defeat of Nazism.
This led Stalin to wave the anti-fascist banner loudly, but rhetorical anti-fascism
alone, as Furet argued, did not suffice for championing freedom (Furet in Furet and
Nolte 2001, 17). For years many on the European left ignored Stalinist and Maoist

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 16 Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
atrocities, including the liquidation of the kulaks in Ukraine, horrors of the gulags
or forced deportations of the Chechens and Ingush. Stalinism cannot be excused for
the “gentleness of its intentions,” to use Furet’s shocking phrase for communism
(Furet in Furet and Nolte 2001, 65). Thus, this work is an appeal to unrestricted
and open debate on the history of fascism, its relationship to its mortal communist
“enemy” and the question of continuity and change in fascist discourse in the post-
modern period. If the ENR is to be accused of fascism, then it must be with proofs,
evidence, logical arguments and by tracing the historical genealogy of its works
vis-à-vis fascism, Nazism and other revolutionary right-wing traditions. If we are
serious about the liberty of ideas, ad hominem attacks, ideological favouritism, the
silencing of noxious perspectives or legal remedies should all be resisted. If ENR
ideas about the demise of European identity appear unconvincing or irrational, then
we must counter them with more convincing and rational arguments.
Third, in an age when both nationalism and socialism, the two pillars of the fascist
ideological synthesis from one perspective (Sternhell 1986), are in serious decline
as a result of attack from forces both above and below the nation-state, one wonders
whether the term fascism has lost some of its precise analytical value. This problem
is compounded because former neo-fascist political outfits like the Italian AN today
refuse the fascist label. Can one refuse the fascist label and yet secretly long for the
dawn of a new fascist epoch? Are fascist methods pliable to suit changing times? In
this context, novelist Upton Sinclair and most recently Chris Hedges in a work on
the Christian Right insist that fascism will come to the United States dressed in the
Bible and wrapped in the flag (Hedges 2006).
Fourth, if we take Stanley Payne’s exhaustive definition of fascism along the
lines of ideology and goals, the fascist negations and style and organization,1 we
would be hard-pressed to find that the ENR meets all the requirements of a fascist
movement. That is, in taking the metapolitical route the ENR rejects violence in
practice, while it has attacked the notions of a charismatic leader, nationalism and
territorial expansion. If we use Nolte’s fascist minimum of anti-Marxism, anti-
liberalism, anti-conservatism, the leadership principle, a party army and the aim
of totalitarianism, the ENR meets the first three requirements but not the last three.
Using Griffin’s ultra-minimalist definition of fascism as a form of palingenetic ultra-
nationalism, the ENR meets the criteria but so do other non-fascist, nationalistic
right-wing movements. In this sense, we should remember the distinction Martin
Blinkhorn made between fascism as a permanent, ultra-nationalist revolutionary
movement seeking to transcend the nihilism of the period to save the nation or race,
on the one hand, and right-wing conservatism with its defense of established interests
such as the bourgeoisie, Church or monarchy, on the other hand (Blinkhorn 1990).
In practice, co-operation and conflict existed between conservatives and fascists.
In Spain, Franco generally controlled and co-opted fascists, while in Fascist Italy,
for example, Mussolini could say in 1929 after having signed the Concordat with
the Holy See that Italy “is Catholic, but it is Fascist, in fact above all, exclusively,
essentially Fascist” (Gentile in Blamires 2006, 560).
At the edge of the new century, could the “post-fascist” rather than fascist label
be more accurate for the ENR theorists because they have generally criticized the
homogenizing thrust of all modern ideologies, including fascism, nationalism (and

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 Introduction 17
the concept of the nation-state), socialism and liberalism? The ENR’s critique of
nationalism, for example, has distanced it from the Front National, while its support
of global “ethnoregionalism” and the “right to difference” confounds scholars from
anthropologists and political scientists that seek to find linkages with historical
fascism and the way it glorified the national community and state above all other
values (Spektorowski 2000, 352-61; 2003, 55-70; Ethnos 2003, 554-72; Talshir 2005,
311-35). Furthermore, the ENR operates from a particular cultural tradition that has
been historically more attached to the values of the Nietzschean-like conservative
revolution rather than official variants of fascism.
Notwithstanding, the chapter interpreting the ENR will highlight the positions
of cultural critics that claim the ENR intellectuals represent a new form of subtle
cultural fascism, those arguing the ENR theorists have moulded a novel political
paradigm and others that urge caution rather than the reflex desire to hastily classify
the ENR intellectuals. On the one hand, the astute Italian political scientist Marco
Revelli argues that the ENR has been unable to “invent forms of articulation at the
level of practical politics either nationally or internationally, or even, when all is
said and done, of producing really original culture (the intellectual Pantheon it fields
are almost all located between the beginning of the century and the early 1930s)”
(Revelli 1996, 361-65). On the other hand, born in the wake of the rise of the New
Left and May 1968 events, the ENR was firmly positioned to differentiate itself from
all the historical right’s previous stances.
In ENR journals, revolutionary right-wing themes of the past, namely, the
aristocratic conception of life, the military ethic of honour and courage, the “internal
empire of the spirit,” the search for primordial, common cultural origins and the
powerful attachment to myths mingle in uneasy coexistence with more recent
New Left, federalist, ecological and democratizing impulses. The ENR is a right-
wing movement that would not have been possible without a post-World War Two
reflection about the nature of historical fascism and the revolutionary right, on the
one hand, and the events of May 1968, the phenomenon of the New Left and the
influence of the Left in general, on the other hand. In its esoteric, hybrid and perhaps
sexy melange of ideas and influences, one might be tempted to ask the crucial
question of whether the ENR has created a “post-fascist” synthesis or rather laid
the intellectual groundwork necessary for the revival of a fascist ideology that was
buried in the ashes of World War Two.
The plan of this book will be the following. While the first part of the book will
more generally focus on the ENR’s historical trajectory and its ideological universe,
the second part will examine its relationship to the real world of culture and politics
(i.e., its relationship to political forces, the connection of ENR intellectuals to centres
of power and its cultural connections throughout Europe, North America and the
world in general). The first chapter will trace the ENR’s right-wing historical and
ideological origins in France and Europe more generally. The second chapter will
examine the ENR’s birth and development in France from 1968 until the late 1970s.
The third chapter will examine the ENR’s “opening to the left” in the 1980s and
1990s. The fourth chapter will trace the ENR’s left-wing roots both in relation to
the fascist past and particularly in the contemporary period with the key influences
of Gramscian cultural theories, the ideals of the New Left from the 1960s and its

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 18 Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
affinity and flirtation with the old, revolutionary left. The fifth chapter will examine
the ENR’s major influences and basic worldview. I will argue that from the late
1960s and into the new century the primacy of cultural metapolitics and valorization
of the anti-egalitarian notion of the “right to difference” have been the main pillars
of the ENR Weltanschauung. The sixth chapter will consist of an analysis of the
ambiguities and tensions within the ENR’s worldview. The seventh chapter will be
an interpretation of the academic literature surrounding the ENR phenomenon. The
eighth chapter will focus on the French nouvelle droite’s relationship with other
ENR branches throughout Europe and its interesting yet limited cultural impact in
North America. The ninth chapter will grapple with the ENR’s uneasy relationship
with the extreme right, revolutionary right and neo-fascist camps. The final chapter
situates the ENR within the larger framework of intellectuals, which can play an
oppositional or subservient, legitimizing function in relation to the dominant powers
and ideologies of the day. The inability of the ENR to definitively break with the
radical right milieu prevents it from playing the role of authentically oppositional
intellectuals and creating a truly post-fascist ideological synthesis.

Endnotes

1. For Payne, the typological description of fascism includes the following:

A.
Ideology and Goals:
Espousal of an idealist, vitalist, and voluntaristic philosophy, normally involving the
attempt to realize a new modern, self-determined, and secular culture.
Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state not based on traditional principles
or models. Organization of a new highly regulated, multiclass, integrated national
economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national
syndicalist.
Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence and war.
The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with
other powers.

B.
The Fascist Negations:
Antiliberalism
Anticommunism
Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to
undertake temporary alliances with other sectors, most commonly with the right).

C.
Style and Organization:
Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style
and with the goal of a mass party militia.

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 Introduction 19
Emphasis on aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political liturgy, stressing
emotional and mystical aspects.
Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing a
strongly organic view of society.
Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations,
at least in effecting the initial political transformation.
Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command,
whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective.

See Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914-1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995),
p. 7.

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