Alain de Benoist (; ; born 11 December 1943) is a French political philosopher and journalist, a founding member of the Nouvelle Droite (France's New Right), and the leader of the ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE.
Principally influenced by thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution, de Benoist is opposed to Christianity, the Declaration 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. He theorized the notion of ethnopluralism, a concept which relies on preserving and mutually respecting individual and bordered ethno-cultural regions.
His work has been influential with the alt-right movement in the United States, and he presented a lecture on identity at a National Policy Institute conference hosted by Richard B. Spencer; however, he has distanced himself from the movement.
Biography
Family
Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien (now part of Tours), Centre-Val de Loire, the son of a head of sales at Guerlain, also named Alain de Benoist, and Germaine de Benoist, née Langouët. He grew up in a bourgeois and Catholic family. His mother came from the lower-middle class of Normandy and Brittany, and his father belonged to the Belgian nobility.
During the Second World War, his father was a member of the French resistance armed group French Forces of the Interior. He was a self-declared Gaullist, whereas his wife Germaine was rather left-leaning, and the extended de Benoist family was divided between Free France and Vichy France during the conflict. His paternal grandmother, Yvonnes de Benoist, was the secretary of Gustave Le Bon. De Benoist is also the great-nephew of French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau.
Early life (1957–1961) De Benoist was still in high school at Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand lycées during the turmoils of the Algerian War (1954–1962), a period that shaped his political views. In 1957, he met the daughter of the antisemitic journalist and conspiracy theorist Henry Coston. 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 magazine Lectures Françaises, generally in defence of the French colonial empire and the pro-colonial paramilitary organization Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS). De Benoist stayed away from Coston's conspiracy theories on the Freemasonry and the Jews.
Aged 17 in 1961, de Benoist met François d'Orcival, with whom he became the editor of France Information, an underground pro-OAS newspaper. The same year, he started to attend the University of Paris and joined the far-right student society Federation of Nationalist Students (FEN). In 1962, he became the secretary of the group's magazine, Cahiers universitaires, in which he wrote the main articles along with d'Orcival. As a student in law and literature, he began a period of political activism and developed a passion for fantastique cinema. According to philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, de Benoist possessed an intellectual curiosity that was lacking among his elder colleagues like Dominique Venner (1935–2013) or Jean 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".
Radical political activism (1962–1967) De Benoist met Dominique Venner in 1962. The following year, he took part in the creation of Europe-Action, a white nationalist magazine founded by Venner and in which de Benoist began to work as a journalist. He published at that times his first essays: Salan devant l'opinion ("Salan faces the [public] opinion", 1963) and Le courage est leur patrie ("Braveness is their motherland", 1965), defending French Algeria and the OAS.
Between 1963 and 1965, de Benoist was a member of the Rationalist Union; he probably began to read Louis Rougier's criticism 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. In 1965, de Benoist wrote: "We oppose Rougier to Sartre, as we oppose verbal delirium to logics ..., because biological realism is the best support against those idealistic chimeras". De Benoist became in 1964 the editor-in-chief of the weekly publication Europe-Action Hebdomaire, renamed L'Observateur Européen in October 1966. He also wrote in the neo-fascist magazine Défense de l'Occident, founded in 1952 by Maurice Bardèche.
After a visit to South Africa at the invitation of Hendrik Verwoerd's National Party government, de Benoist co-wrote with Gilles Fournier the 1965 essay Vérité pour l'Afrique du Sud ("Truth for South Africa"), in which they endorsed apartheid. The following year, he co-wrote with D'Orcival another essay, Rhodésie, pays des lions fidèles ("Rhodesia, country of the faithful lions"), in defence of Rhodesia, a breakaway country in southern Africa ruled at that time by a white-minority government. Ian Smith, the then prime minister of the unrecognized state, prefaced the book. Returning from a trip to the United States in 1965, de Benoist deplored the suppression of racial segregation in the United States, and wrote as a prediction that the system would survive outside the law, thus in a more violent way.; de Benoist Oct. 1965, pp. 9–12: "The legal segregation removed (and it will be removed everywhere, we must not be under any illusions) is immediately replaced by a de facto segregation over which the legal, and therefore peaceful, means have no more influence." (Europe-Action 34).
In two essays published in 1966, Les Indo-Européens ("The Indo-Europeans") and Qu'est-ce que le nationalisme? ("What Is Nationalism?"), de Benoist contributed to define a new form of European nationalism in which the European civilization – to be understood as the "white race"De Benoist 1966, pp. 8–9: "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 ... 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." (Qu'est-ce que le nationalisme?) — 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 the European Rally for Liberty (REL) during the 1967 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.
The successive failures of the far-right movements de Benoist had supported since the early 1960s – from the dissolution of OAS and the Évian Accords of 1962, to the electoral defeat of presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965 (in which he had participated via the grassroots 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 a meta-political strategy by launching a review. During the May 1968 events in France, then aged 25, de Benoist worked as a journalist for the professional magazine L'Écho de la presse et de la publicité.
Nouvelle Droite and media fame (1968–1993) The Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) was founded in January 1968 to serve as a metapolitical, ethnonationalist think-tank promoting the ideas of the Nouvelle 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". In the 1970s, de Benoist adapted his geopolitical view-points and went from a pro-colonial attitude towards an advocacy of Third-Worldism against capitalist America and communist Russia, from the defence of the "last outposts of the West" towards anti-Americanism, and from a biological to a cultural approach of the notion of alterity, an idea which he developed in his ethnopluralist theories.
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 term Nouvelle Droite to label the movement. He started to write articles for mainstream right-wing magazines, namely Valeurs actuelles and Le Spectacle du Monde from 1970 to 1982, and Le Figaro Dimanche (renamed in 1978 Le Figaro Magazine) from 1977 to 1982; he then wrote for the videos section of Le Figaro Magazine until 1992. De Benoist was awarded in 1978 the prestigious Prix de l'essai by the Académie française for his book View for the Right (Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines). Between 1980 and 1992, he was a regular participant in the radio program Panorama on France Culture.
Although de Benoist had announced his retirement from political parties and elections to focus on metapolitics in 1968, he ran as a candidate for the far-right Party of New Forces during the 1979 European Parliament election. In the 1984 European Parliament election in France, de Benoist announced his intention to vote for the French 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.
De Benoist met Russian writer Aleksandr 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 magazine Elementy in 1992. 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 on Eurasianism and Martin Heidegger, they have maintained regular exchanges since then.
Intellectual re-emergence (1994–present)