Why the 'Nation of 68' is More Immune To Its Ideas
Despite French intellectuals being very well-represented amongst the New Left, Wokeism failed to take over France like it did the Anglosphere. Why?
This article was one of the most difficult to write and took me the longest time to research. This was due to the sheer quantity of information about the French right, and its journey throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, much of which I did not know about.
As it happens, it could not have come at a better time. The French National Rally got 31% of the vote in the European Elections, with 32% amongst young people, and no difference between young men and young women. The result was so embarrassing for Macron that he has dissolved the National Assembly to try and regain political capital, and whilst a similar strategy paid off for Pedro Sanchez in Spain last year, and I wouldn’t be complacent as French elections can be surprising, this is such an enviable position compared to Britain and the United States, when we are constantly reminded about how young people are Woke.
It’s even more surprising when you consider that France was home to many of the intellectuals of the New Left, and indeed the riots of ‘May 1968’ personified the student counterculture. France harboured many of the most significant proto-Woke intellectuals; Simone De Beauvoir, Michael Foucault, Jean-Francis Lyotard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and many others, and nowhere was support for the abolition of age of consent laws more widespread than there, where in 1977, every single one of the above intellectuals signed a petition asking for the government to legalise sexual acts with children.
So how did France, the home of 1968, emerge today less in thrall to its legacy compared to the Anglosphere, particularly Britain where the student counter-culture was relatively weak compared to elsewhere in the West?
This is a long and complex topic, hence why this took me so long to write. But it deserves explanation for an Anglo-Saxon audience in a digestible format.
I will first talk about the electoral side, National Front’s rise under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, and then its transformation into National Rally under Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, comparing it to the failure of Britain’s nationalist right in a similar period, both the (British) National Front in the 1970s and the British National Party (BNP) in the 2000s. Then, I will talk about the metapolitical side, with Alain de Benoist and the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation (GRECE) forming the bedrock of the Nouvelle Droite (French New Right). I will conclude that the decisive difference between the French nationalist right and the British nationalist right was the failure of the British right to engage in metapolitics effectively, and this is the most important lesson from the triumph of the French nationalist right that us in the Anglosphere can learn from.
History of the National Front under Jean-Marie
Jean-Marie Le Pen came of age during World War II, too young to have seen combat but still having vivid memories of the Vichy regime, of which he supported. A fervent anti-communist from his youth, in the immediate post-war period he was very committed to defending French colonial possessions, volunteering with the Foreign Legion to fight for his country in Indochina. After France’s defeat in that war, he joined Pierre Poujade’s ‘Poujadist’ movement, which was a movement of left-behind farmers and small shopkeepers in the 1950s. The Poujadist Movement, whilst ‘big-tent’ had some populist-right elements, with one maybe being able to compare it to the Yellow Vests.
When Algeria erupted in revolt after Vietnam, Jean-Marie once again signed up for service. He became an intelligence officer in the Algerian War of Independence, where opponents say he authorised torture (FLR terrorists responsible for anti-White genocide probably deserved it) and was distantly involved in a plot by OAS (Secret Army Organisation) to assassinate Charles De Gaulle over his betrayal on Algeria, that was thwarted.
In the chaos of the May 1968 protests and strikes, people like Jean-Marie, and many other people we will discuss in this article, looked with horror and deep despair at how much their countrymen were not with them, and how the left had established cultural hegemony.
It is important to put this in perspective throughout the article, as the French right was good at recognising early just how badly it had lost public opinion, something the Anglosphere right only recognised recently. But because it understood the dynamics of the game so early, the need to fight a long war of attrition that would take many decades, it was able to come out of its long period on the margins of culture earlier.
Jean-Marie was always very anti-communist, but other views underwent shift. In the aftermath of May 1968, the National Front was formed in 1972 out of a multitude of different right-wing groups in the early 1970s, most prominently ‘New Order’. The NF’s first election campaign in the 1973 legislative focused on immigration like it would go on to do, but by the late 1970s it had moved towards a more Religious Right and ‘Reaganism Before Reagan’ angle, only to revert to its original position in the early 1980s when immigration became a more saliant concern.
From the very beginning, the National Front abandoned the ‘cult of violence’ that had defined previous groups like New Order. Harvey G. Simmons’s book the ‘French National Front’ that I used to research this, writing in the 1990s, admits it did not engage in openly anti-democratic behaviour even under Jean-Marie. This is one advantage the French nationalist right had over the British, the latter of which could never quite shake the perception of being a movement of violent skinheads and thugs.
After Francois Mitterand’s election in 1981, and him giving immigrants the right to vote in local elections as well as overseeing a surge in the number of arrivals, higher than in Britain at that time, the immigration issue increased in salience. The mainstream right, represented by people like Jacques Chirac who would later become President, were shocked by their defeat in 1981 and the participation of the Communists in government (though this would be the blow of death for the French Communist Party, which was the second largest Western communist party after Italy and was an interesting organisation). It therefore was willing to work with elements of the radical right like the National Front, even whilst publicly keeping them at a distance, shown with the strong showing of National Front councillors in the City of Dreux, where mainstream right-wing parties supported them in the second round.
Unlike in First Past the Post, where the spoiler effect means you have to get the ball in the net on the first try if you want to replace one of the two main parties, the two-round system allowed the National Front to consolidate its gains.
The 1986 legislative election was held under proportional representation, as President Mitterrand wanted to have a weaker National Assembly, which allowed the National Front to gain 9.8% of the vote and 9.8% of the seats, enabling them to have a nationwide platform. However, in the 1988 legislative election when the National Assembly returned to using the two-round system, whilst in the first round the National Front MPs, the mainstream right in the Union for French Democracy (UDF) and Rally for the Republic (RPR) sided with the mainstream left in the second round, which caused NF to lose all of its deputies save for one, who later defected.
Jean-Marie was known for his outrageous antisemitic remarks, for instance saying that the Holocaust was a ‘mere detail’ of WWII. Because of this, the mainstream media blamed him when a Jewish grave was vandalised, the Carpentras Affair in 1990, with polls showing 66% of the French public agreed that Jean-Marie had contributed to the environment that had allowed this to happen (1), a similar hold on public sentiment that the cultural left has today in the Anglosphere with the doctrine of ‘stochastic terrorism’.
Despite this setback, the party continued to have a swell of grassroots support and was able to get a seat in a by-election in the early 1990s.
By the 1990s, the focus of the party lasered on fear of Islam, a primary focus that it continues to have to this day. The ‘Scarves Affair’ in 1994 began the positioning of the National Front as a defender of laicism against Islamism, something that would be emphasised to a greater degree under his daughter.
In the 1990s Phillipe de Villiers emerged onto the political scene with his ‘Movement Por France’. One could compare the dynamic between Villiers and Le Pen as between Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin of the BNP, with Villiers a mainstream conservative figure who echoed some of the same sentiments as the nationalist right. However, unlike in Britain, Le Pen was able to maintain his strong basis of support.
The zenith in Jean-Marie’s leadership of the NF was in 2002 Presidential Election, when he got into the run-off against Jacque Chirac. However, he was overwhelmingly defeated with him only getting 1% more votes in the second round as he did in the first round, showing his base of support was limited.
By 2007, the National Front had been a feature of French politics for numerous decades; they had a significant base of support and strong ‘ground game’ in local elections and on the constituency level, and mainstream right figures like Nicolas Sarkozy had adopted many of their policies on citizenship and immigration restriction. But it was still politically isolated, led by the personality cult of Le Pen, and could not expand its appeal beyond around 18% of the population, as the runoff with Chirac showed in 2002. This was far higher than the British National Party (which’s height was 6.3% in the 2009 European election in Britain which only had a turnout of 37%,) but was still nowhere close to power.
National Front at this time, like the BNP, was filled with antisemites and Holocaust Deniers, with the public image of respectability and populist-focus a façade for extreme elements something that both parties shared. However, the National Front was slightly more skilled at hiding some of that extremism than the BNP was. On some of its issues the left was also much more divided in France than it was in Britain, that we will discuss, and whilst not to the extent that his daughter did, Jean-Marie did tap into popular concerns about the Islamification of France and the threat it posed to state secularism, that chimed better with France’s republican tradition than in Britain.
History of National Front under Marine (2011 - 2019)
Marine Le Pen’s take over from her father in 2011 signalled a shift in the messaging of the party, though she would have a similar autocratic style of leadership. The image of a woman leading the party in and of itself gave a softer image compared to an alleged torturer who admitted he had kept a ‘picture of Phillipe Petain in his house’.
Marine Le Pen marginalised antisemites in the party, and connected the party’s programme to Gaullist populism. It was under her that one saw a decidedly ‘economically left-wing’ policy programme designed to appeal to various segments of the ‘Old Left’, and to capitalise on the resentment of neoliberal capitalism and the Eurozone currency that had facilitated EU-imposed austerity measures in countries like Greece.
Her programme involved withdrawing from the Eurozone and Frexit, and desiring high tariffs. She increasingly justified anti-Islam policies in the language of laicism and French secularism, which her father had done but more linked to a Christian-centric view of French civilisation. She also talked about the threat of Islam to women’s rights and gay rights, endorsed citizens initiatives and direct democracy, and in a change from the party’s previous strong support for the restoration of the death penalty, now advocated for a referendum on the subject.
This strategy did pay off. Whilst she did not make it to the second round in 2012, in 2017 she improved on her father’s result dramatically, from 18% in 2002 to 33% in 2017.
However, whilst this was a vast improvement, it was still not a victory. She was widely criticised for her ‘economic illiteracy’ when debating with Emmanuel Macron, and considered too fanciful and not in touch with reality.
Nevertheless, the period of Marine’s leadership from 2011 to 2018 went a long way to distance the party from the extreme right, whilst broadening the party’s base. At this stage, National Front was recognisably very different from a party like the British National Party; with perhaps it best represented by the small British party ‘For Britain Movement’.
History of National Rally under Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella
Wanting to further distance the party from her father, Marine recommended that the party’s name be changed to National Rally, which was approved in 2019.
Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal, was widely considered the heir-apparent. However, considering her aunt too moderate, she defected to Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest in 2022.
Eric Zemmour, a French writer and media personality known for his extreme views on Islam, participating in the 2022 Presidential election helped make Marine look relatively moderate in comparison, which made his presence an asset at expanding the Overton Window, helping her party gain more mainstream credibility.
Marine Le Pen in 2022 had abandoned her support for exiting the Euro, instead supporting a ‘Europe of Nations’, similar to what Charles De Gaulle advocated, but which would reject the supremacy of EU law over French law. Her views on Islam still remained extreme for Anglo-Saxon standards, wanting to completely ban the hijab in all public areas, though she insisted that she was not completely against Islam but against ‘Islamism’.
With Macron being an incumbent who had overseen a stagnant economy, major eruptions of protests over pension reforms and fuel prices with the Yellow Vests, and a chaotic response to Covid, she improved on her 2017 performance and got 43% of the vote.
Marine Le Pen, whilst still the likely Presidential nominee in 2027, resigned the leadership of National Rally in November 2022 in favour of Jordan Bardella, who was only 26 at the time and is 28 today.
Bardella is known as an articulate representative of the party, understanding the issues better than Le Pen, and being the first non-Le Pen to lead the party. He proved a hit with young voters, with him dominating on TikTok reach, and connecting well to the ‘left-behind’ areas of France. Having grown up in the working-class suburbs of Paris, and partially of immigrant origin himself, he represents an aspirational ideal of Frenchness that somebody from the Le Pen dynasty never could.
Having been in large part responsible for the very impressive performance of National Rally in the European elections, with new legislative elections in progress as of 13th May 2024, he could very well win and become Prime Minister. How somebody of his young age would cope with being the second most powerful person in France is an open question, and Macron may indeed be banking on this to blunt the National Rally for 2027 if he stumbles in office.
However, Bardella’s massive popularity with the youth in combination with staunch right-wing politics, being an effective messenger who knows what issues to focus on and talk about, is a refreshing contrast with the depressing picture in the Anglosphere, where each generation seems to be more Woke than the last.
It’s clear that France has turned a corner, from being at the forefront of the 1960s cultural revolution in 1968 to the nationalist right being on the cusp of power. Unlike Italy, where Meloni occupies the Premiership, and even more so Türkiye where Erdogan has remade the nation in his image, the story of National Rally is still one that is open-ended, and has not yet come to power. But the strong European election performance has made it the favourite to win the coming elections, an enviable position compared to the certain shift to the left here in Britain which will have its election in the same month.
Nouvelle Droite’s Metapolitical Influence
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But why was the French right able to do this, when in the Anglosphere each generation gets more culturally left-wing than the last? Why weren’t they beaten down by the ‘anti-fascists’, that have proved an insurmountable impediment in Britain? Why does France have a plurality of its young people NOT Woke?
Whilst the electoral politics matters a lot, it has grown cliché to say ‘politics flows downstream from culture’. Whilst the organisation and perseverance of the French right was impressive, with both Sr and Jr Le Pen’s able to unite the right in a way leaders like John Tyndall and Nick Griffin were not, right-wing nationalist ideas were able to gain respectability in France that they did not gain in Britain, because the right realised its weaknesses earlier.
Alain de Benoist came of age during the Algerian War, of which he was a staunch supporter of the Pied Noirs. A bit like my experience as a Zoomer with the Gamergate/anti-SJW movement, Benoist briefly felt in the early 1960s like the tide was finally going to turn.
But Algeria was lost, and the left ramped up victory after victory.
Alain de Benoist watched the May 1968 protests with a sense of despair and nihilism that the average young Anglo feels during Pride Month, an overwhelming show of your enemy’s domination over the culture. It was beyond clear that the left had won the culture war, the dreams of a turning point dashed; they had the youth on their side, the institutions on their side, and society seemed predetermined to get more and more left-wing on the cultural front.
This was more powerfully shown in France than anywhere else in the West. For instance, the right in America was still able to console itself that they were still the ‘Silent Majority’, proven by Richard Nixon winning the same year with a majority, albeit smaller, of young boomers, which in the long-term led to complacency and the erasure of that ‘silent majority’ through elite brainwashing..
But in France, the right got the shock it needed earlier. The positive of being at ‘absolute rock bottom’, and knowing the public is NOT on your side, is that it can make you see things clearly. De Benoist, rageful and resentful at the left’s victory like we are today, nevertheless understood the need for a long war of attrition. It would take patience, and would not happen overnight, but in order to have a hope of winning, the cultural right needed to be as committed to its ideals and willing to dedicate their life to them as the cultural left was.
De Benoist established the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) in 1968, developing highly sophisticated philosophical work on the same level as the intersectionality and postmodernist movements did on the left. This was the beginning of Nouvelle Droite (French New Right), a distinct political philosophy which did a great deal to influence the course of right-wing politics on the continent.
Unlike the American right at this time, which expended a huge amount of its time and political capital on Christian fundamentalism, the French right knew where it wanted to go in the late 1960s. In France, you get a result of a ‘Right’ that did what people like Sam Francis and Jared Taylor recommended they did, and focused on demographic concerns first and foremost.
The Nouvelle Droite saw itself as 'Gramscianism of the Right’ (2). Like the left frequently does with language, and unlike the Anglophone right that simply feels rage about this, the Novelle Droite knew how to manipulate language to its own ends, and was immediately willing, from the late 1960s, to fight fire with fire.
There is nothing inherent about right-wing politics that means that it must be dominated by the ‘chuds’, and must be less intellectual than the left. The fact that the right is so outnumbered in terms of ‘elite human capital’ in the Anglosphere is a result of bad strategy and bad choices, that have ensured half a century of metapolitical defeat. Whilst the American Woke left was normalising the terms ‘marriage equality’ and ‘gender affirming care’, the Nouvelle Droite was talking about ‘ethnopluralism’ and ‘indigenous Europeans’.
What was also interesting about the Nouvelle Droite and Alain de Benoist was that they would deliberately ‘counter-signal’ others on the right to gain a hearing from the mainstream, for instance when he defended Muslim women wearing the hijab, unlike National Front, under the ‘right to difference’, as well as adopting many ‘left-coded’ talking points.
Many Anglophone right-wingers criticise this as the Neocon Cycle, with
chiding for being an ‘inverted hicklib’. But the Nouvelle Droite was able to do this effectively, and very much not fall into the Neocon Cycle, because their ideas were at their core anti-egalitarian, going to the absolute root of the egalitarian and universalistic ethos of Christianity, which led to universalistic notions of ‘human rights’.But as is the case with all successful right-wing movements, the Gulen Movement/Erdogan in Türkiye, CasaPound/Berlusconi/Giampolo Pansa and Brothers of Italy in Italy, there needs to be a metapolitical side and a directly political side. The metapolitical side ‘counter-signalling’ the political side helps maintain their separation in the eyes of voters. Whilst Alain de Benoist and GRECE were adjacent to National Front, their distance proved an asset as it meant the cultural left could not focus on a single target, allowing these ideas to diffuse through the society.
And whilst it is difficult to pinpoint ‘the moment’ when these ideas started having an effect, they definitely did influence French, and European, society. Many of the talking points of the Nouvelle Droite, with its emphasis on national identity, ethnic pride of Whites, and direct democracy as opposed to the traditional fascist authoritarianism, have informed a great part of right-populist rhetoric in Europe today; having allowed these ideas to gain young followers. The French right has also had artistic pull, publishing books like ‘The Camp of the Saints’ and ‘Submission’, which in large part owe their influence to Nouvelle Droite.
There were divides within Nouvelle Droite, with Guillaume Faye breaking with De Benoist over the issue of Islam, which Benoist was more tolerant of. Faye wrote the book ‘Archeofuturism’ which is a classic of ‘Reactionary Modernism’ that I consider characterise Anglofuturism as being a form of. But the splintering of the movement in the French case in a way showed it’s intellectual vibrancy, and how their ideas had gradually diffused into the culture.
Walt Bismarck and
I believe are playing a similar role, albeit not the same as the Nouvelle Droite in their ideology, to the metapolitical strategy that the ND utilised in France, of creating a high-brow intellectual movement that can tactically counter-signal.Ideology of the Nouvelle Droite
I’ve talked a lot about their long-term strategy, but what exactly are the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite?
Along with Paleoconservatism and the work of Jared Taylor and American Renassiance, the Nouvelle Droite (ND) was one of the major influences on the Alt Right movement. In the modern Dissident Right its influence has declined, but it is still popular in Europe.
The ND believes in ethnopluralism, and values ‘global ethnic diversity’. It is against globalism and the doctrine of ‘human rights’ as it sees it as a quest by global capitalism to homogenise the unique tapestry of cultures. Hence the word ‘globohomo’, a twin meaning of US-led promotion both of homosexuality and cultural homogeneity.
Utilising the deconstructive method and metapolitical discourse, it turns leftist logic on its head, by presenting native Europeans as ‘indigenous’ and ‘aboriginal’, and calling the left racist against Whites. It makes this plausible by supporting anti-colonial movements like Arab nationalism in the name of ‘right to difference’. This chimes in well with a Gaullist nationalist perspective, and indeed you could see Marine Le Pen particularly compare herself to various nationalist leaders like Putin and Modi.
The ND is also against Christian morality, seeing it as the precursor to ideas of universal human equality and ‘sameness’, and desires to return to native European Paganism with a Nietzschean ethic.
They are very into Conservative Revolution thinkers, particularly Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola (less focused on by the Dissident Right, that focuses on Carl Schmitt), Nietzscheanism, thinkers of the New Left like Gramsci, and elements of postmodernism.
The ND is self-consciously anti-conservative and anti-reactionary, and instead desires to create an ‘alternate modernity’, something I have expressed support for in favour articles like this one. This anti-conservative standpoint can be seen in National Front/Rally, and it is one of the things that distinguishes it from the Italian Brothers of Italy.
It counter-signals the right almost always, sometimes sincerely, and sometimes as a metapolitical strategy. The Nouvelle Droite is additionally somewhat anti-capitalist, with De Benoist famously saying he’d rather live under communism than eat ‘hamburgers in Brooklyn’ (of all of the bad things about American culture, you choose a yummy hamburger… I suppose Drag Queen Story Hour was inconceivable at that time, in which case support for Soviet communism as the lesser evil would be 100% justified.)
These ideas continue to be very influential on the continent, though over there they compete with Hazonyite ‘National Conservatism’ and ‘Fortuynism’. In the Anglosphere, their ideas have declined since the mid 2010s with the end of the Alt-Right and rise of the more Christian and Elite Theory-driven ‘Dissident Right’.
might be a prominent Anglosphere figure who subscribes to it, though Ireland is an oddball Anglosphere country that in many ways is closer to the continent.French Nationalist Right and British Nationalist Right Compared
It’s important to analyse the reasons why the French nationalist right succeeded and the British nationalist right failed.
It is true that the First Past the Post system presents a disadvantage to British upstart parties. Whilst the two-round system isn’t as favourable to this as PR, the lack of the ‘spoiler effect’ allows parties to consolidate bases of support without being blamed for being spoilers.
But the First Past the Post system for domestic elections did not stop UKIP from becoming a successful electoral vehicle, managing to push the Conservative Party to the right and winning European elections in 2014. Indeed, the BNP did manage to gain 6.3% of the vote in the 2009 European election in Britain.
One reason is that in France there was a strong ‘Old Left’ tradition that stopped the ‘intersectional’ version of ‘anti-fascism’ gaining as much traction. The French Communist Party (PCF) for a long time was not Woke, and genuinely represented the interests of the French working-class. This continued on for longer than in Italy, as the French Communist Party did not embrace Eurocommunism to the same degree. In Communist lead councils in the 1980s, the PCF implemented anti-immigration policies. The Old Left version of ‘anti-fascism’ was more focused on the threat of fascism to working-class, trade union interests, rather than the obnoxious, pathetic ‘minority-worship’ of the Anglosphere ‘anti-fascist’ movements.
The left was also divided on issues like Islam, with the Old Left being consistently secularist, which allowed the nationalist right to make inroads as the ‘intersectional coalition’ was not able to form, as there were enough leftists that were against it.
In a country like France, which as a republic has a strong ‘left-nationalist’ tradition, is easier to promote nationalist policies than in a country like Britain, where nationalism is associated with the Monarchy that leftism is antithetical towards (even though the mass of the Labour Party liked Queen Elizabeth II, even those on the left).
The British nationalist right also could never quite shake the perception of being made up of thugs. In the 1970s the National Front (NF) was tied between the ‘respectable’ members linked to the Powellite ‘Monday Club’ in the Conservative Party, and the Neo-Nazi fringes led by John Tyndall. The British NF fractured when Tyndall was deposed, yet took a large amount of the membership with him to form the BNP. The BNP under Nick Griffin would abandon the open Neo-Nazism and start to move in a direction similar to Jean-Marie Le Pen, but too many of the BNP were still in-thrall to ‘copy and paste’ Nazism, that was only thinly disguised in the 2000s. Nick Griffin also lacked the charisma and prestige to be able to keep the BNP together, leading to its fracture by 2010.
The factors I have mentioned are largely ones outside of our control, but the biggest difference that the movement has control over was the attention to metapolitics that the French nationalist right showed. By understanding they’d badly lost the culture war early, the French right was able to adopt the right strategy for a long war of attrition, in which they gradually managed to turn their position around.
There were figures like this in Britain, chief among them Jonathan Bowden. Jonathan Bowden is a hugely underrated figure, that I have called the ‘British Sam Francis’. He was associated with the BNP but was always more high-brow than them. Bowden was heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Droite and attempted to start a think-tank, ‘New Right’. ‘Right Now’, a publication running from 1993 to 2006, was somewhat more successful, a type of right-wing publication that would be good to revive.
However, all in all the British nationalist right, at least so far, has had a preference for hooliganism as opposed to serious thinking about ideas, which is a large reason why it fell flat.
What We Can Learn
The chief thing to learn from the French Nationalist Right is the importance of metapolitics. Winning will be a long road; it will take perseverance and patience, but recognition of your marginal status can inspire you to take effective action. Whilst it did not happen overnight, the Nouvelle Droite was at least partially able to counteract the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’ that happened in the Anglosphere, making the ‘Nation of 68’ actually far less in thrall to it.
What I would recommend is that the British Right develop a consistent ideology, and develop sophisticated publications. We are very badly lacking on this front. I am not talking about ‘normie-facing’ publications like The Critic and UnHerd, but more exclusive journals and think-tanks like GRECE or Chronicles Magazine in the US. Be unafraid to tackle the subject of race, but do it in an intelligent way, metapolitically using the counter-signal and definition-change to be more persuadable to normies, though the ‘anti-fascists’ are dedicated and will throw everything they can at you. I will be doing some future articles on how to neutralise ‘anti-fascists’ and stop them from controlling our culture.
The transformation of the National Front from the limited appeal of Jean-Marie to becoming a major political player under Marine and Jordan Bardella, shows that messaging, populist rhetoric, appealing to people in areas where they already agree with you, and keeping the cranks who will roleplay Hitler away, does pay dividends. However, it is important to respect Jean-Marie for getting that crucial 17% base from which his daughter could build off, and that British movements at the same time failed to do. Nigel Farage probably could have gotten the same amount of support that he did if he’d been more radical, and despite my support for him this election, deserves a large part of the blame for why the British right is so tame in comparison to the continent.
However, most importantly is the work of the Nouvelle Droite and Alain De Benoist. Whilst electoral politics is good, we need to fight a metapolitical war, not just say ‘politics is downstream from culture’ and then do nothing. We need to have a very strong sense of what we believe and why we believe it, offering a distinct alternative vision to that of the left, that we will be as willing to dedicate our lives to as they dedicate theirs, and be prepared to play a long game.
A
article recently published, that is unfortunately behind a paywall so I will be exploring many of its ideas in my own words in the coming weeks, was titled ‘Don’t Get Angry at Woke, Get Even’ and the experience of France shows us that it’s possible, that one day the young will be on our side, and it will be the Woke that will be forced to the margins of society.Bibliography
Simmons, H. G. (1996). The French National Front: the extremist challenge to democracy. Routledge.
Bar-On, T. (2013). Rethinking the French new right: Alternatives to modernity. Routledge.
A thought from your article: You mention how the National Front was successful in part by using those to their right to seem more reasonable. This strikes me as a good idea but there may be difficulty in straddling the line between the more extreme right being a buffer that makes you look good and a anchor that drags you down vis a vis guilt by association.
Great article on the evolution of The French Nationalist Right. We definitely need more emphasis on the metapolitical within the Anglosphere ‘Dissident Right.’