Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 18
More particularly, he believed that paganism is a rooted and differentialist
religion (“the logic that ‘everyone is to remain where they belong’ ”) and
a solution to a “mixophile” and leveling universalism.5 This aspect is key
in Faye’s thought. He was close to the pagan trend within GRECE and
participated in the Oath of Delphi, first delivered in 1979 upon the initia-
tive of Pierre Vial, then General Secretary of GRECE. The oath was taken
in Delphi, in front of the Stoa in the presence of several European pagan
and radical activist members of GRECE: it declared the promise made by
these activists to fight for European identity.
From the end of the 1970s, Faye became a promoter of the strategy
of “metapolitics.” His first text on this dates from 1978, ten years after
the foundation of GRECE,6 and eight years after he became a member
of GRECE. After the failure of the attempt of entryism within the Figaro
Magazine, he continued to promote this strategy, also after his return to
activism in the late 1990s. He was not, however, the founding theoretician
of this strategy, which is consubstantial from the birth of GRECE in 1968.
The founders of GRECE— of whom Guillaume Faye is not one7— wanted
from the beginning to insist on this point; metapolitics is the essence of
GRECE.8
As a result of intellectual and financial disagreements with Alain de
Benoist, Faye was marginalized within GRECE. As a result, he left the or-
ganization in the spring of 1987. He distanced himself from the activism
of the New Right to focus on his work in the media. In parallel to his activ-
ities in the press (using his own name or pseudonyms), he hosted a show
on a large French radio station on which he entertained his listeners with
hoaxes and a provocative spirit. Between 1991 and 1993 he also took part
in a general- interest program broadcast by a French state channel. And he
also claims to have acted in pornographic films. He published three books
intended for the general public. Finally, he wrote stories for comic strips,
something that he had already started doing in 1985. Since at the time he
was not hostile to homosexuality and transsexualism, he wrote for a mag-
azine on homosexuality, where, in the name of paganism, he often praised
teenage homosexuality.9
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He went back into politics in 1998 after writing Archeofuturism
( L’Archéofuturisme), a key book published by L’Æncre, a major publisher
of the French radical Right; it was followed by the publication of The
Colonization of Europe ( La Colonisation de l’Europe) in 2000. He became
more involved with the activities of various radical Right networks. He or-
ganized conferences with sympathizers of GRECE, with supporters for the
restoration of the monarchy in France, with young Catholic traditionalists
and with neopagans. In 2000 came the attacks by Alain de Benoist and
his sympathizers, who accused Faye of racism. This was an unfortunate
time for Faye and his publisher L’Æncre: following the publication of The
Colonization of Europe, they were both sued for incitement to racial ha-
tred. At the request of de Benoist, Faye was finally ousted from GRECE in
May 2000 by an assembly of executive members. Subsequently, Faye be-
came involved in nativist circles, participating in the group Terre et Peuple
(Land and People), founded by former GRECE members Pierre Vial, Jean
Mabire, and Jean Haudry, until he was expelled in 2007 following the
publication of his book The New Jewish Question ( La nouvelle question juive).
Guillaume Faye’s thought
Intellectually, Faye was a member of GRECE and who is hard to catego-
rize. He did not feel the nostalgia for the völkisch. He did not share the
interests of the theorists of the “Integral Tradition” such as Julius Evola
or René Guénon, in pagan esotericism or in any attempts to reinvent
pagan cults. He was neither reactionary nor modern since “traditions
are made to be redacted, absorbed, selected; since so many of them are
carriers of the viruses that are going wild today. As for modernity, it
probably has no future.”10 On the contrary, he insisted on the need to
restore the term “archaic” to its original meaning as the foundation,
the beginning. According to Faye, archaism is different from an attach-
ment to the past because it is not a historical counterrevolutionary re-
gression.11 In fact, Faye believes that his thinking is not “antimodern”
but “nonmodern.” He views those who are antimodern and
counterrevolutionaries as constructs that reflect modernity and share
the same biases, including a linear conception of time, even though he
defended, following Nietzsche, a spherical conception of time.12 Faye is,
thus, halfway from the “culturalist” and “biological” currents of GRECE.
He was strongly influenced by French postmodern philosophers and
sociologists, in particular Michel Maffesoli. As mentioned earlier, he
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Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism
95
participated in the dissemination of an identity that was both cultural
and biological. Unlike most activists of the radical Right, he is not hos-
tile to hypermodernity and the liberation from morality, to which he
devoted two books: Sex and Ideology ( Sexe et idéologie) in 1983, and Sex
and Deviance ( Sexe et dévoiement) in 2011. In 1983, he wrote that in a
pagan society the coexistence of different sexualities (including sexual
asceticism, orgiasm, debauchery, deviance, homosexuality) is permitted
because they correspond to highly structured social functions.13 His
conception of sexuality was “liberated,” “pagan.” It went against the
sanctimonious discourse that dominated the Right and acted as the
carrier of a cultural revolution, undermining the foundations of the
Christian ethic. More particularly, this liberated but highly structured
form of sexuality was a catharsis from the rules of an extremely rigid so-
ciety, which controls “the reproduction of the species and the transmis-
sion of progeny.”14 This, as we will see, was a vital issue for him. Thus,
sexual freedom facilitates the acceptance of an authoritarian regime.
His first books, published in the beginning of the 1980s, were both
a critique of consumerist society and a rejection of the standardization
and Westernization of the world.15 This is one of his major intellectual
constants. In the early 1980s he defended a radical differentialism to
the point of calling for the return of non- European immigrants to their
civilizational area since the right to difference, according to him, was the
dismissal of the multiracial society as one that is “multiracist.” He also
condemned multiculturalism and what he called “ethnomasochism.”
In the 1990s, he made his discourse even more radical, writing that the
cultural struggle of the Right activist remains the defense of European
ethnocentrism.16
Like some leftist theorists, in particular those of the Frankfurt School,
; Faye believes that Europe has been colonized by American values. His
subsequent dismissal of the US firmly situated him in the revolutionary-
nationalist current, even though he also dismissed nationalism in favor
of European nationalism. This influence can be found in his geopolit-
ical views, his early condemnation of the “American- Zionist Axis,” and
proposed alliance with Arab regimes, in particular Ba’thists. In 1985, he
believed that there were Zionist “opinion circles” in France that prompted
French governments to break ties with the Arab regimes, which he viewed
as France’s natural allies. Moreover, he defended the idea of taking action
against “Zionist lobbies” in the US that wished to influence the global ge-
opolitics that supported the state of Israel.17
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After his comeback to the political arena, however, Faye reversed his po-
sition: he now supported Israel and the US against the Arab and Muslim
world. In fact, he became an important ideologue of nativism with a ve-
hemently anti- immigration and anti- Islamic discourse in the name of
defending the ethnic interests of Europeans. Since the late 1990s, he has
championed a racialism that is reminiscent of the 1900s to the 1930s. He
has made references to “loyalty to values and to bloodlines.”18 As a fol-
lower of the “right of blood,” he hopes for a natalist and eugenic campaign
favoring high birthrates for ethnic Europeans. He has defined ethnocen-
trism as the mobilizing conviction that is specific to long- living peoples
and the idea that where one belongs is central and superior, and that
one must preserve one’s ethnic identity to endure the course of history.19
He has also adopted the Darwinist theme of the “struggle for survival”
and the law of the fittest, considering other civilizations as enemies to
be eliminated.20 For Faye, this racial Darwinism must promote European
ethnocentrism as the source of world civilization.21 By his own admission,
the books that he published upon his return to political activism were an
appeal to the “ethnic awareness” of Europeans who must defend their bi-
ological and cultural identity in order to preserve their civilization in the
course of history.22 Faye has developed the idea that non- European mi-
gration (African, Arab Muslim, and Asian) is colonizing Europe through
high birthrates among these ethnic groups: for him, what is at work is
an ethnic substitution. Islam has undertaken the conquest of Europe to
impose its values, which are contrary to those of European paganism,
while the supposed greater delinquency of young migrants is only the
beginning of an ethnic civil war (here we find the ethological idea of war
over territory).23 If his current discourse is a complete reversal from his
positions in the early 1980s, when he called for an European- Arab alliance
to fight against US hegemony, he still condemns the Americanization of
morals through culture and food practices as eroding the identities and
sovereignty of Europeans, substituting an American mythology and im-
aginary for those of Europeans.24 Yet he has recognized that the US is
not the “main enemy.” For Faye, the adversary is made up of “alien non-
native masses colonizing Europe, their collaborators (foreign states or a
fifth column) and Islam.”25 The transformation of his thinking is evident.
Finally, Faye also wishes to quell liberal democracy in order to confront
the “convergence of catastrophes,” to use the title of one of his books, which
he wrote using the pseudonym Guillaume Corvus.26 He believes that the
Western countries are threatened by various perils: a cancer spreading
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Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism
97
across the European social fabric, demographic decline, the threat of a
chaotic South, the global financial crisis, the rise of religious fundamen-
talism and in particular Muslim extremism, the ethnoreligious clash be-
tween North and South, and the worsening of uncontrolled pollution. To
avoid civilizational and ecological collapse, he proposes putting in place
an authoritarian regime under the auspices of a “born chief,” a dictator
defined as a providential man who knows how to take the right decisions
in emergency situations, knows how to set his peoples in motion, and
protects his peoples’ identity and ancestry.27 Yet, if there is a risk of ecolog-
ical disaster, he does not believe, unlike radical environmentalists, whom
he has qualified as “naïve,” in an endangered nature. Rather, he argues
that only humanity is endangered, since the Earth will be able to recover
from the climate upheaval.28
An increasingly discussed body of work
Faye has maintained long- standing links with various groups and figures.
As early as the 1980s, his work was translated into Italian, German, and
Spanish, thus in countries where there is a long- standing tradition of
New- Rightist and revolutionary- nationalist groups. Several of his books
were translated between 1980 and 1985: The System to Kill the Peoples,
The New Consumer Society, New Ideological Issues, and Little Lexicon of the
European Partisan, coauthored with the Belgian activists Pierre Freson and
Robert Steuckers.29 His articles were also translated in the German and
Italian versions of Elements and New School. During this first period, Faye
participated in university symposia in Greece30 and in Belgium.31 He even
taught the sociology of sexuality at the University of Besançon, France.
But above all, he has spoken at conferences organized by European New
Right groups. During his media period, he abandoned these activities.
Nonetheless, his first books and articles in this new period continued to
be translated and discussed not only by European activists but also by
American activists of the movement that was later called the “Alt Right.”32
His reputation grew abroad after his return to politics. In the begin-
ning, between 1998 and 2006, he renewed his links with the nativist mi-
lieux of GRECE and nationalist- revolutionary networks. He participated
in meetings and symposia organized by the activists of “Eurosiberia,” a
sort of federal empire bringing together the peoples of the “white race” in
Europe and in North America, organized in 2005 in Spain, and in 2006
in Russia. In Spain, he found himself alongside some very radical activists
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on the margins of Nazism, including Italians such as Gabriel Adinolfi, and
Germans such as Pierre Krebs (whose work he translated and published
in German in the 1980s), Andras Molau, and Ernesto Mila. In Russia, he
once again stood alongside Pierre Krebs, the Spaniard Enrique Ravello, the
Frenchmen Pierre Vial and Yann- Ber Tillenon, former executive members
of GRECE; the Greek Eleftherios Ballas; the Ukrainian Galina Lozko; and,
finally, the Russians Vladimir Ardeyev, Anatoly Ivanov, and Pavel Tulaev.
The goal of these meetings was to put in place a
structure to defend the
“future of the white world:” the Council of the peoples of European origin,
bringing together German, Austrian, Spanish, Flemish, French, Italian,
Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Walloon, and Quebecois splinter groups.
Subsequently, during an international conference on “The Future of the
White World,” which took place in Moscow in June 2006, Faye proposed
an alliance between Eurosiberia and all the white peoples of European or-
igin. He referred to the “notion of Septentrion” to create “ethnospheres,”
namely “groups of territories ruled by peoples who are ethnically related.”33
This concept is based on the idea that the “ethnic foundations of a civiliza-
tion rest on its biological roots and those of its peoples.”34 He has, there-
fore, become an important figure of “national- westernism.” This idea was
taken up and discussed by the Alt Right website Counter- Currents.35 In
the light of this white supremacism, it is not surprising that Faye is fre-
quently cited in the American neo- Nazi website of the Racial Nationalist
Library, alongside the French revisionists Robert Faurisson and Maurice
Bardèche;36 since 2006 he has taken part in the meetings of the American
Renaissance association.
During this period, there were more translations of Faye’s work, which
became closely linked to its vehemently anti- Muslim and anti- Islam con-
tent. His most important works in this second period were in English,
published by Arktos Media, a radical London-
based publisher with
links to the Alt Right; they included Archeofuturism, The Colonization of
Europe, Why We Fight, The Convergence of Catastrophes, Sex and Deviance,
and Archeofuturism 2.0,37 all of which were also translated into other lan-
guages.38 These works have been reviewed on the website and publications
of Counter- Currents. However, the publication in 2007 of The New
Jewish Question caused a split with his older friends who were usually
anti- Semites: the revolutionary- nationalist Europeans and nativists from
GRECE considered him to be overly “Zionist.” His nonhostile positions
toward Israel and Judaism prompted both Holocaust deniers and Catholic
traditionalists to dismiss him.
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Finally, Fayes’s views were also discussed in Telos, a journal that came