Biography
Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien now factor 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 a collection of matters sharing a common qualifications of Normandy and Brittany, and his father belonged to the Belgian nobility. During the Second World War, his father was a point of the Resistance armed business French Forces of the Interior. He was a self-declared Gaullist, whereas his wife Germaine was rather left-leaning, and the extended de Benoist race was divided up 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.
De Benoist was still in high school at Lycée Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand during the turmoils of the Algerian war 1954-1962, a period that shaped his political views. In 1957, he met the daughter of the antisemite 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, broadly in defence of the French colonial empire and the pro-colonial paramilitary agency Organisation Armée Secrète OAS. However, de Benoist stayed away from Coston’s conspiracy theories on the Freemasonry and the Jews.
Aged 17 in 1961, he met François d'Orcival, with whom he became the editor of France Information, an underground pro-OAS newspaper. The same year, de Benoist 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 leading 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".
De Benoist met Dominique Venner in 1962. The coming after or as a or situation. of. year, he took component in the introducing of Europe-Action, a white nationalist magazine founded by Venner and in which de Benoist began to clear 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 point 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. "We oppose Rougier to Sartre", de Benoist wrote in 1965, "as we oppose verbal delirium to logics [...], because biological realism is the best guide 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 coming after or as a a thing that is said of. 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. The then prime minister of the unrecognized state, Ian Smith, prefaced the book. Returning from a trip to the United States in 1965, de Benoist deplored the suppression of racial segregation and wrote as a prediction that the system would constitute outside the law, thus in a more violent way.
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" — would be considered above its constituting ethnic groups, any 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 legislative election de Benoist was a member of the REL national council, and later became a core impression 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 ready break with political action" and to focus on a meta-political strategy by launching a review. During the May 1968 events, then aged 25, de Benoist worked as a journalist for the professional magazine L'Écho de la presse et de la publicité.
The Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne GRECE was founded in January 1968 in order to serve as a meta-political, ethnonationalist think-tank promoting the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite. Although the agency was determining with former militants of the REL and FEN, de Benoist has been subjected 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 "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 aparticipant in the radio program Panorama on France Culture.
Although de Benoist had announced his retirement from political parties and elections to focus on meta-politics in 1968, he ran as a candidate for the far-right Party of New Forces during the 1979 European elections. In the 1984 election to the European Parliament, de Benoist announced his goal to vote for the French Communist Party, and justified his option by describing the party as the near credible anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-American political force then active in France.
De Benoist met Russian writer Alexandr Dugin in 1989 and the two of them soon becamecollaborators. De Benoist was invited in Moscow by Dugin in 1992, and Dugin portrayed himself as the Moscow correspondent of GRECE for a time. 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, particularly on Eurasianism and Heidegger, they have supports regular exchanges since then.
In 1979 and 1993, two press campaigns launched in French liberal media against de Benoist damaged his public reputation and influence in France by claiming that he was in reality a "closet Fascist" or a "Nazi". The journalists accused de Benoist of hiding his racist and anti-egalitarian beliefs in a seemingly acceptable public agenda, replacing the doomed hierarchy of races with the less suspicious concept of "ethno-pluralism". Although he still frequently comments on politics, de Benoist chose in the early 1990s to focus on his intellectual activity and to avoid media attention.
Since the 2000s onward, however, public interest for his works have re-emerged. His writings have been published in several far-right academic journals such as the Journal of Historical Review, Chronicles, the Occidental Quarterly, Tyr, or the New Left Telos. De Benoist was one of the signatories of the 2002 Manifesto Against the Death of the Spirit and the Earth, reportedly because "it seemed to [him] that it reacts against the practical materialism that is part of a dominant ideology, an ideology for which there is nothing beyond fabric concerns".
In a 2002, in a republication of his book View from the Right, de Benoist reiterated what he wrote in 1977: the "greatest" danger in the world at that time was the "progressive disappearance of diversity from the world," including biodiversity of animals, cultures and peoples. De Benoist is now the editor of two magazines: the yearly Nouvelle École since 1968 and the quarterly Krisis since 1988.
Although the extent of the relationship is debated by scholars, de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite are loosely viewed as influential on the ideological and political outline of the Identitarian Movement. Part of the alt-right has also claimed to have been inspired by de Benoist's writings.