Alain De Benoist Popular Books

Alain De Benoist Biography & Facts

Alain de Benoist ( də bə-NWAH, French: [alɛ̃ də bənwa]; born 11 December 1943), also known as Fabrice Laroche, Robert de Herte, David Barney, and other pen names, 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, namely 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. 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, 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.... Discover the Alain De Benoist popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Alain De Benoist books.