Family of the House de Benoist 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
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) 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, public interest for de Benoist's works have re-emerged. His writings have been published in several far-right journals, such as the
Journal of Historical Review, Chronicles, the
Occidental Quarterly, and
Tyr, and the
New Left academic journal
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 material concerns". In a 2002 republication of his book
View from the Right, de Benoist reiterated what he wrote in 1977 that 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 generally viewed as influential on the ideological and political structure of the
Identitarian movement. Part of the
alt-right has also claimed to have been inspired by de Benoist's writings. ==Political views==