page_title: Alain de Benoist
section_title: Radical political activism (1962–1967)
hierarchical_section_title: Alain de Benoist / Biography / Radical political activism (1962–1967)
caption_attribution_description: English: Federal government photograph of Ian Smith, then a Member of Rhodesia and Nyasaland's Federal Parliament, circa 1954. Smith was later Prime Minister of Rhodesia from 1964 to 1979.
context_page_description: Alain de Benoist, also known as Fabrice Laroche, Robert de Herte, David Barney and other pen names, is a French journalist and political philosopher, a founding member of the Nouvelle Droite, 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 rights of man, 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.
context_section_description: De Benoist met Dominique Venner in 1962. The following year, he took part in the creation of Europe-Action, a white nationalist magazine created by Venner in which de Benoist started 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, and he probably began to read Louis Rougier's criticism of Christianity at that time. 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, "like we oppose verbal delirium to logics [...], because biological realism is the best support against those idealistic chimeras". De Benoist continued his journalistic career and 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 in 1965 the 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 that was ruled 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, de Benoist deplored the suppression of racial segregation 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 in 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 idea of GRECE after 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 March 1967, — 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, then aged 25, de Benoist worked as a journalist for the professional magazine L'Écho de la presse et de la publicité.
caption: Ian Smith, then the president of Rhodesia, prefaced de Benoist's 1965 book Rhodésie, pays des lions fidèles.
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