page_title: Nouvelle Droite
section_title: United Kingdom
hierarchical_section_title: Nouvelle Droite / Beyond France / United Kingdom
caption_attribution_description: English: Symbol of the National-Anarchist Movement
context_page_description: The Nouvelle Droite, sometimes shortened to the initialism "ND", is a far-right political movement which emerged in France during the late 1960s. The Nouvelle Droite is at the origin of the wider European New Right.
  The Nouvelle Droite began with the formation of Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, a French group guided largely by the philosopher Alain de Benoist, in Nice in 1968. De Benoist and other early GRECE members had long been involved in far-right politics, and their new movement was influenced by older rightist currents of thought like the German conservative revolutionary movement. Although rejecting left-wing ideas of human equality, the Nouvelle Droite was also heavily influenced by the tactics of the New Left and some forms of Marxism. Particularly influential were the sociocultural ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, with ND members describing themselves as the "Gramscians of the Right". The ND achieved a level of mainstream respectability in France during the 1970s, although their reputation and influence declined following sustained liberal and leftist anti-fascist opposition.
context_section_description: The Nouvelle Droite also developed a presence in the United Kingdom, where the term "New Right" was more closely associated with the Thatcherite policies introduced under the Conservative Party administration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Britain's far right first collaborated with the Nouvelle Droite in 1979, when a GRECE delegation met with the League of St. George in London. It was claimed that the meeting went well, although there was no further collaboration between the groups. The Nouvelle Droite's ideas were pursued in a more sustained way in Britain when far right activist Michael Walker launched the National Democrat magazine in 1981, renaming it The Scorpion in 1983. Walker had been a senior member of Britain's fascist National Front, and believed that the latter party had failed to achieve its goals because it had neither engaged with culture nor won over intellectuals to its cause. He felt that the Nouvelle Droite thinkers could aid the British far right by challenging two of its "sacred cows": biological racism and conspiracy theories. In his publication, Walker produced translations of some of De Benoit and Faye's writings. During the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Walker co-organised several conferences with a group called Islands of the North Atlantic (IONA), which was led by Richard Lawson; these conferences were attended by Nouvelle Droite figures like De Benoist.
   After Walker left Britain for Cologne, his role as promoter of the Nouvelle Droite in Britain was taken on by Lawson, who launched the meta-political magazine Perspectives in the early 1990s; this was re-launched as Radical Shift in 1997, but remained uninfluential. In the mid-1990s, some hard right Conservatives co-operated with members of the fascist British National Party (BNP) to establish the Bloomsbury Forum, a self-described "New Right" group based in Bloomsbury which modelled itself on GRECE. After Nick Griffin took over the BNP in 1999, he reformed it in a manner closely based on the French National Front and thus influenced by the Nouvelle Droite. In certain ways Griffin's BNP remained distinct from the Nouvelle Droite, however, for instance by not embracing the latter's wholesale rejection of Christianity. The terminology of the Nouvelle Droite, in particular that surrounding "ethno-pluralism", has also been adopted by the British National Anarchist Troy Southgate.
  The Identitarian Movement UK launched in 2017 espouses the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite citing Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist as inspirations.
caption: Nouvelle Droite ideas have influenced the National Anarchist movement (logo pictured), established in Britain by Troy Southgate
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