Net Gains and GUD Reactions: Patterns of Prejudice in a Neo-fascist Groupuscule

Published in, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 1999), pp. 31-50.

Professor Roger Griffin Department of History Oxford Brookes University Gipsy Lane Campus Headington Oxford OX3 0BP

The scholarly neglect of the groupuscule In the summer of 1997 we decided to dissolve Nouvelle Rsistance and to work as a fraction both in and out of the Front National using the names Rsistance and Jeune Rsistance. Since this time we have also worked alongside a student action group, called the Groupe d'Union et de Dfense (GUD). 1

The speaker is Christian Bouchet, leader of a small group of French ideologues and activists dedicated to the `struggle against the New World Order'.2 His organization is one of the hundreds of radical right groupuscules which have appeared in the Western world since 1945, the majority of which have had tiny memberships, meagre resources, and short lives. They have thus fallen through the wide-meshed sieve mostly used by academic sifting through primary materials relating to political organizations.3 Students of the contemporary radical right4 are generally much more at home researching chunky and readily documentable objects such as those constituted by

electoral parties which have formal structures, programmes, mass memberships, and a discernible impact on historical events. Thus, while there is no shortage of specialist studies of the Front National, the Republikaner, or `right-wing populism' in general, the monitoring of extremist groupuscules is left in most countries to dedicated anti-fascist organizations, such as Searchlight in Britain and the Centre de Recherches, d'Informations et de Documentations Antiracistes in France.5 Books which probe into the murky habitat in which they thrive tend to be written either by journalists6 or insiders who have seen the democratic light,7 rather than by professional academics.8 The premise of what follows is that the traditional academic neglect of the world of the groupuscule may have led to a distorted perception of some important aspects of the post-war ultra-right. Certainly it would be difficult to justify the time and resources needed to embark on an in-depth empirical investigation of a particular formation, unless, that is, one of its members had committed an outrage such as the Oklahoma bombing. Yet taken together as the myriad components of an entire political subculture they may add up to a significant phenomenon, one which cannot be given the attention and importance it deserves as long as the historical imagination is dominated by the principal form which revolutionary nationalism aspired to assume in the inter-war period, notably the >armed party= combining a paramilitary elite and a mass electoral base which found its most complete manifestation in the PNF and the NSDAP. As a step towards grinding a heuristic lens appropriate to investigating the `groupuscular right', this article proposes to focus on the `student action group' which Bouchet refers to so fleetingly, namely GUD.9 Once the broad outline of its operational history, ideological stance, and organizational linkages are established it will be possible to draw some tentative conclusions

about what species of political animal it represents in the menagerie of the radical right.

Brief history of GUD The Groupe Union Droit, soon renamed Groupe d'Union et de Dfense, was born out of the ashes of Occident, a French paramilitary nationalist group dissolved in 1968. A primarily campus-based organization,10 its immediate task was to combat the university communist and anarchist groups riding high on the wave of student power in the late 1960s. For the last three decades its existence has been precarious. In 1969, in the aftermath of the `Events of May' a year before, it averaged 10% in university elections held in Clignancourt, St. Maur, Nanterre, and Assas, and functioned as the student branch of one of the most prominent ultra-right groupings, Ordre Nouveau. ON was eventually banned at the end of 1973, but only after it had left an indelible mark on France=s post-war history earlier that year by creating the Front National to fight the legislative elections. In the wake of the ON=s disappearance GUD entered a period of decline, which was aggravated further when in 1974 it lost some of its natural constituency to Le Pen's newly created Front National de la Jeunesse (FNJ) (not to be confused with the Front de la Jeunesse created by the Ordre Nouveau). Its ineffectiveness as a revolutionary force was underlined when in December 1980 GUD activists (>black rats=) carrying out a commando-style raid on leftists at the Nanterre campus were routed by hundreds of students, leading to one of their number being injured and others arrested. A few months later GUD disbanded as an interuniversity grouping, and even its bastion at the Arras campus was near to extinction. What revived GUD's fortunes unexpectedly was the `hot' period of student politics which started in 1983 when various shades of right united in a strategy of `National

Coordination', i.e. a campaign of mass protests against the Savary Law11 in particular and Mitterrand's `socialist' government in general. Another factor which helped create the right climate for a right-wing backlash was the growing respectability of Le Pen's Front National, which by the early 1980s was regularly taking 10% of the vote in local elections, and considerably more in its strongholds in the Marseilles region. Working in association with nonuniversity radical right groups such as Troisime Voie (born of the fusion of Mouvement Nationaliste Rvolutionnaire and a section of Parti Forces Nouvelles), GUD began establishing a high profile in the campuses of Lyon, Lille, Montpellier, and Clermond. The same period saw the appearance of local nationalist groups and the rise of the nationally organized Restauration Nationale, a revival of Maurras' famous royalist and anti-Semitic Action Francaise which flourished between the 1890s and 1936 when it was dissolved. By 1988 radical right groups were achieving 5-10% in university elections instead of the 0.3% in the early 1980s, and at Assas GUD created Union et Dfense des tudiants d'Assas (UDEA) as its legal and electoral front organization. However, the increasing prominence of the FN in France's political life was threatening to eclipse all the more radical groupings of the right, and in the 1991 university elections UDEA gained a mere 167 votes out of the 17,588 registered. In order to survive, GUD, which in 1977 was still attacking the FN for compromising with the hated parliamentary system, had no choice but to become one of its auxiliaries.12 As its (reputedly charismatic) leader Frdric Chatillon, whose son=s god-father is no other than Jean-Marie Le Pen, put it `we help the Front because otherwise there would be just a handful of us'. By the 1990s its militants were training alongside those of the FNJ in an estate in the Oise belonging to one of the FN's regional counsellors. In

1993 Renouveau tudiant Parisien (REP) was formed to replace the Cercle National des tudiants Parisiens (CNEP) whose president had once been Le Pen. This was part of a wider FN strategy to forge links with or infiltrate the groupuscular right so as to recruit future party cadres. One of REP's first actions was to regroup the GUD and FNJ and coordinate their activities. The reciprocal nature of this association can be seen from the fact that, according to the Contre Tout Intgrisme Website, GUD's own journal, Les Rprouvs, which in the mid-1990s was serving up standard Third Positionist topics with a special emphasis on `negationism' (Holocaust denial) and anti-Semitism, had helped radicalize the FNJ. In this period GUD was still collaborating with other groups to the right of the FN such as Rsistance and Unit Radicale (an alliance of l=Union des Cercles Rsistance, and Jeune Rsistance). Such overlaps between the radical and extreme right can sometimes be embodied in a single person, as when Gildas Mah joined both GUD and FNJ at Assas as a student, and went on to play a role in the FN. Despite efforts to keep GUD going, which included a number of commando-style >actions=,13 reforming it under its original name Union Droit in autumn 1995, and working in close association with Renouveau tudiant (the student branch of the FN), it had practically become defunct by 1996. It was the input of energy from a new cohort of Revolutionary Nationalist students which gave it another lease of life. By 1997 they felt sufficiently strong to return to groupuscule status. In October 1998 it was renewing its traditional campus activities: violent attacks on militant Jews (nicknamed >le Btard=), leafleting in the faculties and streets of Paris, publishing its own newspaper (see appendix 2), and carrying out raids on the headquarters of left-wing student organizations (though it avoided violence at the Assas campus, its traditional bastion, in the hope of being allowed to have its own premises once more). One of its leaders

claimed in December 1998 that >GUD is thus being reborn from its ashes and seems to have a future independent of all political parties.= He went on to stress that >We are not in the good books of other nationalists. Since we hate the games played by politicians, we have situated ourselves outside the mle. The groupuscular logic we adopt is the corner-stone of all revolutionary action: the concept of the active minority.=14

GUD activism Child of the 1960s, a period of intense political polarization and extra-system violence both left and right in a number of Western countries but particularly in France, GUD has operated on more than one front. By taking part in elections and participating in mass demonstrations alongside other rightist groups within the highly politicized world of French student politics, it has maintained a pseudo-democratic presence. However, its true nature, symbolized in the black rat which it adopted as its logo, often displayed in its literature alongside the Celtic cross of international fascism, is revealed in two main areas of activity. One is in the war of words against the hegemony of liberal and socialist ideas which it has fought on campuses through posters, stickers, and fliers, both in the run-up to university elections and as part of campaigns on special issues such as the Savary Law. Nor has GUD been averse to making symbolic gestures, such as defacing leftist notice boards and posters, or displaying the Celtic cross and singing Nazi songs at a class given by an FN lecturer. The ideological position underlying its propaganda will be considered shortly. But it owes its notoriety as an extremist group less to words than to deeds, some of the more notable of which can be summarized in a brief curriculum vitae. GUD played a conspicuous role in the mass anti-socialist demonstrations of May 1983

against the Loi Savary, but it rose to even greater prominence when political violence flared up once again in academic life a few years later. On 27 November 1986 it joined some 200 other extremists in an attack on leftist protesters as they marched past the Assas faculty: over 60 were injured in the ensuing street fighting. Within days a similar episode had occurred in Lyon, and hitsquads made up of neo-fascist skinheads and militants of GUD (in general GUD regards skinheads as too anarchic and anti-intellectual to be regarded as reliable allies), the Mouvement Nationaliste Rvolutionnaire, and other right-wing groupuscules (some of them linked to the `moderate' UNI) had carried out sorties against leftists at the Jussieu and Sorbonne campuses in Paris, as a result of which one student beaten with an iron bar was permanently paralysed. Some idea of how seriously GUD also took its role as a cadre-forming organization in this period can be gathered from the fact that in 1986 it joined Jeune Garde (the youth section of TV) in running a training camp for revolutionary nationalists in the Pyrenees. In 1987 GUD activism in the capital reached its peak. Its members not only took part in five street demonstrations by the extreme right, but joined forces with FNJ and UNI militants in commando-style `raids' and publicity stunts on six faculties. The preferred target of its violence was the radical leftist student organization Pour un syndicalisme autogestionnaire (PSA). In the run-up to the university elections of December GUD activists orchestrated the sacking of the PSA office at the Assas faculty, and were responsible for a number of physical attacks against its members. Since the late 1980s GUD's strength has been on the wane, largely due to the growing success of the FN. Nevertheless, when in 1992 the FN revived the Vichy Festival of Joan of Arc in a mass rally held in the Place des Pyramides in Paris, GUD demonstrated once more its gift for

self-publicity when 50 of its members marched behind the Italian Fascist flag in the company of the AF, the Association Ptain Verdun, and the L'Oeuvre Franaise,15 all militant radical right groups. In 1992 >gudards= also took part in a demonstration against Euro-Disney chanting >death to Marxists and capitalist Jews=. Between 1993 and 1995 GUD still made its presence felt, attacking leftists at Tolbiac and Paris, disrupting an anti-fascist meeting, assaulting antifascist journalists, (one at the book stand of the neo-Nazi Ogmios publishers), and carrying out `raids' at UNEF, Sorbonne, Jussief, Montpellier. It also took part in anti-American demonstrations, and helped FNJ militants occupy a local radio station. Some GUD activists even volunteered to fight in the Croatian army during the Yugoslav civil war. Though by 1998 it was no longer in a position to instigate street violence single-handed, membership of GUD had reestablished itself as one of the main radical right groupuscules operating in France which offered an outlet to the violent impulses of racially motivated right-wing students and ideologues seeking ways to attack `the system'.16 As such it was well placed to take advantage of the window of opportunity which unexpectedly opened up for the extreme right when the FN, whose success had kept it in the shadows for so long, entered a protracted period of internal strife in the course of 1988. As Reflex, France=s equivalent of Searchlight, explained, the continuing crisis over whether Le Pen was suitable to continue as its leader or should be replaced by Mgret, persuaded some of France=s more radical national revolutionaries that the time was right to join forces and woo the more fascistically inclined FN members over to their cause. Sensing that a potential decline in the fortunes of the electoral radical right might vacate the political space for a

resurgence of the extra-parliamentary right, Christian Bouchet decided to relaunch the magazine Rsistance and to broker a formal agreement between his Cercle Rsistance and members of the reactivated GUD to collaborate in promoting each other=s cause while retaining a separate identity. One concrete result of this strategy was that >at the FN May Day demonstration last year [1988] a joint GUD-Rsistance leaflet was warmly received by young people and a joint dinner for activists was organized at the fascist bookshop L=ncre, in Paris...The national revolutionaries also used the FN=s annual festival at the end of September to strengthen links with radical elements in the FN=.1 By December 1998 various factions had joined forces to form Unit Radicale to take the battle with the anti-fascist left into the streets. It was the emergence of this new political conjuncture in France=s far right which formed the deeper rationale to GUD=s liaison with Bouchet=s ACercles Rsistance@ to which he alluded so cryptically in his interview with National Revolutionary Faction quoted at the outset of this article.

The ideology of GUD GUD activism is informed by a permutation of neo-fascism variously known as `National Revolutionary' or `Third Positionist' (in French `tercriste'). `National Revolution' emphasizes the idea of an anti-systemic revolution from the right which draws on an organicist conception of the nation, though one which frequently expresses itself not in a narrow chauvinism and xenophobia, but in the conception of Europe as a homogeneous cultural entity subsuming a variety of differentiated ethnies. The term >Third Position= alludes to the rejection of both
1

Searchlight, no. 283, January 1999, 20-1.

capitalism and communism in the name of a `Third Way', a national socialism which, though antiSemitic, avoids the distortions of Nazism, namely its ethnocentric nationalism, its retention of capitalism, and its Hitler-cult _ Third Positionists often celebrate Gregor and Otto Strasser as representing the `true' spirit of Nazism. This stance is summed up in the subtitle of the Third Positionist publication The English Alternative, `beyond capitalist greed and Marxist servitude', and even more tellingly in the reference to `the Death System which operates out of Washington, Moscow and Tel Aviv'.17 What makes Third Positionism a form of neo-fascism is the way it duplicates the structural matrix of all fascist thought, namely the vision of a rebirth (palingenesis) of the nation (in this case as part of a wider European process of regeneration) in a new order which will put an end to the decadence of the prevailing liberal democratic system and the threat posed by communism.18 In the late 1980s, when GUD activity was at its height, a number of its fliers were reproduced by its arch-enemy PSA in their dossier Droite extrme et Extrme droite en milieu universitaire, a compilation of data about the extreme right-wing groups which were invading French campus life at the time. The dossier was intended to persuade university and state authorities to take more draconian action to stop their campaigns of violence and intimidation. A sample of the propaganda GUD was producing in this period is provided in the appendix. The second sample is an attack on globalizing multi-culturalism made in the pages of its newspaper Le Rongeur Masqu. The title is a pun which combines the French for to chew, a reference to the >gudard= nick-name, the Black Rats, with an allusion to the masked >lone ranger= of Cowboy TV fame. In the light of the definition of fascism just offered, what stands out immediately is the

centrality to GUD's thinking of a palingenetic myth of national decadence and renewal. It attacks parliamentary democracy (1.33-7), liberal egalitarianism (1.36), and Marxism (1.4-14), along with materialism (1.13; 1.29-30), one-worldism (2.?) and cosmopolitanism (2.). As other tracts published in the PSA dossier make clear, GUD intends to counteract these forces, all of which were identified as decadent by inter-war fascism, through a Nietzschean reawakening of the force of the `spiritual', and presents a programme of revolutionary nationalism, which is conceived as laying the basis for a post-liberal new order. This is clear from the fact that GUD conceives of the nation in an organic, and hence deeply illiberal way as a `community of destiny', a phrase used by the Nazis (Schicksalsgemeinschaft).19 Taken together, the two pieces show that GUD aspires to regenerate France by turning it into a `genuine' national community based on ties of history, land, and blood, its culture having been purged of foreign (including Jewish) influence under a political regime run by a spiritual elite freed from the constraints and corruption of parliamentary democracy. Yet this is no nostalgic or mimetic fascism: GUD claims that `We are revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, while remaining resolutely modernist'.20 There is no reference to interwar fascism or any of its heroes, such as Hitler, Mussolini, Jos Antonio, or Codreanu. Instead there is repeated stress on Europe, conceived not as the Europe of Maastricht, but as the heartland of Indo-European culture (1.44-54) _ the allusion to Dumzil (1.46), a specialist in uncovering Indo-European (or what it is now unfashionable to call `Aryan=) mythology, is revealing. The aspiration to a Europe of (ethnically homogeneous) regions or ethnies (sometimes called `the Europe of a thousand flags') is a major theme of post-war fascism.21 Central to Eurofascism until the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the conviction that Europe was caught in

a cultural pincer movement between Communist materialism in the East and American materialism in the West. Hence the references in another leaflet to the crushing effect of the `Soviet-American condominium' (the slogan `against Moscow without Washington')22; and to the threats posed by America both as a military and cultural force (1.15-30). Other leaflets circulating in the 1980s made it clear that GUD has traded in inter-war anti-Semitism for >anti-Zionism=. GUD's success in breaking up a conference on the Holocaust documentary Shoah held at the Sorbonne campus in January 1994 is in any case eloquent enough testimony to its attitude to Jews. The 1998 article, however, displays the profound impact of the New Right=s crusade in the name of >difference=, a form of allegedly anti-racist racism known as >differentialism=.23 A feature of the latest phase of sophisticated (as opposed to vulgar) New Right discourse is that it focuses on attacking the homogenization of global society through such forces as >MacDonaldization=, economic convergence, and the imposition of >human rights= in an apparently pessimistic, apolitical spirit, while implicitly keeping alive for >the initiated= ultraright wing hopes for the >regeneration of history= fed by the likes of Ernst Jnger and Julius Evola. While Europeanism and differentialism are common to neo-fascist discourse, it is the reference to the `struggle against a bi-polar world' and call for `the creation of an axis of mutual interest between Europe and the Third World' which marks out GUD thought as Third Positionist.24 In fact the original flier from which these quotations are taken25 specifically praised three nationalist leaders in `Third World' countries, Mossadegh,26 Nasser,27 Nehru,28 all of whom

took a stand against colonization and international capitalism. It is no coincidence, therefore, if in the 1980s GUD worked in collaboration with another French groupuscule called Troisime Voie, Third Way, another `internationalist fascist' group which proclaims a sense of solidarity with the Arab world. Thus GUD represents a highly modernized and relatively sophisticated version of postwar fascism. Noteworthy in this respect is that the `Basic Principals of the Militant' include the `defence of the environment', thereby ignoring the fact that all genuine ecologically based movements are concerned with the survival of the web of planetary life as a precondition for a sustainable human civilization, and not for specific sections of it. Genuine greens thus have no interest in preserving any particular ethnie, whether cultural or racial, and accounts of the Nazi Blood and Soil movement which depict it as a forerunner of the contemporary `green' movement are revisionist in effect, even if not in intent. Another symptom of GUD's modernization of fascist discourse has already been noted in the context of its differentialist racism, namely its debt to the Nouvelle Droite (ND). This is made explicit when the bibliography which follows the `Basic Principles of the Militant' cites two books by Alain de Benoist.29 However, it should be noted that a vital distinction between ND and Third Positionist organizations such as GUD is that these reject the theory of achieving power solely through the conquest of `cultural hegemony', placing their faith instead in the spiritually enlightened activist prepared to use violence to further the cause. Hence the contempt for pure theory expressed in the English tract on `the political soldier' already cited:

A people oppressed by the Stalinist jackboot or the sick, mind-distorting

techniques of the capitalist salesmen do not want words, rhetoric, over-learned volumes: they want a programme for survival which links their ideals and desires to concrete effective action. A good example of this defective type of thinking is the `New Right' which has rallied writers and intellectuals; which has bought newspapers and magazines with all the persuasive powers that such things entail. Why has the decline of France not been stemmed? Simply, it has forgotten the French people, it has refused to dirty its hands on street politics the lives of ordinary people if you like _ because it is `below' the salons of the intellectuals. Such an attitude is not merely useless, it is utterly contemptible.30

The GUD net The overview of GUD's activism and ideology has already given some idea of the degree to which it is enmeshed in the radical right subculture. If we return to the interview with Christian Bouchet, the leader of Rsistance, with which we started, the vastness and complexity of this interconnectedness is thrown into even sharper focus. Rsistance was formed in 1997 after the dissolution of Nouvelle Rsistance, which had been created in 1991 by former members of Les Tercristes Radicaux (Radical Third Positionists), a faction within Troisime Voie, itself founded in 1985 as a reincarnation of Mouvement Nationaliste Rvolutionnaire, fruit of a merger in 1979 of Groupe d'Action Jeunesse, Lutte du Peuple, and Groupe Nationaliste Rvolutionnaire de Base (GNRB). The latter was formed by a faction of National Revolutionaries active within the Front National and continued to operate `in and out= of the FN. It leader, Francois Duprat, had previously been the leader of Occident and Ordre Nouveau. Another one-time associate of GUD,

Jeune Europe, grew out of a current of Eurofascism that surfaced in France shortly after the Second World War in groups such as Phalange, which was in contact with Otto Strasser's European Popular Movement, founded to realize his Europeanist vision of a fascist continent which he had continued to nurture after the murder of his brother Gregor in the `Night of the Long Knives'. But Bouchet's account of his group's genealogy does not end there. He traces revolutionary nationalism via Dat's Rassemblement National Populaire, Doriot's Parti Populaire Franais, Lamour's Parti Fasciste Rvolutionnaire, Valois' Faisceau (note the absence of a reference to Vichy or Ptainism, which were not fascist), and before that to the fusion of socialism and nationalism in Boulangisme, Blanquism, the French Commune, and, and going even further back, to Baboeuf's Society of Equals and the Leftist current of the French Revolution. The interview with Bouchet also reveals that GUD is in close contact with his group Rsistance, which, is not only, like GUD, in contact with the FN in France, but also with the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) in England, itself a product of the splintering of the National Front after its demise in the late 1970s. Unlike GUD, which does not associate itself with the paganism of >National Revolutionary= groups, NRF is part of the European Liberation Front (ELF) whose other members include Freiheit Volk Bewegung in Germany, Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore in Italy, the National Bolshevik Party in Russia, and the Alternativa Europea in Spain. ELF is represented on a liaison committee along with the American Front, the Canadian Front, and National Destiny in New Zealand. The adverts in issue 8 (1998) of the NRF paper, The English Alternative, shows that it also finds an affinity with such organizations as the US Odinists and Asatru Alliance, the Germanic Heathen Front, the New Zealand Fascist Union,

Canadian and Austrian Third Positionists, Michael Walker's The Scorpion (England's contribution to the European New Right), a Green anarchist based in Oxford, and a Belgian `study group' which is `vigorously opposed to homosexuality, Marxism, and multi-culturalism'. As for GUD's ideological networking, we have seen that it has a profound debt both to the New Right and to a long tradition of anti-Semitism and Eurofascism. Among the `chief ideologues' of Rsistance, with whom GUD collaborates, Bouchet includes such figures as LouisAuguste Blanqui, Georges Valois, Ernst Niekisch, Otto Strasser, Ernst Jnger, Nicola Bombacci, Julius Evola, Ledesma Ramos, Juan Peron, Jean Thiriart, and Alain de Benoist. Meanwhile the National Revolutionary Faction recommends as `essential for the subversive bookworm' texts expounding the distributionist economics of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, the `green' vision of Walter Darr, the national socialism of Gottfried Feder and Otto Strasser, the National Revolutionary ethos embodied in Gregor Strasser, Belgian Rexism, Jos Antonio de Rivera, Corneliu Codreanu, and the visionary thought of such English luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, William Cobbet, and William Morris.

Conclusion: the importance of the `groupuscular right' The presence of William Morris alongside Corneliu Codreanu as the ideological forebear of a Third Positionist group which also praises Qadafhi's Green Book smacks of a postmodernist eclecticism which for some might border on the comic (and which for neo-fascists would be a symptom of the decadent relativism which they have set out to overcome!). It is indeed counterintuitive to devote serious scholarly attention to radical right groupuscules such as GUD, Rsistance, or NRF seriously, given their minute memberships and the generally trivial nature of

their occasional acts of violence committed against the `system', both of which make a nonsense of their claims to be preparing the ground for a `new order' (e.g. by forging a `third way' between socialism and capitalism). This article suggests another way of evaluating their significance, however. Once such formations are seen in the context of their broader historical context and vast network of linkages, they demonstrate clearly that not only did fascism not die in 1945, but that it has mutated significantly to adapt to a post-war habitat, one which, in marked contrast to the inter-war period is, (pace Marxists), profoundly hostile to it. The impact of the First World War was to create conditions in which revolutionary (or `palingenetic') ultra-nationalism, which came to be known as fascism, spontaneously took the form of `armed parties' led by a charismatic leaders and using the techniques of ritual politics and social engineering to convert the masses to a chauvinist, militarist, socially radical vision of imminent national rebirth. By contrast the post-war era became one of relative democratic and capitalist stability legitimated not only by the military defeat of the Third Reich, but by almost universal horror both at its catastrophic impact on untold millions of soldiers and civilians, and at the atrocities mass-produced by the Stalinist travesty of communism. As a result, fascism has been forced either to compromise with parliamentary democracy in the form of the extreme right populist electoral parties, or to renounce paramilitary activism and charismatic politics in another way by focusing exclusively on the need for a `cultural revolution', which is the strategy adopted by the Nouvelle Droite (in particular GRECE) and its emulators all over Europe. A third option has been to retain its revolutionary thrust at the cost of abandoning any prospect of winning mass support or public legitimacy, and hence resign itself to existing solely as a groupuscule.

In a letter to me Christian Bouchet commented that ultra-right groupuscules have two main functions. They are >either a sanctuary for the marginalized and asocial (as is the case of various Nazi groups), or (as is the case of National Revolutionary groups in France) training schools for cadres and think-tanks which develop new strategies and ideas.= He adds that in France >many FN cadres started out in National Revolutionary groupuscules= and >the FN has adopted and refined strategies originally elaborated by NR groupuscules (anti-immigration struggle combined with support for Arab states, anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, winning over the young with modern music etc.)=. However, I would suggest that the ultra-right groupuscule has a third important function. To compensate for its almost total impotence as a mere `handful' of activists in the grand scheme of things, it has rediscovered some of the symbolic significance of the Roman fasces. Just as a wheat-sheaf is stronger than a single straw, so by forging links each minute formation can achieve strength in numbers by being linked to like-minded groups, and so contribute to a cellular, subterranean form of leaderless fascism far removed from its inter-war manifestations. The modern radical right in Europe has internationalized, Europeanized, and now (thanks to the Internet) virtualized itself to create a fine-meshed capillary network made up of multiple nodes of ideological and activist energy. The importance of groupuscules thus lies not in their individual size, but in their interconnections, which, as we have seen in the case of GUD, assume more than one form. Not only will a groupuscule generally have direct connections (and always indirect connections) to other anti-democratic organizations, local, national, and international, but like-minded groups may

well collaborate with each other sporadically to organize campaigns or carry out acts of violence. It is also not unknown for an extra-systemic group to have informal links (i.e. through the activities of individual members or unofficial collaboration) with (a branch or section of) a radical right or centre right mainstream electoral party. As a To complicate matters further, individual members often become activists in the ranks of a groupuscule as part of a long and often tortuous itinerary through (and sometimes beyond) the subculture of political extremism, and might also be members of more than one organization at any one time. Finally, the ideology of a particular group may draw on a range of right-wing precursors and influences which go considerably beyond the narrow parameters of one particular permutation of radical right (e.g. Nazism), whether historical or contemporary. In other words, the radical right groupuscule has an importance disproportionate to its intrinsic strength and immediate impact. In the spirit of Einsteinian, post-structuralist, or Internet cosmologies, it is to be seen, not as a discrete, independent entity, but as a nodal point in a synchronic and diachronic communications network which both conserves and channels the energy/discourse/data of radical right politics. Fascism is thus maintained as an >informatic= structure however hostile the environment. Its adherents can thus continue to be loyal to their cause secure in the belief that when the political climate eventually changes they can come out of hibernation with the fascist world-view intact. The ultra-right groupuscule is therefore to be treated, not as an embryonic, stunted, and hence unviable, version of national inter-war fascist mass parties such as the NSDAP, PNF, or BUF. Rather it is to be pictured as something resembling a component in a computer circuitboard: its function and significance can only be understood contextually and systemically in

terms of its place within the hardware as a whole and the way the software used on it performs. At the same time, every group can be treated as the centre of a vast organizational and ideological network of connections extending from the local to the global, and from the historical to the contemporary. What makes these metaphors misleading is that they do not evoke the dynamic, unstable, and sometimes highly ephemeral nature of the minute groupings that make up so much of the network. Just as the World Wide Web continues to exist even when individual computers and servers are shut down, so groupuscules may disband and reform in new incarnations, their members might come and go, and their Websites31 can become inaccessible just as suddenly as they appear. But the radical right's net, and hence its quest to find a radical alternative to the `new world order' of globalized liberal capitalism, survives. If this analysis is correct, it is clearly wrong-headed to hazard generalizations about the rise and fall, strength and weakness of fascism in the post-war era mainly on the basis either of the electoral fortunes of extreme right-wing parties which insist that they have no intention to overthrow liberal democracy, or of discrete spectacular displays of racist or terrorist violence. Sustaining both phenomena is a radical right subculture which in order to stay true to its palingenetic vision has had to make itself practically invisible as far as a conventional current affairs perspective is concerned, yet which in its atomized form has continued to maintain considerable vitality at both an ideological and organizational level. The danger posed by this `groupuscular right' thus lies less in the sporadic episodes of anti-democratic violence which it manages to stage, than in its success in two key areas. First, it has provided a transmission belt (>training school=) conveying ideology and recruits from the revolutionary radical right to the electoral extreme right. Second, it has created a micro-

environment capable of conserving and nourishing fascist utopianism in a hostile political habitat, and thus maintain a subterranean pressure for the centre of gravity of European politics to stay on the right rather than the left. There is little doubt that structural forces ensure that even the most ideologically and technologically sophisticated forms of fascism will remain marginalized indefinitely in the Westernized world, thus condemning their palingenetic fantasies of post-liberal new orders, new men, and new ages to remain chimeras. Nevertheless, if political scientists want to keep track of the evolution of fascism in the twentieth century this article suggests they should treat each minuscule grouping not as an isolated phenomenon, but as a single component of a collective political force. It is a political force which guarantees that if conditions of profound socioeconomic crisis were ever to emerge again in the West=s democratic heartland to make mass support for revolutionary nationalism a realistic possibility, then many countries would have not only the dedicated cadres prepared to lead it, but a plentiful reserve of ideological resources to fuel it.

APPENDIX: TWO SAMPLES OF GUD IDEOLOGY

GUD bares its soul (flier circulated in 1985)

For those of you who are interested in the actions of our association, here is a brief summary of

our political positions in 5 points: 1 GUD is first and foremost an anti-communist association. This is for numerous

reasons which include the following: We reject: (I) The Rousseauist basis of Marxism, which is egalitarian and utopian because it is based on an erroneous idea of the state and of nature. (ii) Marxist theses which are a century old and are now obsolete. The only merit of Marx which remains is that he concerned himself with the deplorable life situation of the workers of his day. (iii) The idea of class struggle, which foments divisions within the nation. (iv) The one-world and materialist vision of communism, as well as its messianic vision of history which conflicts with ours. 2 But GUD is not `Atlanticist' for all that: quite the reverse. As any true nationalist

should, we must take it upon ourselves to struggle in any way we can against the influence of the USA in Europe. Whether this influence is: cultural. We must in fact reject the materialist American sub-culture as well as the American `way of life' which destroy our culture. We must in particular oppose the building of Eurodisneyland in France. political or military. Europe must refuse to be the 52nd American state. It must refuse the establishment of US bases on its territory and assure its own defence. For the same reason it must refuse to participate in the IDS32 and develop a European technology Star Wars technology. economic and monetary We must reject to dictatorship of the multinationals and of the dollar and monetarism on the Reagan model.

On the domestic front. We are against: (I) corrupt social democracy and the reign of

political parties. (ii) universal suffrage, the tyranny of the masses and the asphyxiation of the true elite. (iii) republican egalitarianism and the rights of man, which we want to replace with the right of peoples to govern themselves. We are in favour of: (i) a policy of national independence based on a reversal of the immigratory flow from outside Europe so that we can preserve our cultural identity. (ii) a real and effective decentralization which has nothing to do with the pseudo-decentralization advocated by socialists which is imbued with Jacobinism.33 4 As far as Europe is concerned: Our will to unify Europe is based on the existence of a

cultural heritage common to all European peoples (cf. Dumzil).34 The Europe we aspire to will be independent of the two blocs35 or it will not exist at all. It will not be the mercantile Europe of the European Economic Community, but a nation united and strong politically, economically and militarily. We refuse to outline what would be the administrative system of such a Europe because that would be nothing but pure fiction, but we will not conceal from you our preference for a Europe of regions. 5 Our action at faculty level. Its goal is the creation of a new university which through

the alliance of justice and efficiency will once more serve the nation. The university must provide the nation with the elites which are necessary for its survival. It is for the university to adapt to the evolution of society.

We have reached the end of this brief overview. If the ideas which we propose to defend correspond top your conception of the way things should be, your place is with us. If not, go on your way.

Dossier: Multiculturalism or Standardization (published in the GUD quarterly Le Rongeur Masqu, No. 1, Autumn 1998)

The cultural paradox. We agree with Lvi Strauss that culture has the paradoxical need both to interact with other cultures and to guard jealously its own characteristics. Understood in this way multiculturalism, which we conceive more in terms of a cultural exchange, is something we approve of. In fact, for such exchanges to be enriching, all it needs is for each culture to preserve its individuality so that nothing can induce a culture to give up its roots (examples are not lacking, for example European mannerism was inspired by Japanese prints). What is now generally understood by multiculturalism is no longer exchanges carried out between civilizations which are productive and conscious of their unique values, but the abandoning of these very values in favour of an American subculture, in favour of the bastardization of the most impoverished aspects of culture, as symbolized by long hair tressed red-indian-style, tom-toms, and a joint. On the other hand the USA, home to a catastrophic ethnic melting-pot, is tending to impose an ersatz culture which would like to replace Wagner and Vivaldi with rap and groove. The unacceptable norm... The establishment through the Gatt agreements of a single cultural norm leads to the uprooting of entires peoples and their loss of vitality. One-worldism is thus essentially the enemy of multiculturalism in the sense that it treats the world as a single human community, while true multiculturalism stems from the existence and celebration of different human communities.

Though they claim they are promoting a richer culture even though all it does is serve up the crudest clichs C rap is not really the fruit of Mandingo culture, but a concoction of US record companies C the promoters of globalization want to impose the standardization of what passes for culture, but which is really the opposite of everything which is enriching. If they ever succeed the cultural exchanges so dear to our intellectuals will have become impossible for the simple reason that the precondition for such exchanges, differentiated cultures, will have disappeared. ...is the carrier of a hegemonic politics. With the imposition of Gatt art and money have never been so closely linked. Whatever we may think of the French cinema, it cannot be denied that the initiative of artists who call for the recognition of the principle of the >cultural exception= has a certain coherence. We must know how to choose our role-models, if that is what we need. In 1992 the former adviser of Reagan, E. Luttwark, asked if the USA were going to become a Third World country: well, in cultural terms there is no doubt that it already is. The visionary Rousseau wrote >these so-called cosmopolitans boast about loving the whole world just so as to have the right not to love anyone.=

ENDNOTES

1. 2.

The English Alternative, no. 9, summer 1998, 4. Ibid., 3.

3.

For a comprehensive survey of the world of the ultra-right groupuscule (as well as larger organizations and fully-fledged parties) in the mid-1980s see C. Maolin, The Radical Right: A World Directory (London 1987). This article respects the distinction legally recognized in Germany between the `democratic' extreme right and the extra-systemic (and hence illegal) radical right. The exception is, of course, Germany, where the state authorities responsible for `protecting the constitution' publish regular bulletins on all anti-democratic organizations. See Website of Verfassungsschutz on the Net FIND. E.g. Michael Schmidt, The New Reich (London, 1993); Paul Hockenos, Free to Hate (find?). E.g. Ray Hill, The Other Face of Terror (London, 1988); Fhrer X find? Exception: Kaplan's book on religious radical right: find? The data which follows are culled from two main sources: first, Droite extrme et Extrme droite en milieu universitaire Supplement to PSA, Letter 52 (Paris, c. 1988); second, the section la Facult provided by the highly informative antifascist Website Contre Tout Intgrisme, Racisme et Fascisme, to be found at http://perso.guetali.fr/home/dnthines/page20.html (28/07/98). A more detailed history of GUD up to 1995 is given by the anti-fascist newspaper Reflex, no. 46, May 1995, pp. 3-5. Campus-based nationalist groupuscules are a feature of the French ultra-right. The principal one between 1960 and 1968 was the Fdration des tudiants Nationalistes which was connected with Europe Action, important for its formative role in the creation of the Nouvelle Droite. In 1972 a schism in GUD gave rise to Groupes d=Action Jeunesse, soon renamed Front des tudiants Nationalistes and linked to Mouvement Nationaliste Rvolutionnaire. Once Troisime Voie broke with GUD it was represented on campuses by the Fdration des tudiants Tercristes, and then by Troisime Voie Universit. Nouvelle Rsistance had its own student group, Rsistance tudiante, that is until it recently merged with GUD. It should be added that GUD has been on bad terms with the centre-right student organization Union Nationale Interuniversitaire (UNI) ever since it was taken over by Gaullists. UNI now operates as the official student branch of the Rassemblement PR? In the mid-1990s an attempt was made to create an umbrella organization for right-wing students called Union Nationale des tudiants de Droite (UNED) which quickly folded. The student branch of the FN is Renouveau tudiant. The `Savary Law' drafted by the Mitterrand administration proposed to abolish state subsidies to private (i.e. Catholic) education, a move which inevitably unleashed a wave of protest from all sections of the right.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Christian Bouchet makes it clear that a similar fate befell his movement Nouvelle Rsistance (NR): `Our main problem was the growth of the Front National, which became very popular amongst industrial workers, poor people and the youth of the lower social classes. So for us it was very difficult to gain new members and keep those we already had.' (The English Alternative, No. 8, summer 1998, p. 4.) It was this crisis which prompted him to dissolve the NR and reform it as Rsistance to work `in and out of the FN'. See Reflex, no. 46, May 1995, p. 5 for a >chronology >of GUD acts of violence between March 1993 and February 1995. Private correspondence dated 10 December 1998. For a sample of OF ideology see Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford, 1995), pp. 370-371. Others are the PNFE, FNE, OF: find full names? Derek Holland, The Political Soldier (c.1989), in Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 360. The centrality of this core myth to fascism arguably forms the common ground of the new consensus on its definition which has been gaining ground over the last decade: see Roger Griffin, International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus, (London, 1998). It ironical that GUD, an `anti-Zionist' organization, invokes the name of Renan, who used the term `community of destiny' to characterize the Jewish people's extraordinary capacity to survive in adversity. Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 362. See R. Griffin, Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of The European New Order 19221992, Humanities Research Centre, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1993: available on the Web at find? Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 362. See also Pierre-Andr Taguieff, >Sur la Nouvelle Droite=, op.cit., pp. 92-106; `The New Right's View of European Identity', Telos, Nos. 98-99, Winter 1993-Fall 1994, pp. 99-125 Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 361. Basic principles of the Militant. (Booklet published in 1987 by Groupe Union Dfense/Union Dfense des tudiants) Mohamed Mossadegh (1980-1967), the president of Iran 1951-53 who nationalized the oil industry and nearly toppled the Shah.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Gamal Abdel Nassar (1918-1970), president of Egypt 1956-1970 who brought the Suez Canal into national ownership and set up the United Arab Republic (1956-1970) Jawaharial Nehru (1889-1964), India's first prime minister (1947-54). Vu de droite and Les ides l'endroit. Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 360. There is now an extensive `virtual fascism' which only exists on the Web, a vital feature of which, apart from their imperviousness to censorship, is the extensive use made of hyperspace links to related Websites. It is a centreless network of propaganda and information which mirrors the cellular network of leaderless cells created by some terrorist groups devoted to what is know in Italian as `spontaneismo'. The whole spirit of virtual and leaderless fascism is in marked contrast to the organizational forms adopted by inter-war fascism which was highly visible in public space and dependent for its success on the leader cult (which underlines the need to define fascism in terms of ideology and ultimate objectives rather than style). For a tour of the latest far-right offerings of the virtual radical right see Hate on the Net Find address?. Initiative de Dfense Stratgique, in other words the USA's Strategic Defence Initiative, colloquially known as `Star Wars'. A reference to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution which instituted the Terror in the name of safeguarding the purity of revolutionary populist values. Georges Dumzil, specialist in Indo-European mythology (a subject dear to the New Right) and author of L'Idologie tripartie des Indo-Europens (1958). I.e. the Soviet and the American blocs, or spheres of influence.

32. 33. 34. 35.