Guillaume Faye: History of Ideas

In the fall issue of the reactionary Austrian quarterly Abendland, former left-wing radical and current Catholic-conservative German journalist Werner Olles published a eulogy to Guillaume Faye disguised as a review of a completely different book. Nils Wegner, author of the right-wing alternative publishing house Jungeuropa, wrote the following correction to several points of that Faye eulogy, which was rejected by the magazine and subsequently published on the Jungeuropa website. Translated and slightly amended by the author.

Originally published on Jungeuropa here.

Translated by Nils Wegner

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The interest in the extra-parliamentary right that has emerged since 2015 has brought about a rejuvenation, as well as a further diffusion of “the Right.” Even after nearly 80 years, it remains difficult to discern a “general line.”

This makes the ongoing struggle over terminology and interpretations for our situational analysis all the more valuable. The appreciation of this relentless process of refining and sharpening our grasp on reality is likely the aim of the critiques penned by seasoned “scene” author Werner Olles with his signature “charming modesty.”¹ These critiques, appearing irregularly and infused with subtle self-irony, admonish the “molting” of conservative minds, the “right-wing populist psychodrama,” or, more recently, a “hamster wheel of illusions” in which “the New Right” exhausts itself. Olles belongs to an ever-shrinking group of authors whose biographies include radical leftist formative years and their subsequent overcoming, much like the late important Carl Schmitt scholar Günter Maschke. From those bygone times, he is well acquainted with the significance of criticism and self-criticism as “self-evident guiding principles.”² However, the contribution quoted last is somewhat ambiguously phrased, hopefully not obscuring its evidently good intention to encourage the younger generation engaged in right-wing political theory—specifically referencing Benedikt Kaiser, Jungeuropa, and their title Die Konvergenz der Krisen (“The Convergence of Crises”).

A Roundabout Approach

What Werner Olles presents in his ostensible book review after three paragraphs on the topic is actually about a page of grievances regarding contemporary Europe, followed by a denunciation of “the New Right” as emotionally detached from the fears of “older citizens” concerning ethnic displacement. Finally, he promotes the life and work of French publicist Guillaume Faye (1949-2019). We shift from discussing a Realpolitik-oriented theory contribution to a neoreactionary fantasy that literally emerged as ideological superstructure for a science fiction short story.³

This represents a categorical error—akin to the proverbial “comparing apples and oranges.” After all, Faye's work on what he predicted as the “Convergence of Catastrophes,”⁴ to which Olles refers, not only lacks a German translation. It was published in its original French under the pseudonym Guillaume Corvus—at the behest of the Parisian publisher—back in 2004. Thus, it originates from an almost entirely different world than our own. This is evidenced, among other details, by his prediction of an escalation in global HIV transmission, which has not materialized.

The unnecessarily stark animosity of “Kaiser vs. Faye” as a front for “Old vs. Young” harms all parties involved, including readers, whose potential for gaining insight regrettably remains limited. However, one cannot easily derive criticism from Olles celebrating an old guard thinker of non-leftist European nonconformism and suggesting his reading. After all, we all stand on the proverbial shoulders of giants, and rightly so; there is no need to reinvent the wheel of ideology. Werner Olles himself fondly remembers his time in Frankfurt as a driver for Karl Dietrich “KD” Wolff, chairman of the Socialist German Students' League, and Hans-Jürgen “HJ” Krahl—the chief theorist there—to whom he dedicates obituaries to this day; his own postulates “till the final victory of the world revolution!”⁵ not so much, which is understandable.

The Case of Guillaume Faye

Similar to Olles, Guillaume Faye himself began (1970-1986) with a “radical” phase as a member—not a co-founder (as Olles falsely claims)—of the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), founded in 1968. This think tank was the nucleus of what the hostile French mainstream media would soon label⁶ Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”), with Faye establishing himself as an author and speaker, earning recognition as the second major theorist behind GRECE founder Alain de Benoist. However, it is little known or quickly forgotten that Faye's rapid rise was significantly aided by his status as a protégé of Italian journalist Giorgio Locchi (1923-1992), an éminence grise within early GRECE. Locchi's exegesis of Nietzsche and reverence for antiquity laid the groundwork for all significant writings by Faye, especially the later⁷ ones. Apart from Locchi's influence, Faye's theoretical writings—far less original than Olles suggests—were based on GRECE's typical blend of classical anti-liberal thinkers (such as Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, or Julien Freund) with unorthodox leftists (like Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze or the former neo-Marxist, later culturally conservative U.S. historian Christopher Lasch) that is still cultivated by late-ordained GRECE scholars such as Alexander Dugin. During that time, Faye was just as vehemently anti-American as he was anti-Zionist and welcomed the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.

In this context, Faye's abrupt departure from GRECE in 1986—along with his immediate distancing and angry critique of the organization and Benoist personally—comes across as unintentionally comical. It is evident that GRECE did not “effectively dissolve in 1986,” as Olles seems to mistakenly assert; it exists to this day and played a significant role in establishing successful younger organizations, notably the Iliade Institute founded in 2014. It is true that following a daring yet spectacularly failed entrist maneuver—wherein friendly journalist Louis Pauwels had invited several GRECE leaders into newly founded Le Figaro Magazine’s editorial team to counterbalance the left-liberal Nouvel Observateur, triggering furious attacks by the formerly rather indifferent mainstream press on the alleged “crypto-Nazis”⁸—there was indeed a general exodus of “careerists” from GRECE starting in the early 1980s. Faye, once one of the staunchest advocates for Antonio Gramsci-inspired metapolitical strategies aimed at achieving “cultural hegemony,” then deemed this approach refuted by reality and consequently distanced himself from the entire New Right—whose defining characteristic remains its metapolitical objectives (not an ostentatious distancing from “National Socialist” elements, as is often claimed)⁹.

A Questionable Role Model

While Faye and others hoped to find a livelihood within Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, Benoist increasingly distanced himself publicly from this party and its leader—whom he had always openly considered an idiot. Thus, a rift with the “careerists” was inevitable, accompanied by mutual accusations.

However, due to his widely known radical positions, Faye was denied a political career as well—a fact that triggered his publicly staged renunciation of any politics in 1986 along with his substantive 180-degree turn. He subsequently immersed himself energetically into cultural mainstream media for ten years as an entertainer at hip-hop radio station Skyrock and on France 2’s breakfast television while working as a print tabloid journalist (advocating for greater “visibility” for homosexuals and transgender individuals among adolescents from an explicitly anti-Christian neo-pagan perspective) and—as he claimed—also as a pornographic actor¹⁰. In this way, the “arrogance and ignorance” towards this alleged “outstanding intellectual” attributed to Benedikt Kaiser specifically and “the majority of the New Right” by Olles transforms into healthy skepticism regarding unreliable fellows when contextualized appropriately.

This became even more clear when Faye in all seriousness returned to GRECE in the late 1990s after growing dissatisfied with limited opportunities within said mainstream media. His return was marked by publishing L’Archéofuturisme in 1998—a work that generated considerable attention within his milieu. Faye organized events with neo-pagans as well as traditional Catholics, monarchists alongside nationalists, or even tribal national anarchists. However, his outline for an “archeofuturist” future rejected all such anti-modernist groups because they continued to acknowledge liberal-progressive linear notions of time. Instead, he proposed transitioning towards a “Vitalistic Constructivism”¹¹ with a “‘spherical’ conception of history,”¹² explicitly borrowing Nietzschean concepts from his GRECE patron Giorgio Locchi.

This new direction found its place precisely during “the end of the End of History,” coinciding with U.S.-led Western aggression against the Arab sphere of influence, when Faye published La Colonisation de l’Europe, provoking a new, this time definitive break with Benoist and GRECE due to its biological determinism. Subsequently, he attempted to establish himself as chief ideologist for the cultural association “Terre et Peuple” (a circle composed of renegades from GRECE and Front National)—publishing his work on “the Convergence of Catastrophes” in this context. However, he made himself so unpopular there with his pro-Zionist screed La Nouvelle Question juive (“The New Jewish Question”) published in 2007 that he thereafter published solely as a solitary figure. Anecdotal evidence may not hold much weight; however, it speaks volumes that Karlheinz Weißmann—a recognized expert on Nouvelle Droite and colleague of Werner Olles at liberal-conservative weekly Junge Freiheit, who surely is beyond reproach regarding any “radicalism”—expressed concern to me in Autumn 2013, due to a misunderstanding, about whether I had indeed attended a lecture by Faye because he considered him “completely insane.”

The Long Dream of Empire

In this light, Olles' designation of Faye as “the true father of the ‘Identitarian Movement’” unnecessarily severs any actual traditional strands of this historical movement. Faye's role in sharpening European understandings of identity did not stem from an entirely novel vision, but rather represented a “fresh” rehashing—almost zeitgeist-driven—of what had already been extensively laid out half a century earlier by “old right” thinkers.

For while a much younger Werner Olles concluded his anarchist pamphlet with an appeal to “bite fascists,”¹³ those very “fascists” had long been preoccupied with geopolitical realignment—a matter that Olles unfortunately misrepresented in his eulogy for Faye as “visionary sketches [of an] expandable theory of counter-revolution” by the latter. As early as 1964, industrious Belgian Jean-François Thiriart had published his manifesto Un empire de 400 millions d’hommes l’Europe (“Europe: An Empire of 400 Million”), projecting a “Euro-Soviet empire” stretching “from Dublin to Vladivostok.” This phrasing was so striking that Alexander Dugin—who collaborated with Thiriart towards the end of the latter's life and emulated many of his positions—elaborated on it extensively in his 1997 work Основы геополитики (“The Foundations of Geopolitics”). It is indeed remarkable that Dugin’s book—which marked his ideological shift away from “National Bolshevism” towards “Eurasianism”—was released just a few months before Faye’s oddly similar L’Archéofuturisme. It is even more noteworthy that Olles himself instinctively draws connections between Faye as Thiriart’s epigone and Dugin’s daughter, Daria.

Thiriart was in turn heavily influenced by mysterious neo-Spenglerian U.S. cultural philosopher Francis Parker Yockey¹⁴ who had already articulated such visions against petty nationalism—which could easily be overwhelmed by both Americans and Soviets—in his pseudonymously published foundational text Imperium back in 1948:

The sole hope of success Iies in the intensity and thoroughness of the accomplishment of the first stage, the victory, in the significant minds, of the Imperium-Idea. No force within the Civilization can then resist the Cultural Reunion which will unite North and South, Teuton and Latin, Protestant and Catholic, Prussia, England, Spain, Italy and France, in the tasks now waiting.¹⁵

In the subsequent 12 years leading up to his unnatural death, Yockey endeavored toward vigorous yet ultimately largely futile international networking among various organizations promoting a “Third Way” amidst Cold War tensions. His close ties with West Germany's Socialist Reich Party and German Reich Party converged ideologically with Thiriart’s efforts in attempts at founding a pan-European nationalist movement. The intellectual legacy of these so-called Euro-fascists bears resemblance to Alain de Benoist's notorious later provocation¹⁶:

Some cannot accept that one day they might have to wear Red Army caps. A truly unpleasant prospect! We, however, cannot tolerate even thinking about spending our remaining days eating hamburgers around Brooklyn.

This statement was made in the context of suggesting that violent Soviet subjugation could foster a resistance spirit and facilitate Europe's rebirth, whereas the poison of Western liberal consumerism would ultimately corrode everything:

Every dictatorship is vile; every downfall even more vile. Dictatorship can kill us individually tomorrow; however, downfall obliterates our chances for survival as a people.

An Old Story

Ultimately, the entire intra-right dispute reveals itself once again—simply put—as one between culturalists versus essentialists (among other vectors, via “compatibility”).¹⁷ This division will likely persist for some more time, despite rapidly shifting front lines due to global phenomena such as wars in Ukraine or Gaza—favoring, nota bene, the convergence of crises rather than that of catastrophes. The internal struggle merits being waged openly rather than through straw men or crocodile tears over alleged insensitivity toward seniors encircled by foreigners. It may also be prudent to postpone such discussions until later, as the late Günter Maschke—an acquaintance of Olles'—famously stated:

Not because there were no differences, but because the wrong people are demanding it—and furthermore, one should not do so in front of our common enemy.¹⁸

The issues at stake have persisted for decades; thus, it remains uncertain when this vicious cycle of bickering will come to an end—hopefully soon.

1. Siegfried Bublies, “Werner Olles zum 80. Geburtstag: ein sozialpatriotischer, ein sanfter Reaktionär,” Wir selbst, accessed 12/21/2024, https://wir-selbst.com/2022/09/12/werner-olles-zum-80-geburtstag-ein-sozialpatriotischer-ein-sanfter-reaktionar/.

2. Lorenz Erren, “Selbstkritik” und Schuldbekenntnis. Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 146.

3. Cf. Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (London: Arktos 2010), 57. Consequently, only this story—without the theoretical decoration—has been translated into German and published as a novella; cf. Guillaume Faye, Ein Tag im Leben des Dimitri Leonidowitsch Oblomow: Eine Chronik aus dem Zeitalter des Archäofuturismus (Dresden: Jungeuropa 2020).

4. Cf. Guillaume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes (London: Arktos 2012). In general, Faye's continuous talk since the late 1990s of catastrophes as a basic prerequisite for the chiliastic idea of redemption that he propagates represents the maximum version of a “D-Day mentality”, the determinism of which Benedikt Kaiser quite rightly criticizes in his book and from which “Identitarian” representative Martin Sellner, for example, regularly explicitly distances himself.

5. Werner Olles, “keine amnestie für die justiz,” agit 883 2, Nr. 62 (06/05/1970): 14. The first public programmatic declaration of the left-wing terrorist German Red Army Faction (RAF) was printed in the same issue of this anarchist journal, which is why it was indexed (i.e. legally banned from distribution) in West Germany.

6. In fact, the great tragedy of this diffuse school of thought, which has long since spread throughout Europe and beyond, begins with the fact that the “right-wing” label was successfully imposed on it from the outside and accepted internally almost without contradiction, while it persistently described itself as Nouvelle École (“New School”) in the sense of a way out of the right-left dichotomy.

7. Cf. the concise appraisal in Faye, Archeofuturism, 19, as well as passim in his other late works from the end of the 1990s on.

8. Cf., among others, Alain de Benoist, Mein Leben: Wege eines Denkens (Original title: Bibliographie 1960-2010) (Berlin: Junge Freiheit 2014), 176-183. It is remarkable how much this process would prove to be a less miserable prefiguration of the West German farce surrounding the three-headed “New Democratic Right” some 15 years later, in which the neoconservative authors Rainer Zitelmann, Ulrich Schacht, and Heimo Schwilk attempted to exert influence within the Axel Springer media complex.

9. The significant rejection of reactionary fantasies of a restoration of the monarchy, the long-lost colonial empire, and other relics of the 19th century, which began to take hold in France in the early 1960s around eminent multi-activist Dominique Venner, cannot be dealt with here. It is hoped that Benedikt Kaiser's book on “the New Right” and the right-wing adaptation of Gramscism, which has been announced for the end of 2024, will provide some clarification.

10. Cf. Stéphane François, “Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism.” In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, 91-101, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford University Press 2019), 93.

11. Cf. Faye, Archeofuturism, 56 et seqq.

12. Cf. Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos 2011), 160 et seqq.

13. Werner Olles, “beisst die faschisten …,” agit 883 1, no. 24 (07/24/1969): 5.

14. Cf. Kerry Bolton, Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey (London: Arktos 2018), 557-566, and Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia 1999), 541-551. If you don't want to rely on the anarchist Coogan's analysis, consider that a traditionalist stylite addressed and criticized Yockey's and Thiriart's idea of Europe, which was later adopted by Faye and Dugin, by naming names in 1953 already; cf. Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions 2002), 240.

15. Ulick Varange (i.e. Francis Parker Yockey), Imperium. Vol. II (London: Westropa Press 1948), 275.

16. Both quotes taken from Alain de Benoist, Die entscheidenden Jahre: Zur Erkennung des Hauptfeindes (Original title: Orientations pour des années décisives) (Tübingen: Hohenrain 1982), 87 et seqq.

17. The recent retrospect François Bousquet, Alain de Benoist à l'endroit: Un demi-siècle de Nouvelle Droite (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie 2023) will certainly help to clarify this and other misunderstandings.

18. Günter Maschke, “Mit der Jugend damals wurde diskutiert,” Junge Freiheit 15, no. 35 (08/25/2000), 3.