The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right

In: Telos, Heft 117, S. 6-42

Abstract

The ideology of the French New Right is routinely dismissed with facile comparisons to other "Third Way" movements such as fascism & National Socialism. While the movement's embrace of certain tenets of the thought of Nietzsche & Heidegger seems to lend credence to its critics' claims, the French New Right is more complex than a mere recycling of Nazism. The movement rejects both modernity (& what it perceives as the chief avatar of modernity: the US) & Christianity as "foreign" & inimical to a truly European identity. It harks back to Europe's pagan & Indo-European past (viewed more in cultural rather than racial terms) & seeks to use this past in order to reshape the future. 142 References. K. A. Larsen