Suchergebnisse

As its starting-point this article situates the new reactionaries controversy in relation to recent intellectual debates on the alleged national crisis of confidence in France's political and social models. The political ideas of Marcel Gauchet and Pierre-André Taguieff, two of the leading figures named by Daniel Lindenberg, are examined here to illustrate some key theoretical questions concerning the historical processes which have led to the current crisis, and the possible directions in which France could move in the future. Neither Gauchet nor Taguieff deserves to be labelled as a reactionary in the sense implied by Lindenberg. However they have both offered sophisticated perspectives on the problems of adaptation faced by France with regard to the practice of government, the evolution of democracy, changing patterns of civic participation, and the challenge of integrating ethnic minorities, during a period when Europeanization and globalization call the role of the nation-state itself into question.

This article examines the forms, the modes of dissemination and some of the recent topics of revisionist historical writing in France's extreme right-wing subculture today. Over the last two centuries shared understandings of French national history have structured the extreme right's definition of itself as guardian of the national interest in opposition to other ideological families which came to constitute the political mainstream. Its adherents take pride in the strength and continuity of their intellectual tradition. Although the extreme right is largely excluded from historical debates in the journals or media outside its own milieu, its adherents shadow those debates, putting their own, different interpretations on the meaning of events to articulate what they consider to be authentic readings of the past and, hence, of the present. It is argued that this process, defined here as counter-memory, is essential to the maintenance of the subculture.