Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 6, Number 36, September 18, 1979 'New Right' cult: Not new-and not right for France There are shades of Weimar hovering over France and also operative inside the Gaullist Party (RPR), creating spilling into the rest of Western Europe with the massive an unlikely alliance between members of a party that is media promotional campaign on behalf of the so-called nominally the vehicle for Charles de Gaulle's legacy Nouvelle Droite (New Right) during the past few weeks. and the very Vichyite and Nazi collaborationist forces Most of the press analyses, whether they scream "wolr' whom de Gaulle thunderously denounced 40 years ago. against the new Nazis, or coyly applaud this "rejuven­ New Right cultists ghost-wrote the last book of ation of right-wing thinking," carefully escape identi­ Poniatowski as well as that of the chairman of the fying the actual sources, political command and ulti­ France-Bavaria organization, Philippe Malaud, another mate political implications of the phenomenon. But the leading "conservative" politician, and they command New Right of France is simply, in the guise of one more an impressive array of access to the general public's "cultural fashion" oozing from Paris circles, the mental intellectual and political consumption. equivalent of the Panzerdivisionen of the Archduke Otto One deployment of the gang is the so-called Nou­ von Hapsburg wing of the British oligarchy's strategy veaux Economistes (New Economists), disciples of Mil­ for a New Dark Age. ton Friedman and his son David, the radical-liberal. The New Right movement has its tentacles in place These "biopoliticians" and "sociobiologists" advocate in the political parties and movements making up dismantling the French state and delivering whole President Giscard's government majority, and has been chunks of it to the private sector, especially all social launched with a bang in time for the dust to settle and services and infrastructural works, as well as credit to play a key role in shaping the policy content of the policy, in the name of "economic freedom." Should 1981 French presidential elections. The movement can they succeed, President Giscard will be set up for an be expected to help lay the groundwork for the emer­ austerity-inspired violent backlash by the French pop­ gence of a General Alexander Haig presidency in the ulation such as the one deployed against de Gaulle in United States and Bavarian neo-Nazi Franz Josef '1968. Strauss to topple Helmut Schmidt as chancellor of West The picture would not be complete if we did not Germany. This axis, combined with the Thatcher gov­ mention the presence of Jacques Medecin in this move­ ernment in Britain, would effectively bring Giscard's ment. Mayor of Nice, Medecin is one of the linchpin Grand Design for a new world economic order to an figures in organized crime today, a virtual member of end and balkanize Europe into backward, squabbling the French subsidiary of what we have dubbed "Dope, regional entities subservient to the British monarchy Incorporated," the multinational shadow corporation and its continental appendages. that runs the finances of the· illegal drug traffic. In The New Right agents in place around Giscard future articles, Executive Intelligence Review will be include his erstwhile close advisor and now itinerant taking a closer look at some of these connections. foreign envoy, Michel Poniatowski, and his own brother, Olivier Giscard d'Estaing, both of whom have partici­ 'Death to realon' pated in study projects of some of the New Right's thinktanks. Va rious government ministries, especially aefore foraying into the New Right's doctrines, it will the Interior Ministry, (Poniatowski was minister of the be useful to look at the political command for whom interior in Giscard's first cabinet in 1974) are well the arsenal of irrationalist doctrines is being hammered infiltrated. Most recently, Lionel Stoleru, state secretary into the French public. It will then be most revealing to in charge of manual labor affairs, came out publicly in investigate one trait that has been cautiously concealed the pages of Le Figaro newspaper calling for an open from the view of the general public: the sudden coup de dialogue with the Club de l'Horloge, the New Right's fo udre between the New Right's leadership and the New recruitment arm in the civil service, around such left­ Left (Nouvelle Gauche)-the lawful crossing of the left ecologist themes as "small is beautiful." The circle with and right wings of the New Dark Age movement. the New Left was closed. The combination of magazines, institutions and While the primary intent of the New Right is to individuals that make up the New Right is centered influence the Giscardian movement, their agents are around Alain de Benoist, former chief editor of the 48 Europe EXECUTIVE INTELLIGENCE REVIEW September 18-September 24, 1979 © 1979 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. Nazi-like Europe-Action grouping of the early 19608. etats totalitaires (How to pass fr om liberal democracies to It consists of GRECE (Research and Study Group for totalitarian states). The book claims that any economic European Civilization) and its paper, Elements, a theo­ doctrine is but a mystique, unrelated to reality, and that retical review Nouvelle Ecole, a civil service infiltration liberalism always must devolve into "constructive lib­ think-tank called the Club de L'Horloge, a mass cir­ eralism." By this was meant the policy that had been culation weekly, Le Figaro Magazine, a recruitment arm just implemented in Germany by Nazi Finance Minister called Mensa International, and a cultural institute, Hjalmar Schacht-an attack on both big industry and Nouvelle Acropole. Beyond minor functional differ­ organized labor, to bring both under the full control of ences, de Benoist's crowd entirely revolves around the the military aims of a geopolitical expansionist policy. doctrines of its mentor, Professor Louis Rougier, the According to Rougier, liberalism's adequate use was as New Right's grand old man. a stick against "Marxism." Interestingly, to retrace the evolution of Rougier is Even then, in the 1930s, these ideas perfectly to discover that not only the "New Right," but its matched with left-wing counterparts, and often crossed indecent alliance with the "New Left" are very old paths institutionally with them. The left-terrorist orga­ indeed. In this century, both movements arose as com­ nization "Justice and Liberty" of Italy, which claimed plementary "radical" variations on the theme of the antifascist ideals and was operationally based in France, British liberal world-outlook, and both took as their worked under the banners of a doctrine called liberal­ targeted foe the large-scale organization of productive socialismo, in which socialism was purged of its "total­ manufacture and industrial labor forces which are the itarian" (read: urban and industrial) bent and used as social basis for urban-centered industrial progress. a means of enticing workers and leftists into kamikaze More than 90 today, Louis Rougier reached public "exemplary actions" against the Mussolini regime. fame in 1925 with his attack on the Fabian "neo­ France collapsed in 1940 with the aid of the Imperial Thomist" revival around Jacques Maritain (whose left­ circle. Rougier rushed to Vichy, where his friend, Ban­ wing descendents we shall encounter later). "Philoso­ que de l'Indochine drug traffic organizer Paul Bau­ pher" Rougier was given a top political mission to the douin, was Marshal Petain's first foreign affairs secre­ Soviet Union by the French government. Then in 1934, tary. He was given the important job of negotiating a the Rockefeller Foundation asked Rougier to investigate deal between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill Central Europe and the governability and survivability and Petain-unbeknownst to General de Gaulle, who of local governments. This was during the year after had assumed leadership of the French Resistance. Using Hitler had come to power in Germany and was already his London School of Economics links, Rougier gained making clear his expansionist aims into Mitteleuropa. immediate privileged access to pro-Nazi Lord Halifax After stints at Cairo and Besan�on universities, and Churchill. Only the public airing of the Montoire Rougier became the general counsel of the extreme interview of Petain and Hitler blew the cover off this right-wing "Association for the Defense of the Nation." effort to gain the Vichy puppet state the recognition of This was a plot of the grouping known as the French "antifascist" Britain, and Rougier went to the United Imperials recruiting in the officer corps in preparation States. for a coup-part of the operation that so honeycombed After a stint at St. John's College, Rougier joined the French military with the rot of fascist sympathizers Lippmann at New York's New School for Social Re­ that it collapsed without resistance before the blitzkrieg search. Upon his postwar return to France, he became of Hitler's invading army in 1940. the mentor of successive generations of fascist grou­ During the infamous Munich appeasement negoti­ plets, and the leading French representative of Lord ations led by Britain's Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Bertrand Russell and Sir Karl Popper's logical empiri­ Hitler in 1938, Rougier teamed up with his great friend, cism. the Anglo-American political intelligence agent Walter Rougier's metaphysics asserts that the universe is Lippmann, to organize the "Walter Lippmann Collo­ only an entropic chaos of blind, stochastic becoming, quium" in Paris. The hard core of what later became where causality is statistical and hazardous. Life, like the Mont Pelerin Society-the economic thinktank of the universe itself, is a random nonevolving accident; "Dope, Inc." today-was present.