Guillaume Faye (1949-2019): At the Forefront of a New Theory of White Nationalism

Stéphane François and Adrien Nonjon

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Keywords: Guillaume Faye, France, Far Right, New Right, Archeofuturism, White Nationalism

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Despite being under-studied, Guillaume Faye (1949-2019) is probably one of the most central figures of the current Euro-American Identitarian movement, and a key inspiration for global white nationalism. He holds a special place within the small world of the radical right, combining political activism, journalistic activities, and serving as an anchor for populist countercultures. His concept of “archeofuturism” has served as a rallying point for the revival of the doctrinal corpus of the French Identitarian movement, and of the Euro-American far right more broadly. Forged in the mid-1990s, his worldview is a mix of postmodern philosophy and elements from old-fashioned Western racist discourses. 

Faye’s career trajectory can be divided into two major periods. He was first a member of the main French New Right cadres’ school GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne, or Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, whose acronym spells out the French name for Greece: Grèce) from 1970 to 1986 and was its second-most-prominent figure after the more well-known Alain de Benoist. At the time, he argued for a form of somewhat pro-Arab revolutionary conservative thinking. After withdrawing from political activism between 1987 and 1996 to work in the media realm, Faye returned to working as a political essayist and took up a prominent Identitarian position, asserting a very racialized discourse targeting Islam and Arab-Muslim immigration that made him a cult figure for white nationalist subcultures.

From Political Activism to the Media … and back

Faye was born in Angoulême, a mid-sized town in southwestern France, on November 7, 1949, into a bourgeois social environment. His family leaned toward the Bonapartist right wing, an authoritarian, nationalist and social leaning.^[1] In contrast to many of GRECE’s founding members who came from Nazi-collaborationist families, Faye’s family did not collaborate during World War II, nor did Faye himself campaign among pro-OAS^[2] (a right-wing paramilitary group formed in opposition to Algerian independence) or old-fashioned nationalist circles. He studied at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, where from 1971 to 1973 he ran the Pareto Circle, the GRECE association active in this Grande École training the French elite.^[3]

Created in January 1969 in the south of France, GRECE was the founding act of the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite).^[4] Born from the will of the European-nationalist theorist Dominique Venner (1935-2013) to transform political militancy into a “metapolitical” struggle, the organization set out to lay the foundations of a new right-wing culture in France that would then spread throughout several European countries, as well as to the US and even Russia. It aimed at breaking out from classic, French-centric nationalism and promoting an organic and unified conception of pan-European nationalism. GRECE’s hopes of deeply renewing the doctrinal basis of French nationalism were motivated by the need to compete with far-left thinking and especially Marxism, which were powerful currents of thought among French intellectuals at that time. The fact that GRECE was launched a few months after the May 1968 revolts points to the shock that that the student riots produced in conservative circles. 

Initially close to certain GRECE figures such as Jean-Yves le Gallou (1948), the founder of the Pareto Circle, Guillaume Faye joined GRECE a few months after its foundation and held the position of secretary for studies and research, in which he had to develop new political platforms for the organization. It was within this structure that Faye laid the first ideological stones in the foundation of his thinking. Initially in charge of economic issues, he progressively moved towards more geopolitical and identity-related topics such as European federalism or the “White nationalism” issue, publishing important theoretical texts in the New Right’s main journals: Éléments, Nouvelle École, Orientations, Études et Recherches.

His first books, published in the early 1980s, were both a critique of consumer society, a rejection of art standardization, and a dismissal of the Westernization of the world.^[5] One of Faye’s intellectual constants was his belief–largely shaped by Alain de Benoist–in a radical differentialism: according to Benoist, the “right to difference” (initially coming from leftist and anti-colonialist thinking) should result in the rejection of any multiracial society to the point of repatriating the European emigrants and their descendants to their indigenous “civilizational area.” Faye believed that Europe had been colonized not only by immigrants, but also by American values. The resulting rejection of the United States then placed him in the nationalist-revolutionary current of the European far right, an orientation visible at that time in his geopolitical stance against the “American-Zionist axis” and his support for an alliance with the nationalist Arab regimes, in particular the Baathists.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Faye was also writing for several French right-wing papers and magazines such as Le Figaro, a gateway to mainstream conservatism for the New Right, and the more jet-set-oriented VSD and Paris-Match, as well as countercultural publications such as L’Écho des savanes. His main intellectual influences were the French philosophers Henri Lefebvre, Jules Monnerot, Robert Jaulin, Julien Freund, Michel Maffesoli, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord; the German thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Arnold Gehlen, Jürgen Habermas, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Carl Schmitt; the British writers Herbert Spencer and Robert Ardrey; and the American Christopher Lash. 

Faye also acknowledged the key influence on his thinking of the Italian journalist and philosopher Giorgio Locchi (1923-1992), who played a major role in the elaboration of GRECE’s first principles such as anti-Americanism, inegalitarianism, and a pagan conception of the world. At that time, in fact, Faye was close to the neopagan leanings of GRECE and participated in the Serment de Delphes (Oath of Delphi), an oath sworn before the Stoa at Delphi by several of GRECE’s radical and pagan European militants in early 1979 at the instigation of Pierre Vial (born in 1942), GRECE’s secretary general and French scholar (medievalist) at the University of Lyon III. This oath consisted of the promise that militants would fight for a neopagan European identity. Yet, contrary to some of his colleagues, Faye did not accept attempts to reconstruct a pagan theology. As he put it:

More than any other religion, paganism is at once the guarantor of the social order, of the cosmic and natural order, and the guarantor of the plurality of beliefs and sensibilities. It rests on the logic of “each in their own place,” and not on the fantasy of a chaotic universalist diversity. Its social model closely associates the notions of justice, order, and freedom, these latter being founded on discipline. It sets out from the principle that humanity is diverse and by no means destined to unify, that history is an unpredictable and endless becoming. It presumes, contrary to the monotheisms, a heterogeneous humanity made up of homogeneous peoples, the essence of the political being the constitution of the homogeneity of the City, sacralized by divinities, in which identity is absolutely indistinguishable from sovereignty. Organic and holist, the pagan vision of the world considers peoples as communities of destiny. As it is lived in Greek paganism, the notion of the City, soldered by patriotism and the common identity (reflection of divinities and of nature) is fundamental in paganism, in which the tutelary divinities have an essentially political and rooted dimension. (Faye 2001a, 116)

In the mid-1980s, Faye became marginalized by the GRECE leadership, as strategic disagreements with its main figure, Alain de Benoist, emerged. Indeed, Faye criticized the movement and its leader for their progressive abandonment of a European identity line and their silence on immigration issues in favor of Third Worldist narratives.^[6] Faye also denounced GRECE’s failure to infiltrate the Front National at a time when the party was experiencing its first serious electoral successes. These criticisms resulted in Faye being forced to leave GRECE in the spring of 1987, and his broader distancing from the New Right’s militancy, instead concentrating on his media activities, until his rehabilitation into GRECE in 1997 thanks to Pierre Vial’s support. 

During his decade-long hiatus from direct political militancy, Faye built for himself a new career in the popular culture realm. Parallel to his work for the printed press (under his own name or pseudonymously), Faye became a host (“Skyman”) of a major French radio station, Skyrock,^[7] winning over many listeners with his hoaxes and provocative nature. He also participated in a general interest program on a French public station between 1991 and 1993. He further claimed to have appeared in pornographic films. Under the pseudonym of Skyman, he published three books of popular culture aimed at the general public. In Le Guide de l’engueulade (The guide to shouting matches)^[8] and Le Manuel du séducteur pressé (The busy seducer’s handbook),^[9] Faye took a comic detour inspired by Guy Debord and his Société du Spectacle.^[10] His third book, co-authored with Jean-Christophe Florentin, was published under the title Viol, pillage, esclavagisme, Christophe Colomb, cet incompris: Essai historico-hystérique (Rape, pillage, slavery: The misunderstood Christopher Columbus, a hysterical historical essay)^[11]–a rehabilitation of the legitimacy of the European colonization of the Americas. Faye also wrote storylines for cartoons, the first of which was the graphic novel Avant-guerre (Prewar).^[12] In the 2000s, he published other cartoons with militant storylines including, in 2002, Chirac contre les fachos (Chirac versus the fascists, referring to Jacques Chirac, President of France from 1995-2007).^[13]

Almost becoming homeless due to drug addiction and financial problems, Faye returned unexpectedly to politics by first rejoining GRECE in 1997 and then, the year after, publishing one of his most significant books, Archéofuturisme (Archeofuturism),^[14] in a major French far-right publisher, L’Æncre (an archaic rendering of the word for anchor). He followed this up in 2000 with the publication of La Colonisation de l’Europe (The Colonization of Europe),^[16] a seminal essay denouncing Europe’s Islamization and the dangers of non-European migration. Reintroducing such themes into far-right culture without apology, Faye subsequently gained new visibility among several groups. He participated in conferences with many figures close to GRECE, as well as with royalists, young traditionalist Catholics, neopagans, and others. In 2000, he was accused of racism by Alain de Benoist and the close associates of the latter. Both Faye and his publisher, L’Æncre, were put on trial for inciting racial hatred following the publication of La Colonisation de l’Europe.^[17] Faye was ultimately banished a second time from GRECE by a federal assembly of cadres convened by Alain de Benoist in May 2000 to give the latter’s condemnation of Faye the appearance of legitimacy. 

After that, Faye drew closer to Identitarian and neopagan circles, contributing to the Terre et Peuple (Land and People) movement. The latter had been established by former GRECE radical and racialist member Pierre Vial, a medievalist formerly at Jean Moulin Lyon III University; Jean Mabire, a journalist and writer known for his SS hagiographies; and the Indo-European specialist Jean Haudry–all of them with close ties to a form of regionalist, neopagan neo-Nazism.^[18] Yet even there, Faye could not fit: he was expelled from Terre et Peuple in 2007 following the publication of his philo-Semitic essay La Nouvelle question juive (The new Jewish question).^[19] In this, in contraction with his past, Faye denounced Holocaust denialism and the anti-Semitic fads of the French far right, and pled for a strategic alliance with the “Zionists” against Islam, an alliance considered “unnatural” for a resolutely Anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi movement.  

An Ideological Trajectory toward Extreme Racialism

Faye’s ideological trajectory saw him switch from belonging to the national-revolutionary far right of the 1970s to a radical racialism inspired by Nazi theories. His trajectory can be traced around two key worldviews: the celebration of archaism, which goes with a neopagan cult of sexuality and call for authoritarianism; and the shift from celebrating the resistance to Americanization by Arab nationalists to a racial fear of everything related to migrants and Islam.

The cult of the archaic

Intellectually, Faye was one of the GRECE members who was most difficult to categorize. He displayed no nostalgia for anything völkisch. Unlike his colleagues from Terre et Peuple, Faye rejected any blood-and-soil mythology or worldview inspired by the SS and their followers. He had no interest in the theorists of traditionalism as developed by Julius Evola or René Guénon, nor in attempts at reinventing pagan cults. As he put it: “Traditions are made to be expurgated, wiped off, cherry-picked. For many of them carry viruses that are exploding today. Modernity, for its part, probably has no future.”^[20] By contrast, he was wont to stress that:

The word “archaic” must be restored to its true, positive and not pejorative, sense: according to the meaning of the Greek noun archè,which means both “foundation” and “beginning,” or “founding impulsion.” It also has the meaning of “that which is creative is immutable” and refers to the central notion of “order.” Caution: “archaic” does not mean “attachment to the past,” since the historical past produced the now foundering egalitarian modernity. Thus, any historical regression would be absurd^[20]. 

Indeed, according to Faye,

We must not be “anti-modern” but “non-modern,” since … the alternative to modernity cannot be the return to traditionalism and a backward-looking attitude, since the latter possess the same linear view of time as modernity, except that it is a matter of regressing and no longer of progressing, both attitudes being perfectly contrary to the spherical and dynamic view of time.^[21]

It is in the ideological framework that Faye has elaborated his main concept of “archeofuturism.” He defines this concept as follows: 

The point is not to succumb to classical “traditionalism,” marred by folklore and dreaming (by turning back) of a return to the past. Modernity has become obsolete. The future must be “archaic,” which is to say neither modern nor backward-looking^[22].

At the beginning of his career, Faye embraced the GRECE strategy of replacing the concept of races and the idea of their place on a scale superior-inferior by the notion of ethno-cultural groups all supposedly equal but forbidden to mix, based on Benoist’s ethnodifferentialism. Nevertheless, by the end of his life Faye had returned to a simplified racialism. In his last book, published in 2019, Guerre civile raciale (Racial civil war; published in English as Ethnic Apocalypse: The Coming European Civil War),^[23] he prophesied a confrontation that goes far beyond simple civilizational conflict: a total war between the races from which the white man alone must emerge victorious or be annihilated. With this last book, Faye contributed to inspiring the accelerationist theories that call for accelerating racial war in order to secure victory by whites. 

Faye’s work also displays a desire to bring down liberal democracy in order to confront what he called the “convergence of catastrophes” threatening Europe, as is expressed in the title of one of his works, which he authored under the pseudonym Guillaume Corvus, taken from the Latin word meaning crow or raven^[24]. Adopting a survivalist and apocalyptic tenor, “Corvus” argued that the Western countries face various perils: the “cancerization” of the European social fabric; demographic decline; the threat of a chaotic the Global South; the rise of religious fundamentalisms, notably Islamic fundamentalism; a Global North and South ethno-religious confrontation; and, lastly, the aggravation of uncontrolled pollution. 

In order to avert civilizational and ecological collapse, Faye suggested that an authoritarian regime be established under the aegis of a “born leader,” a dictator, which he defined in another work not as “an oppressive tyrant, but as one who ‘dictates,’ who decides, and who rescues in emergency situations,” and who, naturally, “sets his people in movement and protects their ancestry, their identity.”^[25] However, if there certainly is a risk of ecological catastrophe, he does not believe, contrary to the radical ecologists he dubs “naive,” that Nature itself is in danger. As he sees it, only humanity is in danger, since the Earth can recover from climatic upheaval: “The Earth (Gaya) is not ‘threatened’ by humans, who are its inhabitants; it still has several billion years ahead of it and can promote other species along the path of phylogenetic evolution; and it has undergone far worse ecological cataclysms.”^[26]

Contrary to the majority of his fellows, Faye was not hostile toward hypermodernity or the liberation of mores, a topic to which he devoted two books: Sexe et idéologie (Sex and ideology)^[27]  and Sexe et dévoiement^[28] (Sex and deviance). In 1983, he wrote: 

In a pagan conception of society–at the same time both libertarian and sovereign, convivial and kingly, driven by the pleasure principle as much as by the will to power–everything can coexist in an organic and polytheist manner: sexual asceticism, libertinism, the spirit of enjoyment, deviance, homosexuality, sapphism, sublimation, and estheticism. Each of these attitudes corresponds to a function, to an order, ones for which strict codes provide the norm.^[29]

His conception of sexuality at that point was, in his own words, fairly “liberated” or “pagan.” This stance goes sharply against the conventional moralizing discourse of the far right. It also carries within it a cultural revolution that undermines the bases of Christian morality. As he wrote: 

We must return to an archaic vision of things: integrating debauchery and the “orgiastic”–discussed by Michel Maffesoli in L’ombre de Dionysos [The Shadow of Dionysus]^[30]–into the social order. The stronger this order is, the more the orgiastic can unfurl in its shadow, in secret, as ancient societies knew how to do it. This is simple wisdom. The “principle of order” is consistent with millions of years of laws for the reproduction of the species and the transmission of progeny, culture, and values. The “pleasure principle” must be tolerated and managed hypocritically because it is human and ineradicable, but without ever allowing it to become dominant, without it becoming the established order. Subaltern but in existence, according to the law of life, in a certain “social silence” … I am for group sex, feasts, Dionysian pleasures, but only if subordinated to the ordo societatis, and articulated by it. … The more powerful the social order is, the more the pleasure principle, the orgiastic, can be deployed in its shadows without harm to societal cohesion.^[31]

Faye was also hostile neither to homosexuality nor to transsexualism and wrote for a homosexual magazine called Gaie France, in which he sometimes lauded adolescent homosexuality in the name of paganism.^[32]

From pro-Arab nationalism to racial fear of migrants

The most striking evolution of Faye’s ideological worldview can be found in his geopolitical shift. Faye’s first works were at once a critique of consumer society, a rejection of uniformization, and a dismissal of the westernization of the world. Indeed, in his first period of militancy, like some leftist thinkers, in particular those from the Frankfurt School, Faye believed that Europe had been colonized by American values. His ensuing rejection of the United States placed him squarely in the revolutionary-nationalist camp, though he rejected ethnic nationalism in favor of a pan-European nationalism. This influence cropped up in his 1980s geopolitics, one aspect of which was his hostility to the supposed “Americano-Zionist axis,” against which he suggested an alliance with Arab regimes, in particular Ba’athist ones. 

The activist group formed in France today of pro-Zionist groups is pushing French governments onto the dreadful path of disagreement with the Arabs, our natural allies. In the United States, as President Assad of Syria rightly recalled–after other Arab leaders–the “Zionist lobby” has seen its aims become intertwined with the geo-strategic interest of American power: the American order, Zionist opinion groups (notably in France), and the state of Israel have powerful common interests, both geostrategic and cultural. One cannot reproach this, since it accords with the law of life. But it must nonetheless be understood that these interests run counter to the interests of the Arabs, the Europeans, and perhaps to the cause of all Third World peoples.^[33]

This is a key intellectual theme in Faye’s thinking: he defended a radical differentialism whereby, in order to ensure their survival as nations and civilizations, different peoples must never live on the same territory and never mix, either. In the early 1980s he even endorsed the return of non-European migrants to their own areas of origin. The aim of the right to difference is, according to him, a rejection of multiracial society on the grounds that such a society is multiracist. In this vein, he also denounced multiculturalism and what he called “ethno-masochism.” As he put it: “Cultural combat is not about the defense of all cultures, but primarily of European culture, which must conceive itself as superior.”^[34] With these remarks, Faye barely mitigated his racism.  

Upon returning to the political arena in his second militant phase, Faye inverted the terms of his discourse, expressing support for Israel and the United States against the Arab-Muslim world. He became, in short, a prominent Identitarian ideologue who asserted a violently anti-immigration and Islamophobic discourse in the name of the defense of European racial interests. The end of the 1990s saw him champion a racialism so virulent that it invited comparison with that of the 1930s: “Rootedness is,” he wrote in Pourquoi nous combattons: Manifeste de la Résistance européenne (Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance) about “the preservation of roots, while being aware that the tree must continue to grow. … Rootedness is accomplished first in fidelity to values or to blood. … It must imperatively include a founding ethnic dimension.”^[35]

Faye subscribed to a right of blood founded on the concept of nativism and urged that a natalist and eugenicist campaign be launched that would favor ethnic Europeans. He defined his ethnocentrism as the “galvanizing conviction, specific to long-living peoples, that one belongs to something central and superior, and that to survive historically its ethnic identity must be preserved.”^[36] Thus, reprising the racial-Darwinist, national socialist theme of the “struggle for survival,” he regarded non-European civilizations as enemies to be eliminated: “It’s the law of the strongest, of the fittest, of the most stirring that always dominates. Vae Victis, death to the defeated, such is the law of life; and no philosopher has been born that can change this or prove the contrary.”^[37] He concluded by stating that “European ethnocentrism is not hot air. The contribution of European civilization (relayed by its prodigal and adulterous American son) to the history of humanity dominates in all domains; it exceeds that of all the other peoples.”^[38]

Faye therefore made an appeal to Europeans’ “ethnic consciousness”–that is, “to the individual and collective consciousness of the need to defend the biological and cultural identity of its people, which is the indispensable condition to upholding its civilization in history and to its independence.”^[39] The extreme violence of this overtly racist discourse is quite unique in the French context, where far-right thinkers tend to moderate their expression of racism. Taking his ideas to their logical conclusion, Faye ultimately came to the notion that non-European immigration is merely a form of colonization. 

More than immigration, we must speak of mass settler colonization by the African, Maghrebi, and Asian peoples and recognize that Islam is embarking on a conquest of France and Europe; that “juvenile delinquency” is only the beginning of an ethnic civil war; that pregnancies and porous borders are both means of invading us; that, for demographic reasons, an Islamic power is liable to establish itself in France, first at the municipal level, then, perhaps, at the national level.^[40]

His later writings took positions directly opposed to those he espoused at the start of the 1980s, when he expressed support for a Euro-Arab alliance as necessary to counter American hegemony. He remained steadfast, however, in his condemnation of the Americanization of mores.

Americanism is a mental attitude, the consequence of Americanization, which is causing Europeans to lose their identity and sovereignty, and whose cause is the voluntary submission of the Europeans rather than “American imperialism.” Americanization is linguistic, cultural, food- and fashion-related, musical and audiovisual, and so on. It substitutes American mythologies and imaginaries for those of the Europeans.^[41]

However, he recognized America as the “main adversary, not the main enemy, which is rather made up of the non-native masses colonizing Europe, of all their collaborators (foreign states or fifth columns), and of Islam.”^[42] His change in position is stark. 

Faye’s Legacy: From the Alt-Right to the Russian and Ukrainian Far Right

Faye’s relations with diverse far-right groups and correspondents went back a long time. The 1980s saw his work translated into Italian, German, and Spanish, including Petit lexique du partisan européen (Brief lexicon of the European partisan),^[43]  a work which was coauthored with two fellow militants, the Belgians Pierre Freson and Robert Steuckers. His articles were also published in translation in the German and Italian versions of the two main GRECE journals, Éléments and Nouvelle École. During this early period, Faye participated in university conferences in Greece (the “Athens conferences” organized by Jason Hadjinas between 1982 and 1985) and Belgium (on Euro-Arab relations, at the University of Mons in 1985). Even during his decade out of political activism, his books and articles continued to be translated and commented upon by European militants–as well as by some American activists who would come to belong to the movements known collectively as the alt-right.

With his return to politics in the second half of the 1990s, Faye’s notoriety abroad grew. Between 1998 and 2006, he sought to mend his relations with the Identitarian circles born from GRECE and the revolutionary-nationalist web. He participated in meetings and conferences organized by the militants of the concept of Eurosiberia, a sort of federal empire that would bring together the peoples of the white race in Europe, part of Russia, and North America. The meetings were organized in Spain in 2005 and Russia in 2006. In Spain, Faye came together with neo-Nazi figures: the Italian Gabriele Adinolfi; the Germans Pierre Krebs, who translated his work into German for publication in the 1980s, and Andreas Molau; and the Spaniard Ernesto Milá. In Russia, he again crossed paths with Pierre Krebs; the Spaniard Enrique Ravello; two French former members of GRECE, Pierre Vial and Yann-Ber Tillenon; the Greek Iephterios Ballas; the Ukrainian Halyna Lozko; and the Russians Vladimir Ardeyev, Anatoli Ivanov, and Pavel Tulaev, who launched a so-called raciology school.^[44]

The goal of these meetings was to set up a transnational organization to defend the “future of the white world,” namely the Council of Native European Peoples, which brought together splinter groups from Germany, Austria, Flanders, Wallonia, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and Quebec. In his speech at the International Conference on the Future of the White World, held in Moscow in June 2006, Faye proposed an alliance between Eurosiberia and all the peoples of white European origin. This is what he called the “notion of the North.” The crucial task, for him, was to create “ethnospheres”–that is, “ensembles of territories ruled by ethnically similar peoples.”^[45] This notion revolved around the idea that there was a “biological root of a people and a civilization, [on which] its ethnic base rests.”^[46]

He was then to become an important figure of so-called National Westernism, an idea later taken up and discussed on the alt-right website counter-currents.com.^[47] In light of this white supremacism, it is hardly surprising that Faye came around 2006 to participate in the meetings of the white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance founded by Jared Taylor, who is also the leader of the New Century Foundation and managing director of The Occidental Quarterly.^[48] Yet the 2007 publication of La Nouvelle question juive provoked a split with Faye’s former friends, many of whom were highly anti-Semitic; the European revolutionary-nationalists and the Identitarians who had been involved in GRECE considered him too “Zionist.” Faye’s stances were seen as insufficiently hostile to Israel or Judaism, thereby alienating him from Holocaust deniers and traditionalist Catholics. While the book produced splits, however, its philo-Semitism also opened the door to support from radical Jewish associations in France and the United States who argue for stronger ties between Israel and the West in the face of threats from Palestine or Iran.^[49]

This same period saw a growing number of translations of Faye’s works, especially those with violently anti-Islamic content. The most significant works of his second period, post-2007, were published in English by the London-based publishing house Arktos Media, operated by Daniel Friberg, a radical Swedish editor with links to the alt-right. These included Archeofuturism (in 2010), Why we fight (2011), The Convergence of catastrophes (2012), Sex and deviance(2014), The Colonization of Europe (2016), Archeofuturism 2.0 (2016), and, lastly, Understanding Islam (2017).^[50] This rapprochement with the American far right was cemented with the publication of his last, posthumously-published work, Ethnic Apocalypse: The Coming European Civil War (2019). Faye died on March 7, 2019, the day before its publication. The book contains a preface by Jared Taylor. In 2020, the same publishing house released a previously unpublished collection of short stories by Faye titled Nederland.

Faye’s rejection of Islam and Arab-Muslim immigration found an audience in the United States, where the far right has been prejudiced against the Islamic world since September 11, 2001. Furthermore, it is important to note that, despite GRECE’s overt shows of anti-Americanism, both Benoist and Faye did read American thinkers, including Paul Gottfried, Raymond Cattell, Arthur Jensen, Donald Swan, Wesley George, Roger Pearson, Kevin MacDonald, Robert Griffin, Samuel Francis, Jared Taylor, Michael O’Meara,^[51] and others. These readings have given rise to a reciprocal exchange of intellectual reference points and discussions–and indeed, at the turn of the 2000s, the American far right began discovering these European thinkers and borrowing their arguments. Lastly, Faye’s arguments have been discussed on the left by Telos, a journal of the American New Left. However, if Faye shares some points of reference with this movement (for example, Jürgen Habermas, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and others), he diverges from it on the question of power, and obviously on the question of racism.

If Faye was wont to discuss shared issues with American militants, he has also taken sides with Russia on several occasions. As mentioned earlier, at the invitation of the Identitarian militant Pavel Tulayev, the leader of Athenaeum, an organization known for its links with the splinter groups Synergies Européennes and Terre et Peuple, Faye held a series of talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2006 together with the Breton autonomist Jean-Pierre Tillenon and his steadfast supporter Emmanuel Leroy.^[52] In addition to promoting his main works at the International Fund for Slavic Literature and Culture and at the University of St. Petersburg Institute of Complex Social Research, Faye met with various figures from the Russian ultra-right wing, such as the then Duma deputy for the nationalist Rodina Party, Andrey Savelyev; activists from the National Sovereignty Party of Russia (NSPR); and the leader of neopagan neo-Nazi movement “Solstice,” Artyom Talakin.^[53]

Seeing his theories favorably received in a space he deemed crucial, Faye, emboldened, multiplied his collaborations with Russians. In 2007, these collaborations led to the translation into Russian of two of his works and to the release of a new pamphlet, A Frenchman’s View of Russia, which he promoted at the Europe Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.^[54] This work enshrined his pro-Russian orientation. Presenting himself as a Russophile, Faye provided critical insight into French images of Russia upon evoking, as part of his “political program,” the difficulties that the Russian Federation had faced after the fall of the USSR. Apart from the necessity of establishing a domestic policy and an economic revival to contain China’s power, Faye pleaded for the rebirth of Russia with his concept of Eurosiberia, which he revamped and renamed Euro-Russia. 

If this new version of a continental empire seems scarcely different from the one initially conceived in Archeofuturism, it is nevertheless characterized by a particular geopolitical realism and Russo-centrism.^[55] For Faye, the West ought no longer to view Siberia as a simple exploitable geographical space, but rather as the historical subject of a state belonging “to the same genetic, ethnic, and civilizational layer.”^[56] Taking a stance against the multiethnic and Eurasianist dimension of ultranationalist Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin’s vision for Eurasianism, Faye suggested breaking out of NATO’s encirclement by forming a strictly defensive and independent continental political-military alliance between Russia and Europe. As the initiating powers, France and Russia ought to agree at the outset to a continental nuclear “protection pact,” which should eventually supplant the “shrinking American umbrella.”^[57] This claim is in keeping with the geopolitics of the New Right, which sought to promote a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis as a vector of hegemonic stability. Faye even promoted the idea that the United States actually supported Islamists and the Islamic State. In 2015, he reiterated this position in another article published on his site, “J’ai tout compris,” (“I’ve got it all figured out”) asserting that Putin is Europe’s “only serious ally” against the Islamic State.^[58]

Like the vast majority of the French far right,^[59] Faye also became a supporter of Vladimir Putin and his policies. It is in this context that, starting in 2014 (around the time of the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution), he began justifying Russia’s approach in the international arena. In contrast to the Identitarians, who adopted a chiefly local outlook–framing the Ukrainian conflict as an excuse for the “Eurocratic Union” to avoid solving its own internal problems–Faye pursued an internationalist outlook that viewed the Anglo-Saxon powers as waging a battle against Russia and obliging “subjugated” European nations to participate.^[60]

If his anti-Americanism compelled him to reprise the narrative–widespread among the far right–that the 21st-century “color revolutions” of Eastern Europe and Eurasia were directed by the CIA, his desire to see a powerful Europe independent of the United States is at the core of a discourse founded on Putin’s supposed Gaullist heritage based on sovereignty and non-alignment. Part of the spirit of 1966 where France and the USSR renewed a peaceful diplomatic relationship,  claimed by a fringe of the French political and intellectual landscape,^[61] Faye had no qualms about comparing Vladimir Putin with General De Gaulle on his blog, arguing that the Russian president “defends a Gaullist vision of Europe and the world, and of the sovereignty of Russia.”^[62] He would go even further and portray Putin as a providential figure able to guarantee a “third way” for continental Europe. He thus brushed aside the criticisms leveled at Putin in the West:

Putin exasperates the intellectual, political, and media hyperclass because he defends Identitarian values, because he casts European societies as decadent, because he adopts the same positions as the Conservative Revolution, because he wants his country to reclaim its international rank. Cardinal sin. Of course, Russia is no terrestrial paradise (are we?) but to present it as a dictatorship led by a new Nero who is wrong on all questions amounts to disinformation of the most thoughtless kind.^[63]

A supporter of Russia until his death, Faye shared his analyses with Russian media outlets and agencies, such as RIA Novosti, on several occasions. He voiced support for the campaigns that Russia was undertaking abroad, such as its annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014:

In the view of the Kremlin and Putin, the Crimea historically belongs to Russia: it has a Russian-speaking majority and is home to part of the fleet. Putin wants to reset Russia within the borders not so much of the USSR as those of Catherine the Great’s Russia, of the Russian Empire, whose ambitious defender Vladimir purports to be. So what? Clearly, Vladimir Putin wants to appear among his people as the one who could bring the Crimea (formerly Russian) back to the mother country and could restore Russia’s international power.^[64]

Faye has played a critical role in promoting Russia as part of the dreamed-of White Europe among the far right in France. In return, the yearning for the notions of Eurosiberia and archeofuturism among Russian far-right movements demonstrates this influence on his ideologies. But this influence has proven far weightier on the ethnic Ukrainian far right. Notwithstanding his pro-Russian stance, Faye’s theories have been commented on and utilized as part of the Azov Corps National Party’s Intermarium project.^[65] Its intellectual leader, Olena Semenyaka, acknowledges Faye as an important influence,^[66] his Archeofuturism having provided a springboard for her theory of a “fourth industrial revolution” in Europe founded on new technologies and the archè, as well as for building an Identitarian alter-Europe. 

Conclusion

In the latter part of his life, Faye became an important thinker within the Identitarian movement. News of his death was received with sadness in the French Identitarian realm (Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Les Identitaires, Boris Le Lay, TV Libertés, Riposte Laïque, Richard Roudier, and so on) and among its Anglo-Saxon counterparts who had translated much of his work, in particular the alt-right (Arktos Medias, Greg Johnson, and so on). Even the Éléments blog, though still close to Alain de Benoist, featured homages to Faye from his former comrades.^[67] In fact, Guillaume Faye, beyond his provocateur’s image, remains an important intellectual of the global white-nationalist scene, having rid himself of his neo-Nazi tinsel. His transition from pro-Arabism in the 1980s to a violent rejection of Islam at the end of the following decade is symptomatic of the evolution of the nationalist-revolutionary far right following the war in the former Yugoslavia.^[68]

With what some of his fellow travelers would call a “rocket spirit,” Guillaume Faye has been able to shake up genres both through provocation and radical convictions. Sometimes eschatological, sometimes utopian, his complex and madcap thinking is nevertheless global. As we have seen in the United States as well as in Russia or in Ukraine, it transcends existing far-right political and geopolitical divides. Although officially disowned by GRECE and its leaders, Guillaume Faye has acquired in France the status of an icon among the younger generation of Identitarian activists, who see him as the prophet, if not the harbinger, of contemporary white nationalism. Unlike some far-right authors like the French novelist Jean Raspail or the British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, Guillaume Faye was never so popular as after his death.

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^[1] The Bonapartist right was born with the First French Empire of Napoléon Bonaparte. Napoléon’s was an authoritarian, nationalist political regime, though it also pursued modernizing social policies.

^[2] Organisation Armée Secrète (Secret Armed Organization).

^[3] Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes & C^ie, 1994), 205.

^[4] The expression “new right” was coined in 1979 by journalists, during the aggressive media campaign against GRECE.

^[5] Guillaume Faye, Le Système à tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic, 1981); Guillaume Faye, La NSC, la nouvelle société de consommation (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1984); Guillaume Faye, L’Occident comme déclin (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1984).

^[6] Robert Steuckers, “Les pistes manquées de la ‘nouvelle droite’: Pour une critique constructive,” 2011, http://robertsteuckers.blogspot.com/2011/11/pistes-manquees-de-la-nouvelle-droite.html

^[7] He already had experience as a radio host, gained through his participation in the radio La Voix du Lézard, the forerunner of Skyrock, between 1983 and 1986.

^[8] Guillaume Faye and Jean-Philippe Serrano, Le Guide de l’engueulade (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1992).

^[9] Guillaume Faye and Jean-Philippe Serrano, Le Manuel du séducteur pressé (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1993).

^[10] Jean-Yves Camus, “Guillaume Faye, From New-Right to prophet of the racial civil war,” in Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. A. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon, (New York: Routledge, 2021), 66-77, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003105176.

^[11] “Professeur Skyman” and Jean-Christophe Florentin, Viol, pillage, esclavagisme: Christophe Colomb, cet incompris–Essai historico-hystérique (Paris: Grancher, 1992).

^[12] Guillaume Faye, Avant-guerre (Paris: Carrère, 1985).

^[13] Guillaume Faye, Chirac contre les fachos (Paris: GFA, 2002)

^[14] Guillaume Faye, L’Archéofuturisme (Paris: L’Æncre, 1998).

^[15] Guillaume Faye, La Colonisation de l’Europe (Paris: L’Æncre, 2000).

^[16] With this book, Guillaume Faye and his publisher were each fined 50,000 francs by the 17th Paris Correctional Chamber for inciting racial hatred. Emmanuel Lemieux, “Le retour des affreux,” Technikart, no. 68, (December 1, 2002).

^[17] Camus, “Guillaume Faye,” 2021.

^[18] Guillaume Faye, La Nouvelle question juive (Chevaigné: Le Lore, 2007).

^[19] Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 10-11.

^[20] Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 66.

^[21] Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 168.

^[22] Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 42-43.

^[23] Guillaume Faye, La Guerre civile raciale (Harfleur: Éditions Petit Jean, 2019). Published in English as Ethnic Apocalypse: The Coming European Civil War (Budapest: Arktos, 2019).

^[24] Guillaume Corvus, La Convergence des catastrophes (Paris: Diffusion Inter, 2004).

^[25] Guillaume Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons: Manifeste de la Résistance européenne (Paris: L’Æncre, 2001).

^[26] Corvus, Convergence, 201.

^[27] Guillaume Faye, Sexe et idéologie (Paris: Labyrinthe, 1983).

^[28] Guillaume Faye, Sexe et dévoiement (La Fosse: Le Lore, 2011).

^[29] Faye, Sexe et idéologie, 25.

^[30] Michel Maffesoli, L’ombre de Dionysos: contribution à une sociologie de l’orgie (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982) 

^[31] Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 103.

^[32] Stéphane François, Les Néo-paganismes et la Nouvelle Droite (1980-2006): Pour une autre approche (Milan: Archè, 2008); Pierre Verdrager, L’Enfant interdit: Comment la pédophilie est devenue scandaleuse(Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).

^[33] Guillaume Faye, Nouveau discours à la nation européenne (Paris: Albatros, 1985), 106.

^[34] Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 73.

^[35] Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 113.

^[36] Faye, 117.

^[37] Faye, 76.

^[38] Faye, 118.

^[39] Faye, 78.

^[40] Faye, 20-21.

^[41] Faye, 55-56.

^[42] Faye, 57.

^[43] Guillaume Faye, Pierre Freson, and Robert Steuckers, Petit lexique du partisan européen (Esneux: Eurograf, 1985).

^[44] Atheney, 2006. “Giyom Fay v Rossii,”  http://ateney.ru/old/rus/hronika/FayeInRussia.htm;  Arnold, Richard and Romanova Ekaterina, “ ‘Budushchee belogo mira’ analiz odnoy mezhdunarodnoy konferentsii v Moskve v 2006 godu,” Forum noveyshey vostochnoevropeyskoy istorii i kul’tury–Russkoe izdanie [Russian edition], no. 1, 2015, http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forum/inhaltruss23.html

^[45] Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 119.

^[46] Faye, 128.

^[47] Greg Johnson, “Project Septentrion: The Last Line of Defense.” http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/project-septentrion/, 2010.

^[48] For example, one of Taylor’s books in French translation is L’Amérique de la diversité: Du mythe à la réalité (Paris: L’Æncre, 2016). On Taylor’s arguments, see Russell Nieli, “Jared Taylor and White Identity,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. M. Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Taylor is an unusual figure within the alt-right movement, as he is not an anti-Semite. Several conservative Jewish authors have given talks at American Renaissance conferences.

^[49] James A. McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon, Alejandro, ed., Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003105176.

^[50] These books have also been translated into other languages: Spanish, German, Italian, and Czech.

^[51] The pseudonym of Michael Torigian, who devoted a small book to Faye: Michael O’Meara, Guillaume Faye and the Battle of Europe (Budapset: Arktos, 2013).

^[52] Atheney, “Giiom Fai v Rossii.”

^[53] Atheney, “Giiom Fai v Rossii.”

^[54] Atheney, “Kruglyi stol s uchastiem Giioma Faia,” 2012, http://ateney.ru/old/20121019.htm.

^[55] For more details about Faye’s geopolitical thoughts on Russia see Mark Bassin, “Geopolitics or Ethnopolitics? Guillaume Faye, the European Far Right, and the ‘Russia Problem,’ ” in Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. A. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 103-119. 

^[56] Guillaume Faye, “Euro-Russie: Bases concrètes d’une future confédération impériale.” Ateney, 2007, http://ateney.ru/old/frans/fr022.htm.

^[57] Faye, “Euro-Russie.”

^[58] Guillaume Faye, Comprendre l’islam (Paris: tatamis, 2015).

^[59] Nicolas Lebourg, Les Extrêmes droites françaises dans le champ magnétique de la Russie (New York: Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and Foundation Open Society Institute, 2018), available at: https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/the-french-far-right-in-russias-orbit.

^[60] Guillaume Faye, “Pourquoi la Russie a raison.” J’ai tout compris: Blog de Guillaume Faye, 2014, http://www.gfaye.com/pourquoi-la-russie-a-raison/; Faye, “La russophobie: Stratégie US contre la France et l’Europe, 2014.” J’ai tout compris: Blog de Guillaume Faye, 2014 http://www.gfaye.com/la-russophobie-strategie-us-contre-la-france-et-leurope.

^[61] See, for example, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Le Général De Gaulle et la Russie (Paris: Fayard, 2017); Frédéric Pons, Poutine: Au cœur des secrets de la Russie moderne (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2014); and Yannick Jaffré, Vladimir Bonaparte Poutine (Paris: Ed. Perspectives Libres, 2014).

^[62] Guillaume Faye, “Poutine: Le De Gaulle russe ?” J’ai tout compris: Blog de Guillaume Faye, 2014 http://www.gfaye.com/poutine-le-de-gaulle-russe/.

^[63] Faye, “Pourquoi la Russie a raison.”

^[64] Guillaume Faye, “Pour le rattachement de la Crimée à la Russie?,” J’ai tout compris: Blog de Guillaume Faye, 2014, http://www.gfaye.com/pour-le-rattachement-de-la-crimee-a-la-russie/.

^[65] Established on October 16, 2014, at the base of the Azov Regiment, the National Corps is an ultra-nationalist party that claims to have around 10,000 members. The National Corps is led by Andriy Biletsky, the former head of the paramilitary group Patriot of Ukraine, and is active in Ukrainian society thanks to multiple initiatives: training camps (Azovets), a militia (Natsional’ny Druzhiny), and cultural and political clubs (such as Plomin). 

^[66] Semenyaka, Olena, “Interview with Olena Semenyaka,” 2019.

^[67] Éléments (blog), “Guillaume Faye par ceux qui l’ont connu,” 2019, https://www.revue-elements.com/guillaume-faye-par-ceux-qui-lont-connu/.

^[68] Stéphane François & Nicolas Lebourg, Histoire de la haine identitaire: Mutations et diffusions de l’altérophobie (Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2016)https://doi.org/10.4000/questionsdecommunication.11656.