Guillaume Faye: Philosopher of White Survival

A conversation with Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye is a French philosopher known for his right-wing paganism, his call for a Eurosiberian Federation of white ethnostates, and his concept of archeofuturism, which combines traditionalist spirituality and concepts of sovereignty with the latest science and technology. He has spoken at American Renaissance conferences in 2006 and 2012 and, American Renaissance has reviewed four of his books: Archeofuturism, The Colonization of Europe, Why We Fight, and Sex and Derailment.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In my opinion, the liberalism [libertarianism, free-markets] of tomorrow will be a liberalism at the crossroads of Julius Evola and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — a reconciliation that Italian Fascism basically failed to achieve. In other words, the liberalism of the future will be an archeofuturist liberalism. Do you envision France as a fertile ground for this new liberalism?

Guillaume Faye: If one considers France from the point of view of Frédéric Bastiat, it is basically a communist country. In fact, France is today more communist than the Soviet Union ever was. It is one of the last bastions of communism in a world that is now profoundly liberal. Not only does government spending represent more than 58 percent of GDP, and redistribution expenditure more than 50 percent of GDP, but with a population that represents less than 1 percent of the world’s population, France represents 15 percent of the world’s welfare state redistribution.

I don’t think that France will ever be a liberal country, for liberalism is quite simply incompatible with the French mentality. On the other hand, the world is increasingly liberal, but it is a liberalism that makes serious mistakes — starting with free-trade agreements biased in favor of China. That said, the trade war launched by President Trump seems to me to be a very dangerous thing, likely to trigger a whole new economic crisis far worse than that of 2008.

As for Fascism, it was indeed a failure — were it only for its socialist economics and its warlike hubris. One can always imagine an alternative version of Fascism, the preeminent intellectual reference of which would have been Vilfredo Pareto, Julius Evola, or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — instead of Giovanni Gentile. The fact still remains that it is impossible to change history, and that Fascism is for us only a socialist monster of the past. It is pointless to look in the rearview mirror; we need to focus on the future. And as I tried to show in my book Archeofuturism, when the historical period of the 19th and 20th centuries will have come to a close, and its egalitarian hallucinations — including a certain utopian version of liberalism — will have been sunk by catastrophe, humanity will revert to its archaic values, which are purely biological and human (i.e., anthropological).

This will lead to the separation of sex roles; the transmission of ethnic and folk traditions, spirituality, and priestly organization; visible and structuring social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; rites and tests of initiation; the re-establishment of organic communities — from the family to the folk. It will mean the de-individualization of marriage in that unions will be the concern of the whole community and not merely of the married couple; an end of the confusion between eroticism and conjugality; prestige of the warrior caste; inequality among social statuses — not implicit inequality, which is unjust and frustrating and is what we find today in egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically legitimated inequality. It will mean duties that match rights, hence a rigorous justice that gives people a sense of responsibility; a definition of peoples — and of all established groups or bodies — as diachronic communities of destiny rather than synchronic masses of individual atoms.

In brief, in the vast, oscillating movement of history which Nietzsche called “the eternal return of the identical,” future centuries will witness a return to these archaic values one way or another. The question for us Europeans is whether we will have these values imposed upon us, on account of our cowardliness, by Islam — as is already happening — or whether we are capable of asserting these values ourselves by drawing them from our historical memory. Alas, given the extent to which Arab-Muslim peoples have already colonized European soil, I am afraid that their re-emigration, and the liberation of France and Europe, can be set up only at the conclusion of an extremely bloody conflict.

Grégoire Canlorbe: The Italian Renaissance is generally conceived of as a rebirth of Paganism in the formal context of Catholicism. Yet, far from being exclusively Pagan, the Renaissance was also nourished by a deep interest in Judaism. How do you explain this this?

Guillaume Faye: The Italian Renaissance was not a rebirth of paganism, but a return to the arts and techniques of ancient Rome. Not only has Italy never ceased to be pagan despite the strenuous efforts of Catholic prelates, but Graeco-Latin paganism has always found itself in osmosis with Judaism. Thus, in the pagan Roman tradition, there has never been any anti-Judaism; quite the contrary, the Jewish people was the only one authorized to practice its religion, for the good reason that Judaism was posing no political threat to Romans — unlike with the religion of the Gallic druids, who were therefore persecuted by Rome.

Two years ago, an Italian historian published a book, Ponzio Pilato. Un enigma tra storia e memoria, [Pontius Pilate: An enigma between history and memory] in which it is shown that the Great Sanhedrin asked Romans to kill Christ because they recognized the Roman emperor as their “king,” not Jesus who let himself be called “King of the Jews.” In turn, Romans, who had no trouble with satisfying the request to kill Jesus, were absolutely delighted to hear how supportive Jews were of the emperor who had federated them. For this reason in particular, there has never been a tradition of anti-Judaism in Italy.

Going back to the Renaissance, I subscribe to the thesis of decline developed by Bryan Ward-Perkins, an English historian living in Rome, who has shown in his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization that an immense setback in technology and artistic production happened in several parts of the Roman empire, following the German invasions in the West and the Arab invasions in the East. The Renaissance was not a religious rebirth of paganism; it was an artistic rediscovery of the painting and sculpting techniques of Antiquity, while Europe had basically returned to the bronze age with the fall of the Roman empire.

Grégoire Canlorbe: From a neo-pagan point of view like yours, why do you have more respect for Judaism than for Christianity?

Guillaume Faye: While Christianity carries within it and unleashes a certain moral masochism of the Jewish soul, there is no call for weakness and submission, no castrating message in Talmudic Judaism. This is basically the thesis of Friedrich Nietzsche, who fiercely denounced Christianity, but also was an ardent admirer of the Jewish diaspora and a vehement opponent of anti-Semitism. “Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other too” has nothing to do with the Talmud. On the other hand, in preaching the socialist hatred of the rich, or the subservience of native white Europeans before North African, black African, and Asian colonizers, Pope Francis actually puts himself in harmony, and not in contradiction, with the Gospel’s teaching.

The contemporary devirilisation of the old Christian world is nothing but the final outcome of the pervasiveness of Judeo-Christian values throughout the West. By the same token, the Promethean challenge posed by biotechnology — a positive eugenics that directly intervenes in the genome to improve heredity — poses a terrible problem in offending sensibilities rooted in monotheistic creationism and anthropocentrism. But it was long anticipated in Europe’s archaic pagan imagination. Not only does man become the creator of himself, self-manipulating, but he finds himself immersed in the living, like a “biological object,” like other animals. All this boils down to the combined death of anthropocentrism and metaphysical deism. Man makes himself, being both a demiurge, a rival of the divine, and, by the same stroke, becomes malleable human material to be shaped and molded.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to think of antiracism as an expression of the dual consciousness of the Jewish ethnicity that preaches cosmopolitanism among the gentiles while adopting ethnonationalist principles for Jews. At the root of this double standard, there would be the desire to protect Israel and the Jewish community from non-Jewish states in weakening the latter from within. Do you hold this common view as a sound analysis?

Guillaume Faye: In the guise of combating racism and xenophobia, antiracism indeed promotes a cosmopolitan agenda. It encourages discrimination in favor of aliens, the dissolution of European identity, the multiracialization of European society, and, at root, paradoxically, racism itself. Like the Greens, whose ideological demands do nothing to protect the environment, but surreptitiously promote a hidden Trotskyist agenda, antiracists use their fake struggle against racism to destroy the European identity as they advance cosmopolitan and alien interests.

It is true that the Jewish ethnicity is placed under a permanent state of contradiction — in the first place at the level of its definition. Are they an ethnic entity, nation, race, or religious community? Jews are embarrassed by having to answer to these questions: “Who are we?” However that question is answered, it seems that the sentiment of belonging to a Judaic or Israeli entity is much stronger among the middle and lower classes [in France] — the majority being Sephardim — than among the upper Jewish classes. This difference is becoming more and more clear.

In fact, religion seems to find itself at the heart of the Jewish ethnicity, but at the same time, Jewish religiosity proves very weak. Judaism is a religion in the strict etymological sense: it binds (re-ligere) people in an ethnocentric way. But the relations it has established with its God are of political and contractual nature, keeping a distance and without mysticism or esoteric beliefs. Agnosticism coexists with ritualism. The rabbinic and Talmudic theology refuses any emotional way out, because the calculating analytic spirit of Judaism is exempt from “romanticism.” Judaism refuses the sacrosanct — in the Hindu or Catholic sense — as well as superstition; in this it differs from Islam.

The Jewish soul finds itself in a permanent tension between an exacerbated particularism and a universalist sentiment — between a ghetto spirit and a conquering spirit. Thus, the desire to be a martyr is coupled with the need to dominate and to feel safe. In line with the sacrifice of Abraham, in the consciousness of the Jewish soul, the persecutions undergone during its history, of which the Shoah constitutes the metaphysical crowning, the Jewish people become sacrificial and divine, a symbol of suffering man. This syndrome is very ancient, for the Christ is nothing else on the individual level but a reprise of the martyrdom of the people of Israel — a sacrificial emblem to save all humanity.

From here originate a number of contradictory features: searching for peace and security but complaining of being hated; aspiring domination and proud recognition of an intrinsic superiority but on the other hand adopting an image of a small incessantly threatened people. This corresponds also to the double attractiveness of the international diaspora and the Zionist idea of going back to a homeland, a sacrificial and inalienable motherland; even within Zionism there is opposition between the idea of a purely Jewish vision by Eretz Israel and a more open concept of a lay Jewish State.

These contradictions do not necessarily constitute prohibitive factors. On the contrary, they give birth to a feverish and unique energy in this small population. The Jewish people has profoundly rooted itself during its history in the particularism of its Semitic origins and, on the other hand, inserted itself into the adventure of making white European civilization. Jews have been able to influence the West by the power of their mythological genius and also by their intelligence, much more neocortical than limbic. They turned out to be a small minority able to play a role far beyond their numbers.

Going back to the antiracism promoted by some of the contemporary Jewish intellectuals, it must be understood that these agents of influence for cosmopolitanism — Jacques Attali, Bernard-Henri Lévy, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn — are basically what is commonly called “Court Jews.” Besides being more or less uprooted, they care little for the Jewish ethnicity from which they stem — to such an extent that they would have no trouble serving a Muslim government in an Islamized France. Their fight for the propagation of cosmopolitanism in France and other non-Jewish states has nothing to do with a desire to protect Israel. They are distilling the poison of cosmopolitanism so that their own ethnic homogeneity is eroded, and their autochthonous population is devirilized.

The truth is that among Jewish intellectuals, those who support cosmopolitanism stand for the triumph of cosmopolitanism as much in Israel as in France, Germany, Britain, or America — not to say that most of them are openly anti-Zionist. Yet, a serious analytical error on the part of anti-Semitic authors, and more particularly Kevin B. MacDonald, has been to focus on the psychological traits of Jewish intellectual movements in favor of cosmopolitanism, and to conflate those with the behavioral and thinking patterns of the Jewish ethnicity. While the intellectual influence of “Court Jews” has been steadily decreasing in the West, a growing proportion of “ordinary Jews” is now rejecting antiracism and cosmopolitanism — in part as a reaction to the Arab-Muslim invasion.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In the face of the colonization of European soil by foreign races, you suggest that, instead of a return to the 19th century’s centralized nation-states, which sank into cosmopolitanism, we should promote the establishment of an imperial and ethnically homogenous Europe. Could you explain your argument?

Guillaume Faye: It cannot be denied that nationalist and xenophobic ideologies, which emerged in the 19th century, bear a heavy responsibility for the two World Wars and the historic deterioration of Europe. Everywhere, from France to Poland, from Germany to Britain, and from Russia to the Balkans, they have continued to be the driving force behind inter-European clashes — and therefore behind Europe’s global weakening in the face of African and Asian peoples who are gradually colonizing European soil, while Islam strives to conquer the West.

On the other hand, Europe would provide an ideal frame in which to constitute an empire, for it would include all Europeans, in their diversity and their unity. To this end, rooting oneself in a regional or national identity must reflect a stronger sense of European belonging and not a return to the 19th century’s nationalism. It is encouraging to see that when designing their future independence, several Corsican, Breton, Flemish, and Lombard separatists have understood that their future freedom can only be achieved in a federal and imperial context.

One of the first to have brewed the disastrous intra-European nationalism in the late 18th century was the Prussian linguist Johann Gottfried Herder, who rebelled against the use of French as practiced by the European elites and who invented the doubtful concept of Sprache und Boden (“Language and soil”), whereby each “nation” was to speak only “its” language. This German linguistic nationalism was the virus that poisoned the whole of Europe, along of course with French Jacobin cosmopolitanism and ultramarine British imperialism.

The idea that each nation-state should have its exclusive language caught on in the 19th century, when European nation-states were formed based on the model of the French Revolution. This prompted the French Republic to prohibit the use of local languages in both its colonies and in its provinces, to the sole benefit of the French language. In opposition to the very idea of an empire in which identities overlap unevenly, governments began to view Europe as a juxtaposition of mechanically compartmentalized nations whose homogeneous languages and cultures did not extend beyond their borders.

Every nation-state began to reconstruct its past and history in a mythological manner. However universalist and cosmopolitan it may be, France invented its own Celtic past — a Gaulish and anti-German one — claiming enlightenment and a mental finesse in contrast to the alleged tribal barbarism of the peoples beyond the Rhine. Under successive regimes, the German government strived to “deromanise” itself and used every means available to construct a German mythology composed of an incredibly confusing mixture of Medieval Holy Roman Empire elements and Nordic legends. Suddenly, the Italian state declared itself heir to the Caesars. The Belgian state invented all sorts of ridiculous legitimacies to suit its needs. And so forth.

It is French nationalism that caused the ultimate disaster from 1914 to 1918, that is, the arrival of colonial troops from Africa and Asia — supported by the US military — to fight the fellow Europeans against which France was engaged. Europe’s ethnic solidarity was destroyed. Francis I [or France] had already committed the same blunder when he allied himself with the Ottoman Suleiman the Magnificent against Austria.

The French colonial dream formulated in the 1930s, that of a France comprising 100 million inhabitants and abandoning its European anthropological composition by necessity — a France that would defeat Germany — represents another factor that contributed to the weakening of the European identity. Today, we are paying a heavy price for the colonialist and “civilizing” French doctrine of the 19th century, which aimed in a most stupid fashion at strengthening French nationalism against European neighbors, while deepening ties with nations overseas.

Unlike with the centralizing model of the 19th century’s nation-state, the imperial model involves an overlapping of various communities that is achieved in a vivid (and not mechanically administrative) fashion. The communities may be granted freedoms and abide by particular laws under the leadership of a strong but decentralized state. This conception aims to defend the ethnic identity of European peoples — both against the current colonization of Europe at the hands of the Third World, and against the centralism of nation-states that eradicates all particularisms, and which proclaims a multiracial nationality negating European identity.

This vision is a plural one, yet remains ethnically rooted. The empire is not a “nation-state,” both cosmopolitan and centralized, but an ensemble of free nations ethnically, culturally, and historically related, federated in a great continental empire. In this sense, the empire is a decentralized federation, equipped with a strong central power yet restricted to certain specific domains and regulated according to principles of subsidiarity: as such, this power addresses the domains of foreign policy, border control, general economic and ecological rules, etc.

The imperial principle is not one of homogenization; its various components are autonomous and can be organized in different ways, according to their own internal policies (regarding justice, institutions, fiscal autonomy, education, language, culture, etc.). The empire maintains the ensemble’s unity and the general civilizational project — but it’s not to be seen as a fluid, confederated association, totally heterogeneous, open to the entire world. A discipline of the whole is necessary, to imbue it with a firm, central, clear direction. In this sense, the present European Union, this will-less administrative aggregate, is far from representing the European imperial idea.

The national (or regional) components of the empire would be imbued with a “probationary freedom” that accepts the “grand policy” of the ensemble and the sovereignty of its central power, but this power, in exchange, would concede their specific identities, accepting that each nation or region, in conserving its freedom, has the right to leave the Federation at any moment. To realize a future “Eurosiberian Empire,” including Russia, Europeans will have to decide if the federation is going to be based on the nation-state or the historic region. But whatever their response, the idea of imperial Federation seems, in the end, the sole way by which Europe will be saved.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Speaking of empire, do you think that the small archeofuturist state that is Israel may one day set up an empire in the Middle East — a Pax Hebraica federating and subjugating Arab-Muslim nations under the tutelage of Jerusalem?

Guillaume Faye: Archeofuturism consists in returning to archaic behaviors such as war and territoriality, while coupling those with the latest advances in science and technology. It also consists in reproducing an archaic past in present times. Therefore Israel proves fully archeofuturist, since it emerged as a contemporary revival of the Jewish kingdoms of the Old Testament, and besides has established itself both as a warlike state and a pioneer in techno-science. China, which manifestly endeavors to rebuild its former empire, while imposing itself as a technological power, is another archeofuturist state.

As for the likelihood of a Jewish empire emerging in the Middle East, I believe that Israel is far too weak economically and militarily to continue its territorial expansion. Although Israel — where the ratio of engineers to population is the highest in the word — has undoubtedly become a technological power, it has failed to fight poverty: its middle class is insufficiently developed. Additionally, Israel suffers from two problems: On the one hand, the presence of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who show no interest in science and technology and only care about studying the Talmud; on the other hand, the high birthrate of the Arab-Muslim population, both within and outside Israeli territory.

Grégoire Canlorbe: In Western Europe and North America, the development of capitalism and democratic institutions — first and foremost universal suffrage — has been accompanied by the emergence of what Vilfredo Pareto called the humanitarian-democratic religion. In other words, political beliefs about the form of government, and the material beliefs about how one should make a living have undergone an evolution that have gone along with that of cosmological beliefs about how we should live.

Vilfredo Pareto summed up the humanitarian-democratic religion: a “morbid pity” that bears the name of humanitarianism; disdain for honest workers (in the broad sense), subversion of justice for the benefit of murderers, thieves, and parasites, a cult of redistribution and assistantship that culminates in socialism; and finally, the tolerance and approval of the “mores of bad women” that bears the name of hard feminism.

However, the fate of the pioneer democracies of the West doesn’t look universal: it seems to be possible to have democracy (on a strictly political level) without the humanitarian-democratic religion. Indeed, Russia, but also Eastern-Europeans countries, Thailand, India, or Israel, are not affected by the secularization that has allowed democracy to take the place of religion, to become a new religion. They have retained their traditional cosmological beliefs while evolving in their political and material beliefs, that is to say, in the directions of their democracy and capitalism.

How do you explain these divergent trajectories?

Guillaume Faye: These three symptoms all boil down to a process of devirilization — by which I mean the decline of the values of courage and virility for the sake of feminist, xenophile, homophile, and humanitarian values. The dominant Western ideology, which Vilfredo Pareto called the humanitarian-democratic religion, fosters this devirilization of Europeans, though it doesn’t touch the alien colonizers. Homophilia, like the feminist fashion of false liberation, the ideological rejection of large families for the sake of the unstable nuclear couple, the declining birth rate, the preference of photographers for the African and the Arab, the constant justification of miscegenation, the denigration of warrior values, hatred of every powerful, forceful form of aesthetics, as well as the prevailing lack of courage, are some of the present characteristics of this devirilization.

Confronted by Islam’s conquering virility, the European feels morally disarmed and confused. The prevailing conception of the world — whether it comes from the legislature, public education, the Church, or the media — is deployed to stigmatize every notion of virility, which is associated with “fascist brutality.” Devirilization has become a sign of civilization, of refined mores, the paradoxical discourse of a society, half of which is sinking into violence and primitivism. Devirilization is linked to narcissistic individualism and the loss of communal identity, which paralyzes all reaction to the assaults of immigrant colonizers and the forces of collaboration. This also explains the feeble repression of immigrant delinquency, the absence of European ethnic solidarity, and the pathological “fears” haunting Europeans.

As far as I am concerned, Russia is an authentically democratic country — in any case, far more democratic than France, where the people are solicited to express their views on less than significant matters, but never on issues such as family reunification or the number of immigrants accepted in a given year. A few months ago, President Putin was re-elected with more than 70 percent of votes, which was not the case for Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the 2017 presidential election. As for knowing how Russia — which I believe to be far more democratic than any Western European country — has managed to adopt democracy on a strictly political level, while escaping the “humanitarian-democratic religion,” there is, first of all, the fact that Soviet communism stood in the way of the virus of the French revolution. It proved a bulwark against the cosmopolitan, humanitarian, and feminist conceptions stemming from 1789.

Another factor to be considered is the religious tradition of Russia. To some extent, Russia and East European countries have escaped from the influence of the moral masochism of Christianity, due to the schism between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Church, which lead the latter to reject the devirilizing and cosmopolitan discourse of the former. Ultimately, the humanitarian-democratic religion of 1789 is only a culmination of the Catholic Church’s discourse. This is how countries whose religious tradition differs from Catholicism — including Orthodox-Slavic Russia, but also Buddhist Thailand for instance — have been able to democratize themselves politically speaking, without the humanitarian-democratic virus contaminating what you call their “cosmological beliefs.”

Grégoire Canlorbe: The class struggle between labor and capital was described by Vilfredo Pareto, and above all Piero Gobetti, as an internal spring of capitalism: an infallible instrument of the recomposition of industrial elites. How do you judge this idea?

Guillaume Faye: In fact, the preeminent form of the class struggle today is no more the struggle between capitalists and proletarians, but rather one opposing both migrants and the urban middle class bourgeoisie — whose eminent representative is Macron — to the native ordinary people. The struggle between labor and capital — in the sense of a reshaping of bourgeoisie with elements from the proletarian class — has certainly been a motor of capitalism, but this is only a particular case of the driving role played by the class struggle in any society or economic system. The circulation of elites was constant in the history of Romans.

On the condition that it takes place properly, and that it happens within the same race, a same biological people, the class struggle is something extremely positive. When the class struggle ceases, there occurs a general anesthesia: everyone starts behaving as a public employee, and indulging in laziness instead of searching to earn money or rise socially. This mentality has sadly become that of Frenchmen, who do not want, out of laziness, to make a lot of money, and are nonetheless jealous of their neighbor if he earns more than they do. This is egalitarianism in all its splendor — having the minimum for living and doing as little as possible, going on strike as often as possible . . . .

Grégoire Canlorbe: In my view, there are two Americas. On the one hand, a puritanical and materialistic America that dilutes the individual into a conformist way of life, centered on religious morality and material comfort; on the other hand, a warlike America that celebrates heroic sensibility and the will to power. While the latter is Trump’s America, the former is Obama’s America. Do you agree with this portrayal?

Guillaume Faye: The distinction you stress between an individualist, warlike America and a conformist and materialist America seems relevant to me. However, I would say that Trump rather embodies a melange of these two versions of America. While Barack Obama was a delegate of the Third World, and an accomplice of Islam, Donald Trump represents America — especially the popular and entrepreneurial America — in all its complexity and all its contrasts.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Is there something you would like to add?

Guillaume Faye: With its impending clashes between large ethnic blocs, the 21st century will, in actuality, be possibly more conflict-ridden and violent than the 20th century — because of, not despite, globalization! On an overpopulated planet, prone to rising perils, it’s not the end of history leading to a liberal, democratic world state that we see coming, but an intensification of history, as the competition between peoples responding to the imperatives of selection and the struggle for life becomes ever more desperate.

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Several of Faye’s books have been translated into English and published by Arktos. These include Archeofuturism – European visions of the post-catastrophic age (2010), Why we Fight – manifesto of the European resistance (2011), and Convergence of Catastrophes (2012).

This conversation took place in Paris in July 2018.