The French ultra-right's attraction to Putin's Russia
The links between Russia and the French far right have evolved over time. After the 1917 Revolution, a number of exiled Russians joined the French radical right, primarily out of anti-Soviet sentiment. During the Cold War, while the European far right, in France as elsewhere, remained essentially hostile to communism, some of its members wanted to see in the USSR an alternative option to the hated globalism deployed by Washington. Today, Vladimir Putin's regime, which portrays itself as the upholder of "traditional values", largely appeals to the right of the French political spectrum; but within this movement, the war in Ukraine has created a deep fault line.
Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier and Olivier Schmitt, University of Southern Denmark
Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist in the far right and associate researcher at CEPEL (CNRS-University of Montpellier), and Olivier Schmitt, professor of international relations at the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, look back at this long and complex history in "Paris Moscou, un siècle d'extrême droite", just published by Éditions du Seuil, and from which we present here an extract devoted specifically to the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on the French ultra-right.
After the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a group of pro-Russian French volunteers was formed under the name Unité continentale. The group managed to gain a relative media presence, with the arrest of some of its members even enabling the Russian news agency Sputnik to depict Ukrainian holding centers in the guise of Nazi concentration camps. This contribution by French nationalists has more to do with psychological warfare and opinion-forming than with actual military operations.
The quality of Russian propaganda lies in its ability to play on a plurality of ideological resonances. The core of the Americanophobic, anti-liberal and authoritarian message accommodates a plurality of ideological options, from the far left to the far right, even if the human networks are largely structured around the right-wing end of the spectrum. Indeed, we also deployed an address to white nationalists, in France and elsewhere. This time, the aim was to use the Russian Imperial Movement, founded in 2002 as a continuation of the hard-line White Russians (the exiles after the 1917 revolution), adding racist and Islamophobic dimensions, but with links to the Russian Ministry of Defense, and its paramilitary appendage, the Imperial Legion, founded in 2008.
Advocates of Great Russian and Orthodox nationalism, the Legionnaires were involved in the fighting in the Donbass region, where several reportedly died in 2014 and 2015. In January 2016, the Legion announced that it was giving up armed combat in Ukraine, but retaining its goal of "liberating" Kiev to give birth to the "New Russia".
The term "New Russia" is used to describe a more western frontier of Russia; it dates back to the 18th century, was brought back into fashion by Transnistrian separatists in the 2000s, and was taken up by Ukrainian separatists and Russian neo-Eurasian theorist Alexander Dugin in 2014 (who theorizes an authoritarian regime covering Eurasia and its multiple peoples and cults). By playing on tsarist nostalgia, the aim is to assert the historical artificiality of the Ukrainian state.
In truth, the Legion is redeployed in Syria and Libya, alongside the Wagner group, and returns to Ukraine to take part in the 2022 assault. Nationalist messianism and religion go hand in hand here: it presents a millenarian, eschatological conception of politics. According to her, we are in the last days, globalism is the work of the Antichrist, Islamism is demonic, and the Covid-19 pandemic is the work of the globalists to strengthen the Antichrist's kingdom.
This conception of the world and of time implies that nationalists cannot remain confined within their own borders: the Legion claims to want to create cells not just in Russia, but throughout the Russian diaspora, in a formula that brings it closer to the subversive structures of the interwar period, such as the Brotherhood of Russian Truth or the All-Russian Fascist Organization.
At the same time, from 2015 onwards, the Russian Imperial Movement has been working on its international networks by founding a World National-Conservative Movement with the far-right Russian Rodina ("Fatherland") party, a supporter of Vladimir Putin and from which his Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin hails. https://www.youtube.com/embed/m9tAKY8q7zs?wmode=transparent&start=0
The organization doesn't want to limit itself to defending the white race or Christians, and invitations to join the movement are extended to 58 groups around the world, including Thailand, Japan, Syria and Mongolia - for the United States the connection is made with white supremacist Jared Taylor, close to French theorist Guillaume Faye.
For France, it had issued invitations to Action française, Renouveau français (a neo-fascist groupuscule that has since disappeared, from which came a young Frenchman sentenced by Ukraine in 2018 for his trafficking in arms and explosives, with two other French radicals sentenced in 2023 for similar trafficking), Unité continentale and Yvan Benedetti's Nationalistes (which followed the dissolution of Œuvre française in 2013) - only the latter chose to maintain a relationship with the movement.
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The "national-conservative" manifesto asserts that there is a global Jewish plot to destroy traditional nations and values, and its leader takes up the fight against "the Jewish oligarchs" in Kiev. Nevertheless, it's still a pis-aller: this radical movement was set up at the end of 2015, while earlier in the year Rodina had tried to bring together populist parties such as France's Front National in an "international forum of conservatives" - cautiously, the FN had declined...
The noose is unlikely to loosen: the spring of 2020 saw the USA classify the Russian Imperial Movement and the Imperial Legion on its list of "international terrorism", accusing them, among other things, of having trained Swedish neo-Nazi terrorists. https://www.youtube.com/embed/_fEp7PZmzus?wmode=transparent&start=0
The fact remains that the Azov regiment has had a magnetic effect on radicals, especially since 2015 saw the emergence of a new trend, accelerationism, which can be defined as a totalitarian subculture of a neo-Nazi sectarian nebula with millenarian terrorism (it has been responsible for numerous attacks, including those in Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo...).
The trend emerged thanks to an English-language transnational forum, founded by a Russian aficionado of the Italian theorist Julius Evola and Guillaume Faye, whose American neo-Nazi members created the AtomWaffen Division organization. The latter popularized a fascination with Azov, and several of its members were still being expelled by Ukraine in 2020.
It can still be found among the accelerationists of the French group WaffenKraft, two of whose members dreamed of joining Azov, while others wanted to go there to meet militiamen at a neo-Nazi music festival and buy weapons from them. According to them, Ukraine is a place of "defensive" combat, but also and above all a "homeland" in which it would be possible to live autonomously during the collapse provoked by the imminent general explosion of racial warfare - they were arrested before their terrorist act; this case is the first ultra-right-wing case to be tried by the assizes, with sentences ranging from one to eighteen years' imprisonment in the first instance; the appeal trial opened on September 16.
The most extreme tendency in white nationalism has thus ended up turning the arguments of neo-Eurasianism against Russia: if the latter represents the meeting of diverse traditions and ethnicities, then the white cause is Ukrainian.
So, while between 2014 and 2019, right-wing extremists of 55 nationalities volunteered for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their camp has radically evolved. According to French intelligence, by 2022, the fifty or so French radicals present were massively now in the Ukrainian camp. For them, the battle of 1942 is being replayed, when the invasion of the USSR was presented as the battle between Europe and Genghis Khan. When a French serviceman died in the spring of 2022, his comrades in the Misanthropic Division paid tribute to his fight against "Bolshevism" and the "Asian hordes".
This presence enabled Moscow to denounce France's pseudo-support for the "Ukrainian Nazi regime" in January 2024, assuring that the French state would thus be sending its mercenaries, according to an official communiqué relayed by pro-Russian French associations such as SOS Donbass... Aside from their armed involvement, members of WaffenKraft were unable to attend the Ukrainian neo-Nazi festival, but this was not the case for activists from the GUD and Zouaves (dissolved by the French government in 2022).
Nicolas Lebourg, Researcher at CEPEL (CNRS-University of Montpellier), University of Montpellier and Olivier Schmitt, Professor of political science, Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark
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