The French far right's attraction to Putin's Russia
The links between Russia and the French far right have changed significantly over time. After the 1917 Revolution, a number of Russian exiles rallied to 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 saw the USSR as an alternative to the despised globalism promoted by Washington. Today, Vladimir Putin's regime, which presents itself as the defender of "traditional values," is widely appealing to the right wing of the French political spectrum; but within this movement, the war in Ukraine has caused a deep rift.
Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier and Olivier Schmitt, University of Southern Denmark
Nicolas Lebourg, 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, revisit this long and complex history in "Paris Moscou, un siècle d'extrême droite"(Paris Moscow, a century of the far right), which has just been published by Éditions du Seuil. Here we present an excerpt devoted specifically to the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on the French far right.
After the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, a group of pro-Russian French volunteers was formed under the name Continental Unit. The group managed to gain a relatively high media profile, with the arrest of some of its members even allowing the Russian news agency Sputnik to portray Ukrainian detention centers as Nazi concentration camps. This contribution by French nationalists is more about psychological warfare and influencing public opinion than actual military operations.
The quality of Russian propaganda lies in its ability to play on a variety of ideological resonances. The core of the anti-American, 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 of the spectrum. Indeed, an appeal to white nationalists in France and elsewhere has also been deployed. This time, the Russian Imperial Movement, founded in 2002 in the tradition of the hardline White Russians (those exiled after the 1917 revolution), was used, adding racist and Islamophobic dimensions, but with links to the Russian Ministry of Defense and its paramilitary appendage, the Imperial Legion, founded in 2008.
Supporters of Great Russian and Orthodox nationalism, the legionnaires engaged in combat in the Donbass region, where several are believed to have been killed in 2014 and 2015. In January 2016, the Legion announced that it was renouncing armed combat in Ukraine but would maintain its goal of "liberating" Kiev to give birth to "New Russia."
The term "New Russia" is used to describe a more western border for Russia; It dates back tothe 18thcentury, was brought back into fashion by Transnistrian separatists in the 2000s, and was revived by Ukrainian separatists and Russian neo-Eurasian theorist Alexander Dugin in 2014 (who theorizes an authoritarian regime covering Eurasia and its many peoples and cultures). By playing on tsarist nostalgia, the aim is to assert the historical artificiality of the Ukrainian state.
In truth, the Legion is being redeployed to Syria and Libya, alongside the Wagner Group, and is returning to Ukraine to take part in the 2022 assault. Nationalist and religious messianism go hand in hand here: it presents a millenarian and eschatological conception of politics. According to this view, we are living in the last days, globalism is the work of the Antichrist, Islamism is demonic, and the Covid-19 pandemic is the work of globalists seeking to strengthen the kingdom of the Antichrist.
This conception of the world and time implies that nationalists cannot remain confined within their borders: the Legion claims that it does not want to create cells solely in Russia, but throughout the Russian diaspora, according to 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, starting in 2015, the Russian Imperial Movement has been working on its international networks by founding a global national-conservative movement with the Russian far-right party Rodina ("Motherland"), which supports Vladimir Putin and from which his Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin hails. https://www.youtube.com/embed/m9tAKY8q7zs?wmode=transparent&start=0
The organization does not want to limit itself to defending the white race or Christians, and invitations to participate in the movement have been sent to 58 groups around the world, including Thailand, Japan, Syria, and Mongolia. In the United States, ties have been established with white supremacist Jared Taylor, who is close to French theorist Guillaume Faye.
For France, she had sent invitations to Action Française, Renouveau Français (a now defunct neo-fascist group, from which came a young Frenchman convicted by Ukraine in 2018 for trafficking weapons and explosives, with two other French radicals convicted in 2023 for similar trafficking), Unité continentale, and Yvan Benedetti's Nationalists (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 claims that there is a global Jewish conspiracy to destroy traditional nations and values, and its leader has taken up the fight against the "Jewish oligarchs" of Kiev. Nevertheless, this is still a stopgap measure: this radical movement was set up at the end of 2015, while at the beginning of the year Rodina had attempted to bring together populist parties such as the National Front for France in an "international forum of conservatives" – but the FN, cautious, declined...
There is no chance of the pressure easing: in spring 2020, the United States added the Russian Imperial Movement and the Imperial Legion to its list of "international terrorist organizations," accusing them, among other things, of training Swedish neo-Nazi terrorists. https://www.youtube.com/embed/_fEp7PZmzus?wmode=transparent&start=0
The fact remains that the Azov regiment had a magnetic effect on radicals, especially since 2015 saw the emergence of a new movement, accelerationism, which can be defined as a totalitarian subculture of a nebulous neo-Nazi sect with millenarian terrorist tendencies (it is responsible for numerous attacks, including those in Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, etc.).
The trend emerged thanks to a transnational English-speaking forum founded by a Russian aficionado of 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 from Ukraine in 2020.
It can also 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 the 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 "land of origin" where it would be possible to live autonomously during the collapse caused by the imminent general outbreak of racial war—they were arrested before carrying out their terrorist act. This case is the first far-right case to be tried in a criminal court, with sentences ranging from one to eighteen years' imprisonment in the first instance; the appeal trial opened on September 16.
The most extreme strand of white nationalism has thus ended up turning the arguments of neo-Eurasianism against Russia: if Russia represents the meeting point of diverse traditions and ethnic groups, then the white cause is Ukrainian.
Thus, while between 2014 and 2019, right-wing extremists of 55 nationalities volunteered to fight in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their allegiance has shifted dramatically. According to French intelligence, in 2022, the 50 or so French radicals present were now overwhelmingly on the Ukrainian side. For them, it was a replay of the battle of 1942, when the invasion of the USSR was presented as a battle between Europe and Genghis Khan. When a French fighter died in the spring of 2022, his comrades in the Misanthropic Division paid tribute to him by evoking 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, claiming that the French state was sending its mercenaries, according to an official statement relayed by pro-Russian French associations such as SOS Donbass... Outside of armed engagement, it should also be noted that while WaffenKraft members were unable to attend the Ukrainian neo-Nazi festival, this was not the case for militants from the GUD and the Zouaves (disbanded by the state 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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