The French far right’s fascination with Putin’s Russia
The ties between Russia and the French far right have changed significantly over time. After the 1917 Revolution, a number of Russian exiles aligned themselves with the French radical right, primarily out of anti-Soviet sentiment. During the Cold War, while the European far right—in France as elsewhere—remained largely hostile to communism, some of its members viewed 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,” holds significant appeal for the right wing of the French political spectrum; yet within this movement, the war in Ukraine has created a deep divide.
Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier and Olivier Schmitt, University of Southern Denmark
Nicolas Lebourg, an expert on the far right and a research associate 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 Moscow: A Century of the Far Right,” which has just been published by Éditions du Seuil. Here we present an excerpt from the book focusing specifically on the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on the French far right.
Following 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 some media attention; the arrest of some of its members even allowed the Russian news agency Sputnik to portray Ukrainian detention centers as Nazi concentration camps. This contribution by French nationalists is more a matter of psychological warfare and public relations than of military operations per se.
The strength of Russian propaganda lies in its ability to tap into a variety of ideological resonances. The core of the anti-American, anti-liberal, and authoritarian message accommodates a range of ideological options, from the far left to the far right, even though the human networks are largely structured around the right-wing side of the spectrum. Indeed, an appeal was also made to white nationalists in France and elsewhere. This time, the strategy involved leveraging the Russian Imperial Movement, founded in 2002 as a continuation of the hardline stance of the White Russians (those exiled following the 1917 revolution), by adding racist and Islamophobic dimensions, while maintaining ties to the Russian Ministry of Defense and its paramilitary offshoot, the Imperial Legion, founded in 2008.
As supporters of Great Russian and Orthodox nationalism, the legionnaires took part in the fighting 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 abandoning armed combat in Ukraine but would maintain its goal of “liberating” Kyiv 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 revived by Transnistrian separatists in the 2000s, and was taken up by Ukrainian separatists and the Russian neo-Eurasianist theorist Alexander Dugin in 2014 (who advocates for an authoritarian regime spanning Eurasia and its diverse peoples and religions). By playing on nostalgia for the Tsarist era, the aim is to assert the historical artificiality of the Ukrainian state.
In fact, the Legion has been redeployed to Syria and Libya, alongside the Wagner Group, and is returning to Ukraine to take part in the 2022 offensive. 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 aimed at strengthening the Antichrist’s kingdom.
This view of the world and of time implies that nationalists cannot remain confined behind their borders: the Legion asserts that it does not intend to establish cells solely in Russia, but throughout the Russian diaspora, following a model reminiscent of subversive organizations from the interwar period such as the Brotherhood of Russian Truth or the Pan-Russian Fascist Organization.
At the same time, beginning in 2015, the Russian Imperial Movement has been expanding its international networks by founding a global national-conservative movement in partnership with the Russian far-right party Rodina (“Motherland”), a supporter of Vladimir Putin and the political home of his Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin. https://www.youtube.com/embed/m9tAKY8q7zs?wmode=transparent&start=0
The organization does not wish to limit itself to defending the white race or Christians, and invitations to join the movement have been extended to 58 groups around the world, including those in Thailand, Japan, Syria, and Mongolia—in the United States, ties have been established with white supremacist Jared Taylor, who is close to the French theorist Guillaume Faye.
As for France, it had extended invitations to Action Française, Renouveau Français (a now-defunct neo-fascist splinter group that included a young Frenchman convicted in Ukraine in 2018 for trafficking in arms and explosives, with two other French radicals having been convicted in 2023 for similar trafficking), to Unité continentale and Yvan Benedetti’s Nationalists (which emerged following 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 conspiracy to destroy nations and traditional values, and its leader has taken up the fight against the “Jewish oligarchs” in Kyiv. Nevertheless, this is still a stopgap measure: this radical movement was established in late 2015, whereas earlier that year Rodina had attempted to bring together populist parties such as France’s National Front in an “international forum of conservatives”—but the FN, acting cautiously, had declined…
The pressure is unlikely to ease: in the spring of 2020, the United States designated the Russian Imperial Movement and the Imperial Legion as “foreign terrorist organizations,” accusing them, among other things, of training Swedish neo-Nazi terrorists. https://www.youtube.com/embed/_fEp7PZmzus?wmode=transparent&start=0
Nevertheless, the Azov Regiment has 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 ranging from a nebulous neo-Nazi sect to millenarian terrorism (it is responsible for numerous attacks, including those in Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo…).
The trend emerged through an English-language transnational forum founded by a Russian admirer of the Italian theorist Julius Evola and Guillaume Faye, whose American neo-Nazi members went on to create the organization AtomWaffen Division. These members popularized a fascination with Azov, and several of them were still being expelled from Ukraine as recently as 2020.
She is also 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 tried in a criminal court, with sentences ranging from one to eighteen years in prison at the first instance; the appeal trial began 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 convergence of diverse traditions and ethnic groups, then the white cause is Ukrainian.
Thus, while between 2014 and 2019, right-wing extremists from 55 different countries volunteered to fight in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their allegiances have shifted dramatically. According to French intelligence, by 2022, the roughly 50 French radicals present were overwhelmingly on the Ukrainian side. For them, the battle of 1942 is being replayed, when the invasion of the USSR was portrayed as a struggle 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 recalling his fight against “Bolshevism” and the “Asian hordes.”
This presence allowed Moscow to denounce France’s alleged support for the “Ukrainian Nazi regime” in January 2024, claiming that the French government was thereby sending its mercenaries, according to an official statement circulated by pro-Russian French organizations such as SOS Donbass… Beyond military involvement, it is also worth noting that while members of WaffenKraft were unable to attend the Ukrainian neo-Nazi festival, this was not the case for militants from the GUD and the Zouaves (dissolved by the 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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