Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist (də_bəˈnwɑː , alɛ̃ də bənwa; born 11 December 1943) – also known as Fabrice Laroche, Robert de Herte, David Barney, and other pen names – is a French journalist and political philosopher, a founding member of the Nouvelle Droite ("New Right"), and the leader of the ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE. Principally influenced by thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution, de Benoist is opposed to Christianity, the rights of man, neoliberalism, representative democracy, egalitarianism; and what he sees as embodying and promoting those values, namely the United States. He theorized the notion of ethnopluralism, a concept which relies on preserving and mutually respecting individual and bordered ethno-cultural regions. His work has been influential with the alt-right movement in the United States, and he presented a lecture on identity at a National Policy Institute conference hosted by Richard B. Spencer; however, he has distanced himself from the movement. Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien (now part of Tours), Centre-Val de Loire, the son of a head of sales at Guerlain, also named Alain de Benoist, and Germaine de Benoist, née Langouët. He grew up in a bourgeois and Catholic family. His mother came from the lower-middle class of Normandy and Brittany, and his father belonged to the Belgian nobility. During the Second World War, his father was a member of the Resistance armed group French Forces of the Interior. He was a self-declared Gaullist, whereas his wife Germaine was rather left-leaning, and the extended de Benoist family was divided between Free France and Vichy France during the conflict. His paternal grandmother, Yvonnes de Benoist, was the secretary of Gustave Le Bon. De Benoist is also the great-nephew of French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. De Benoist was still in high school at Lycée Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand during the turmoils of the Algerian war (1954-1962), a period that shaped his political views.