For a moment a few years ago, it seemed that an international movement of racists was emerging to threaten liberalism, as white nationalists in the United States allied with “Identitarians” in Europe. The far-right French writer Guillaume Faye, who died last year, was one of the main figures in this drama, and his ideas were the subject of worried analyses in venues of mainstream American opinion. After the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, commentators such as Thomas Chatterton Williams cited the influence of Faye on white supremacists in the U.S., arguing that the attendees’ “rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine.”
Since then, the media has found other threats. Even “white supremacy” now appears to liberal commentators as an omnipresent legacy of our history rather than the ideology of a militant minority. With the “alt-right” now only a memory, it might seem pointless to reflect on Faye’s influence. But his writings reveal why appeals to white identity still resonate in France — and why, for some, a “racial civil war” is not a nightmare but a hope.
