ABSTRACT
The year 1968 stands as a watershed in the evolution of the French extreme right. The disappearance of Occident, following that of Europe-Action and the FEN, removed the major channels for militant activism and ideological reflection respectively. The electoral failures of 1965 and 1967 had laid bare an absence of ideas with the capacity to mobilise popular support. The events of May and June 1968 further exposed the political weakness and disorientation of extreme-right movements faced with events which they were powerless to influence and on which they could not even readily determine their own best stance. In supporting de Gaulle as a bulwark against the radical left, many extreme-right groups had, for once, backed the winning side. When the barricades were removed, the need to engage in another battle – that of ideas – was evident to those who had already sought to promote doctrinal renewal through the pages of Europe-Action and the FEN’s Cahiers universitaires. Forsaking the failed methods of street confrontation and electoral competition alike, they turned inward to conduct a re-evaluation of their ideology and to bring about a ‘new culture of the right’ in France.1 The moral and intellectual hegemony of the left, they held, had been an established feature of French society since 1945. Even if left-wing parties had known only a brief relationship with political power in that period, left-wing thought had attained a predominant influence in the press, education and the wider intellectual establishment. This cultural power of the left had now been dramatised by a students’ and workers’ revolt which had taken on the character of a social revolution. The urgency of developing a strategy with which to respond effectively to the cultural ascendancy of the left led to the formation of what would become known as the ‘Nouvelle Droite’, or New Right.
