ABSTRACT
When Maurice Bardèche appealed for the constant revision of the “famous fascist methods,” he found a welcome ear in French New Right leader Alain de Benoist. He would begin this re-orientation process of the revolutionary right in 1968 and would be undeniably influenced by the events of that year. The principal ENR think tank Groupement de recherche et d’étude pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE – Group for Research and Studies on European Civilization) was officially established in the southern port city of Nice, France, in January 1968 by forty European members, including Alain de Benoist, and two prominent future secretarygenerals, Pierre Vial and Jean-Claude Valla. Nice provided a particularly favourable atmosphere for GRECE as a result of the large presence of French pieds noirs excolonists returning from Algeria and the avowedly right-wing views of its longserving mayor Jacques Médecin. The GRECE members were largely bourgeois professionals and intellectuals: teachers, university professors, writers, journalists, doctors and engineers. De Benoist was a graduate of the faculty of law and letters from the prestigious Sorbonne. GRECE modelled itself on left-wing think tanks seeking to re-invigorate socialist doctrines such as the French Club Jean Moulin of the 1960s: a collection of like-minded intellectuals, civil servants and politicians (Simmons 1996, 208). At the same time, they also claimed to aspire towards a more objective, detached style of research reminiscent of the prestigious Parisbased research institute, the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 32). Its purpose was the formation of a “community of work and thought” and the establishment of a coherent ideological corpus for the revolutionary right milieu (d’Appolonia 1987, 320).
