ABSTRACT
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 28, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer in the Department of Morbihan in Brittany, the far north western area of France, where agriculture and fishing have been traditional activities for centuries. One of the leading figures on the post-war extreme right was Maurice Bardèche, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and friend and brother-in-law of the anti-Semitic and racist intellectual Robert Brassilach. During the 1950s, Bardèche devoted himself to whitewashing the Nazis, attacking the Resistance, and defining a "pure" fascism adapted to post-war European conditions. Above all, fascism had to be somehow detached from the history of Hitler and Mussolini, cleansed of its association with anti-Semitism and racism, and reborn as a philosophy suitable for the post-war period. After the war those who followed Maurras split into two groups. One centered around the journal La Nation Française. The other, associated with journals such as Rivarol and Aspects de France.
