Introduction

This study analyses the political ideas of two twentieth-century French intellectuals, Alfred Fabre-Luce (1899-1983) and Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987), between 1930 and the early 1950s. During this period, both intellectuals moved from the republican centre-left to fascism and the post-war extreme right. Despite these lasting extreme-right connections, they also reinvented themselves as right-wing liberals and cold warriors. My leading argument is that Jouvenel and Fabre-Luce’s political trajectory needs to be seen as the result of an interplay of Europeanism, fascism and (neo)liberalism. Not only were Europeanist and pacifist convictions an important element in both intellectuals’ ‘fascist drift’; the same ideas permitted them to make an important contribution to the post-war intellectual renewal of the French extreme right. Paradoxically, their continuing involvement with the extreme right did not collide with their post-war adherence to neoliberalism. Rather, Fabre-Luce and Jouvenel seem to have been inspired by anti-communist, Europeanist and elitist ideas that were common to both the extreme right and the early neoliberal movement. This interpretative framework is mainly based on scholarship on fascism and the French extreme right, but it also takes inspiration from other directions such as the study of internationalism, technocracy, early neoliberalism and collaboration during the Second World War. With this approach, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of the links between French fascism, Europeanism and intellectual renewal between the interwar and the post-war period.