Early life and education

Guillaume Faye was born on 7 November 1949 in Angoulême from a bourgeois family close to the Bonapartist right.^[6] He attended the Paris Institute of Political Studies, where he ran the student's associations Cercle Pareto and Association GRECE between 1971 and 1973.^[8][6]

GRECE

On the advice of Dominique Venner, Faye joined GRECE in 1970, an ethno-nationalist think tank led by Nouvelle Droite thinker Alain de Benoist.^[2] He soon became the head of movement's Secretariat for Research and Studies, and one of the major Nouvelle Droite theorists. Faye wrote at that time for many New Right journals such as Éléments, Nouvelle École, Orientations, and Études et Recherches.^[6] From 1978, he became a promoter of the strategy of "metapolitics" embodied by GRECE, although he eventually failed his project of entryism within the mainstream right-wing newspaper Figaro Magazine.^[9]

At the same time, in the early 1980s, he gave courses in the sociology of sexuality at the University of Besançon.^[10]

Departure from GRECE

According to Nicolas Lebourg, Guillaume Faye was expelled from GRECE at the end of 1986, and his eviction was notably caused by his references to Jean-François Thiriart^[11] After intellectual and financial disagreements with de Benoist, Faye was marginalized in GRECE. He is said to have been ousted from the think tank in late 1986, although his departure was only officially announced in August 1987 via a letter wrote by Pierre Vial to the newspaper Le Monde.^[12] According to Robert Steuckers, on the other hand, Guillaume Faye would have left on his own in April-May 1987, due to disagreement on the evolution of GRECE and the way he was treated by Alain de Benoist.

Faye justified his departure as follows: "The New Right, like GRECE, are no more than a shadow of themselves and have given up the fight for identity. They have abandoned any idea of defending European identity and, like false rebels, eager to be recognized (obviously in vain) by the system, they align themselves completely with the positions of the far left and the diplomatic world , for example: Islamophilia, Third-worldism, radio silence on immigration (“avoidance” strategy: above all not talking about what shocks), summary anti-capitalism, relentless and ineffective anti-Americanism, distressing, rowdy and hateful anti-Zionism”.^[3] Later, he published in his book L'Archéofuturisme(1998) a memorandum, in which he underlines the responsibilities of Alain de Benoist in what he considers to be the failure of the “new right”. He believes that it has become bogged down in "dead ends", such as a folk paganism, a "revised leftism", or a "fetishism for empty words". He believes that the concept of the new right has gone bankrupt because "now burdened with too many ambiguities."

Media Career

Faye then distanced himself from political activism and became actively involved with the media industry. Between 1991 and 1993, he worked as an entertainer under the name of 'Skyman' at the urban radio station Skyrock.^[9] He was also a journalist at L'Écho des Savanes and VSD, and appeared on the France 2 talk-show Télématin.^[13] Faye taught the sociology of sexuality at the University of Besançon,^[14] and he has also claimed to have acted in pornographic films.^[9][15]

Return to political activism

Faye went back to political activism in 1998 with the publication of his book Archeofuturism, followed in 2000 by The Colonization of Europe.^[16] The latter, criticized as "strongly racist" by de Benoist, earned him a criminal conviction for incitement to racial hatred.^[17] Faye organized conferences with GRECE sympathizers, Monarchists, Traditional Catholics and neo-Pagans. At the request of de Benoist, however, he was excluded once again from GRECE in May 2000.^[16]

Faye then became close to Terre et Peuple, a neo-Pagan movement founded in 1995 by former GRECE members Pierre Vial, Jean Mabire and Jean Haudry, but he was also expelled in 2007 after the publication of his book The New Jewish Question ('La Nouvelle Question Juive'),^[16] regarded within some revolutionary-nationalist and Catholic traditionalists circles as too overly "Zionist".^[18] In 1999 and 2002, he was invited to speak at conferences organized by the Club de l'Horloge, a national-liberal think tank led by Henry de Lesquen.^[19]

Faye died on 6 March 2019, after a long battle with cancer.^[20] While his death received limited media coverage in the mainstream press, he was praised by many far-right activists, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, Dan Roodt, Daniel Friberg, Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, and Martin Sellner.^[21]

GRECE period (1970–1987)

A key concept of Faye's thought is that paganism – viewed as a quasi-ideal object aligned on the cosmic order that allowed for a holistic and organic society – is a rooted and differentialist religion, and thus a solution to the dominant "mixophile" and universalist worldview of the West.^[9] Faye has also participated in the diffusion of an identity defined as biological and cultural.^[22] In 1979, he argued that immigration, rather than immigrants, should be combated in order to preserve cultural and biological "identities" on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.^[23]

His first books, published in the early 1980s, developed a rejection of the consumerist society and the standardization and Westernization of the world, one of Faye's intellectual constants. For him, a multiracial society is by essence "multiracist", and he has called for the return of non-European immigrants to their respective "civilizational areas".^[22] In 1985, Faye stated that Zionist "opinion circles" in France had forced the French government to break ties with the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein, and he has denounced "Zionist lobbies" in the US that wished to influence geopolitics in favour of Israel.^[22] After his return to politics in the late 1990s, however, Faye reversed from his pro-Arab position and became a supporter of Israel as a potential political ally of circumstance against Arabs and Muslims.^[24]

Later period (1998–2019)

Through several books Faye published from the late 1990s onward, which he conceived as an appeal to the "ethnic awareness" of Europeans, Faye became an important ideologue of nativism and advocated a form of racialism that scholar Stéphane François has described as "reminiscent of the 1900s to the 1930s".^[24] The "ethnic foundations of a civilization", Faye argued, "rest on its biological roots and those of its peoples."^[18] He has also made references to the "loyalty to values and to bloodlines", promoted natalist and eugenicist politics to resolve Europe's demographic issues, and adopted a racialist Darwinian concept of the "struggle of the fittest", regarding other civilizations as enemies to be eliminated.^[24]

Faye believed the West to be threatened by its demographic decline and decadent social fabric, by a supposed ethnoreligious clash between the North and the South, and by a series of global financial crisis and uncontrolled environmental pollution. To avoid the announced civilizational and ecological collapse, Faye has promoted an authoritarian regime led by a "born chief", a charismatic and providential man protecting the people's identity and ancestry, and taking the right decisions in emergency situations.^[14] Faye also condemned what he has called "ethnomasochism", defined as the self-hating of one's own ethnic group.^[22][25] In Why We Fight, originally published in 2001, Faye defined 'metapolitics' as the "social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for the sake of provoking profound, long-term, political transformation."^[26]

"Archeofuturism", a concept coined by Faye in 1998, refers to the reconciliation of technoscience with "archaic values".^[27] He argues that the term "archaic" should be understood in its original Ancient Greek, that is to say as the 'foundation' or the 'beginning', not as a blind attachment to the past.^[16] According to Faye, anti-moderns and counter-revolutionaries are actually mirror-constructs of modernity that share the same biased linear conception of time. Defining his theories as "non-modern", Faye was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of eternal return and Michel Maffesoli's post-modern sociological works.^[16] Political scientist Stéphane François has described archeofuturism as a combination of "post-modern philosophy, some elements of Western counterculture, and racism."^[28]