How to build a far-Right revolutionary How would a fascist explain the radical Right?

The assumed culprits are many and somewhat incompatible: unorthodox medieval Catholic theologians, Protestant reformers who undermined Vatican authority, the atheistic French Enlightenment, English liberal individualism, Marxian socialism, progressivism, feminism — all culminating in the cultural catastrophe of the Sixties. The aftershocks we feel today — wokeism, transgenderism, identity politics — are the inevitable result of a wrong historical turn taken long, long ago. And so history itself must be made to change direction, now. This prophetic vision is very attractive, and very toxic, to young men eager to display a misplaced courage. They are obsessed with coming to the rescue, like real men. 

But how does one actually become a reactionary, psychologically speaking? What are the inner steps by which one moves from curiosity to despair, despair to anger, anger to commitment, and commitment to action? What exactly is happening to the young minds drawn to the radical Right today?

Over the past two centuries some of the great Western novelists have explored the revolutionary mind: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Conrad, Koestler… the list is long. But non-cartoonish portraits of the reactionary mind are vanishingly few. One of the least known is the French novel Gilles (1939), by the infamous fascist intellectual Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. It plunges more deeply into the psychology of Right-wing radicalisation than any novel of the period I know. Unfortunately, it remains untranslated, for obvious if mistaken reasons.

Drieu, as he was known, belonged to that class of young European men who returned from the First World War wounded in every sense, yet somehow also invigorated by the ecstatic experience of having faced death and survived. An Eastern European friend once told me that people get drunk because they are hoping to retrieve the beautiful rush of that first sip of vodka. Something similar was at work in the European post-war generation.

In the decades immediately after the war, contempt for the worlds of business and parliamentary politics was intense among those addicted to raptures. And this contempt extended to the Jews, who had been successful in both. At the popular level, Jews were seen as aggressive, domineering agents cleverly manipulating the world to their benefit, and stabbing in the back those rooted in the nation and its history. Among reactionary intellectuals the charges were, in some respects, the reverse. The Jews were portrayed as cowardly, physically weak, and effeminate chameleons without roots in any soil. As one character in Gilles puts it: “I cannot stand the Jews because they are, par excellence, the modern world which I loathe.” In contemporary terms, they are the quintessential “nowheres” and a threat to all “somewheres”.

Drieu’s Gilles is the Bildungsroman of a fascist, written by a fascist. It is also, unsurprisingly, highly autobiographical. Drieu served in the First World War, was wounded three times, and returned to his native Paris disgusted with the bourgeois decadence and political chaos of post-war Europe. Searching for a rush he drifted into the Dada and Surrealist artistic movements, frequented communists and royalists, and joined a radical Left-wing party before shifting decisively in the opposite direction after a far-Right anti-parliament riot was violently put down in Paris in 1934.

A year later, he joined a writers’ junket to Nazi Germany, attending the Nuremberg rally, and for a short while afterwards edited a journal he appropriately titled The End Times. When the Germans occupied Paris he plunged into the collaborationist world without hesitation, editing the once prestigious New French Review and writing occasional articles in the antisemitic press. He lost faith in Nazism by 1943, but saw the Occupation through. After the Liberation, when he came across a warrant for his arrest in a newspaper, he went home, swallowed some pills, put his head in an oven, and killed himself.

It was a tragic life, and Gilles is a tragic novel. Its main character, Gilles Gambier, is no highly polished hero. He, too, is a victim of the modern decadence he wants to combat. As the novel begins, we learn that he was an orphan, and so as rootless, traditionless, and solitary as everyone else in modern society. His loathing of the modern world is wrapped up with loathing of himself as its offspring, and this fuels his rage to force a radical break in himself and in history. Near the end of the war, he returns badly wounded to Paris, where high society is dominated by women and Jews and homosexuals, and the political world by spineless men too impotent to take decisive action and demagogues who exploit their weakness. The so-called radical intellectuals he meets who would bring the entire system down are even worse — solipsistic, confused dandies who talk but never act. In one of the novel’s brilliant subplots, a Left-wing conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister is hatched only to fall apart ineptly, and the politician’s son, who participated in the plan, kills himself.

In such a world of weak and cowardly men, Gilles’s looks and reserve make him attractive to many women, all but one of whom he treats heartlessly. He mocks their frivolity, their taste for bourgeois luxury, their pacifism. He even briefly marries a Jewish woman (as Drieu himself surprisingly did), only to cynically seize most of her money when they divorce. He then returns briefly to the war, risking his life rather than sharing it with a sensitive modern woman. Gilles’s misogyny and antisemitism are of a piece.

For a time, Gilles is attracted to the radical revolutionary ideas of Marxism, its will to destroy and build an entirely new order. But eventually he realises that the authority, discipline, and will to power he admired in communism is also present in fascism, without all the foolishness about human equality dreamed up by the Jews. Fascism is anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, anti-bourgeois, antisemitic, anti-women — in short, anti everything the modern age has imposed on the human race. This epiphany arrives at the end of the book’s last chapter and we are briefly led to wonder how he will find the opportunity to fight for his new fascist ideal.

In the Epilogue we get our answer. It is now the Spanish Civil War and Gilles joins up with a group of Catholic men who try to make sense of their rival commitments to the Church, the nation and the fascist cause. All they can agree on is that they “are for the virile Catholicism of the Middle Ages” and that in fascism they see the possibility of reconciling “the most ancient with the most new”. Gilles agrees and says he sees himself as belonging to a new military and religious order devoted to saving Europe. And that requires the spilling of blood, much blood. In the novel’s final pages, we find him shooting out of the embrasures of an old fort in a surely futile attempt to beat back a powerful Republican advance. He is about to die, but what’s on his mind is not Franco or fascism. Or liberalism, or communism, or even the Jews. It is the god Dionysius and Christ, the gods who die and are reborn in blood. His final thoughts are about “the Christ of the cathedrals, the great white and virile God. A king, a prince.”

The alert reader puts down Drieu’s novel convinced of one thing above all: that Gilles has no idea what he is actually fighting for, only one of what he hates. The tragedy is not that he chose to become an immoral fascist, but that young men in his position really had no choice. Modernity made them do it, Drieu would have us believe. In the end, the novel unwittingly reveals fascism to be one more cultural disease, of which it pretends to be the cure. It is pure Id, a scream reified into symbols and fanciful apocalyptic myths. What Gilles helps us to understand is how someone could find himself in this position — the role of inner passions and resistances and self-deceptions and lies, the small psychological steps that lead an ordinary young man to become a hate-filled spiller of blood.

Anyone who has spent time following far-Right young trolls on social media today will recognise the profile. Their confidence in their manhood is weak and so they lash out at women, dreamy indecisive liberals, and the physically vulnerable in pathetic displays of adolescent bravado, all from the safety of their mothers’ basements. They buy the supplements influencers tell them to, they follow goofballs who convince them to eat raw liver, they read long screeds by the Bronze Age Pervert which convince them they are the remnants of a dying breed. They are not the acned faces they see in the mirror, they are nigh unto gods. And they bring salvation at the end of times.