Philippe Baillet (writer)

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Philippe Baillet (born January 21, 1951), is a French essayist, political journalist and translator. He was one of the promoters of Julius Evola's thought in the French-speaking world.

Biography

In 1975, Philippe Baillet founded with Léon Colas and Pierre Magne the Julius Evola Center of Doctrinal Studies, of which he was secretary from 1975 to 1976.[1] He published Introduction to Evola's Work, but later opposed its republication, considering it a typical youthful work, with a sectarian and unnecessarily grandiloquent style.[2]

Baillet was initially involved in the national-revolutionary movement. At the beginning of 1977, he founded, with Georges Gondinet and Daniel Cologne, the journal Totalité,[3] which published 27 issues until 1987. The periodical, subtitled "For the European Cultural Revolution," was the standard-bearer, in the French-speaking world, of the current of "revolutionary traditionalism" or "integral traditionalism," a movement that developed in circles distinct from those of the New Right (NFD).[4] Inspired by certain currents of the Italian radical Right, such as those led by the editor Franco Freda and by Claudio Mutti, the leaders of this current attempt to unite "traditional thought" (Julius Evola, René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon) with a doctrine of revolutionary action. It is a question of affirming, "at the dawn of the long march of the European revolution, the will to engage in a total combat — spiritual, cultural, political, against the forces, manifest or occult, decided to bring to a conclusion the process, begun a long time ago, of the complete denaturation of Europe [...] Totality will enlighten and support, in Europe and outside of Europe, the movements acting in the direction of the struggles of national and popular liberation against the worldist oligarchies".

In 1978, Baillet published, in collaboration with Jean-Louis Duvigneau, a French nationalist-revolutionary militant converted to Islam, a text: Sur la Libye de Kadhafi et l'imbécilité droitiste, inserted in a brochure in support of Franco Freda, then imprisoned.

In 1979, he made a contribution to the work La Droite aujourd'hui, directed by Jean-Pierre Apparu.[5] In 1982, he participated in the creation of Éditions Pardès with Georges Gondinet and Daniel Cologne.[6]

Totalité published a number of doctrinal pamphlets, such as Elements for a New Nationalism[7] and To End Fascism,[8] including many texts translated from Italian by Baillet, such as The Disintegration of the System by Freda or The Right and the Crisis of Nationalism by Adriano Romualdi. The circle then created the Editions Pardès and the reviews Kalki (Action and Tradition), Rébis (Sexuality and Tradition) and L'Âge d'Or (Spirituality and Tradition).

In 1981, Philippe Baillet left the editorial staff of Totalité, while continuing to collaborate as a translator with Pardès.

Réné Monzat notes that in 1985, Baillet stopped calling himself a national socialist.[9] At first critical of the "neo-titanism" (that is, essentially, the cult of technology, anti-orientalism, nominalism and evolutionism) of the NFD, like most of the traditionalists-revolutionaries, Baillet went on to collaborate with the reviews of the GRECE, believing that in 1985 "none of the criticisms formerly addressed to the NFD still had any reason to exist". In 1985, he left Totalité, after the publication of issue 11, and became, for a short period (1985–1986), the editorial secretary of the reviews Nouvelle École, Éléments, Panorama des idées actuelles and Études & Recherches.

In 1988, he became independent again and created a quarterly bulletin, Les Deux Étendards: Documents et acteurs de l'antimodernité. But the experience of Les Deux Étendards ended after two years. He then launched the Editions Hérode (1993–1994). At that time, he continued his collaboration with several journals such as Éléments and Nouvelle École.[10]

In 1991, he criticized the label of "revolutionary traditionalism" that some people attached to the movement in which he was involved. "We must not give in to the suggestions of the enemy," Baillet asserted, "for example by seeking to dissolve the revolutionary poison in the nectar of Tradition, such as those who speak of working... for the 'traditional revolution' of tomorrow".

It can be noted that Stéphane François, who is nevertheless a declared opponent of the movement in which Baillet was envolved, recognized the scientific quality of his writings.[11]

The year 2010 marked Baillet's return to Nietzsche, but also his return to the substantive debates among the radical Right. He has returned to the polemical style of his "traditionalist-revolutionary" years, but some of his positions have changed. Worried about the ongoing clash of civilizations, he now severely condemns the Islamophile postures, still very common in large sectors of the radical Right. In 2010, he also published For the White Counter-Revolution: Faithful Portraits and Unfettered Readings. It is a collection of previously published articles. The preface, however, indicates the modifications that Baillet gives to his orientations. First, he encourages the French reader to look at the radicalization of conservatism and the emergence of a racialist right in the United States. Second, he rejects the term "revolutionary" in favor of "counterrevolutionary". This counter-revolution, according to Baillet, will be racial, because "our only chance of survival is linked to the appearance of a new human type of white race in the civilizational and ethnic wars that are coming."

Baillet violently attack those on the right who refused, out of short-sightedness or conformism, to undertake a reappraisal of their own past. In particular, he published several articles against Alain de Benoist, in whom he saw a left-wing intellectual whose real ambition was limited to gaining media recognition. Similarly, in 2013, he published a virulent response to Hervé Ryssen's article, "Men who walk in circles." Under the title "Men who go round in circles and those who go straight into the wall. From Hervé Ryssen to Gianantonio Valli," Baillet defended Nietzsche and Evola and castigated Ryssen's "alimentary anti-Semitism", "conspiracionism" and lack of seriousness and rigor.

In 2015, Le Parti de la vie was published. In it, Baillet presented the portraits of "clerics and warriors of Europe and Asia". In stating his return to Nietzsche, he endorsed the theory of Giorgio Locchi and Adriano Romualdi, according to which it is necessary to assume the significance of the totality of counterrevolutionary thought. In Baillet's view, there is a counter-revolutionary continuity, from Burke, Carlyle and Gobineau, through the Romantics, to fascism (and National Socialism), understood as a European phenomenon. Nietzsche marks the advent of the modern, revolutionary, superhumanist Right.

With the publication of the large volume L'Autre Tiers-mondisme: des origines à l'islamisme radical (2016), Baillet would attempt to launch a substantive debate within various Right-wing circles. He performs a real self-criticism of his traditionalist-revolutionary period, before proceeding to a fundamental critique of all right-wing Islamophiles and Third Worldists (from Johann von Leers and Guénon to the Strasser brothers, from Claudio Mutti to Alain Soral and Christian Bouchet). Baillet does not give in to the "racialism of the simple" and the basic Islamophobia of Guillaume Faye. He calls his book Comprendre l'Islam a "gag". Dismissing both Islamophiles and "Islamophobes", Baillet make his position clear: "all the "posterity of Abraham" (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) participates, in spite of obvious and very important differences, of a common essence, Semitism, fundamentally foreign to the deep Indo-European mentality". In conclusion, he states that "the sun rises in the East for European nationalists. It is now the Eurosiberian myth [...] that must nourish their struggle and their dream of tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. In a totally unpredictable future, the immense Russia will perhaps be the rear base from which to launch the reconquest in order to build an empire that would extend from Dublin to Vladivostok."

In 2017, he published Piety for the Cosmos, an essay devoted to "ecology as seen from the Right" and deep ecology, in which he establishes a filiation between the Conservative Revolution and the environmental movements.

He currently directs the theoretical journal Sparta, launched in the fall of 2020.

Works

  • Introduction à l'œuvre d'Evola (1975)
  • Julius Evola e l'affermazione assoluta (1978)
  • I fondamenti della politica tradizionale secondo A.K. Coomaraswamy (1987)
  • Julius Evola ou La sexualité dans tous ses "états" (1995)
  • Pour la contre-révolution blanche: portraits fidèles et lectures sans entraves (2010; under the pen name Xavier Rihoit)
  • Le Parti de la vie: clercs et guerriers d'Europe et d'Asie (2015)
  • L'Autre Tiers-mondisme : des origines à l'islamisme radical: Fascistes, nationaux-socialistes, nationalistes-révolutionnaires entre "défense de la race" et "solidarité anti-impérialiste" (2016)
  • Piété pour le cosmos: Les précurseurs antimodernes de l'écologie profonde (2017; with Giovanni Monastra)
  • De la confrérie des Bons Aryens à la nef des fous. Pour dire adieu à la droite radicale française (2018)
  • Pour l'honneur d'un camarade - Guillaume Faye (1949-2019) par-delà censure et récupération (2020)

Notes

  1. Boutin, Christophe (1996). "L'extrême droite française au-delà du nationalisme 1958-1996," Revue Française d'Histoire des Idées Politiques, No. 3,‎ pp. 113–59.
  2. Boutin, Christophe (1992). Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le Siècle. Paris: Éd. Kimé, pp. 419–55.
  3. Duranton-Crabol, Anne-Marie (1991). L'Europe de l'Extrême Droite de 1945 à nos jours. Bruxelles: Complexe, p. 67–68.
  4. François, Stéphane (2005). Les Paganismes de la Nouvelle Droite (1980-2004). Université du Droit et de la Santé - Lille II, p. 126.
  5. Camus, Jean-Yves; René Monzat (1992). Les Droites Nationales et Radicales en France: Répertoire Critique. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, p. 333.
  6. Lebourg, Nicolas (2010). Le Monde vu de la Plus Extrême Droite: Du fascisme au Nationalisme-révolutionnaire. Presses universitaires de Perpignan, p. 50.
  7. Cologne, Daniel (1977). Éléments pour un nouveau nationalisme. Paris: Cercle Culture et Liberté.
  8. Cologne Daniel; Georges Gondinet (1977). Pour en finir avec le Fascisme. Essai de critique traditionaliste-révolutionnaire. Paris: Cercle Culture et Liberté.
  9. Monzat, René (1992). Enquêtes sur la droite extrême. Paris: Le Monde éditions, p. 76.
  10. Duranton-Crabol, Anne-Marie (19888). Visages de la Nouvelle Droite: le GRECE et son histoire. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, p. 151.
  11. François, Stéphane (2011). La Nouvelle Droite et la "Tradition". Milan: Archè, pp. 82–83, 102–103.

External links