“The leaders of the National Rally have learned the lesson of Dominique Venner”

2024-01-04 09:00:01
A portrait of Dominique Venner held up during a march marking three years since his death, at the call of the Italian neofascist organization CasaPound, in Rome, May 21, 2016. PATRIZIA CORTELLESSA/PACIFIC

“The Besieged. In the head of Dominique Venner, the hidden guru of the extreme right”, by Renaud Dély, JC Lattès, 246 p., €20.90, digital €15 (in bookstores January 10).

On May 21, 2013, Dominique Venner, one of the most influential intellectuals of the French far right, committed suicide at the foot of the altar of Notre-Dame de Paris “in order to awaken sleeping consciences” facing “crime aimed at replacing our populations [européennes] » by an immigration of which he denounced “hostile swarm” since the 1960s. On Twitter, Marine Le Pen wrote: “All our respect to Dominique Venner whose last gesture, eminently political, was to try to wake up the people of France. » Political editorialist at Franceinfo, co-host of the show “28 minutes” on Arte, Renaud Dély devotes, under the title The Besiegedan in-depth, rigorously documented investigation into this figure who is both discreet and central, whom the National Rally, despite its strategy of “de-demonization”, has never denied.

How did you come to investigate Dominique Venner?

When I covered the National Front for Release, in the 1990s, I knew that it was an important ideological reference to the far right, even if it remained in the second line. We always found his complete works at gatherings organized by the FN or other groups of the movement, and I noticed that he was the object of veneration. But it was her suicide, and the meaning it took on at a time when Marine Le Pen was so close to power, that made me decide to embark on this investigation.

Because this gesture crystallizes the character’s entire vision of the world, his obsession with the “great replacement”, a fantasy that he stirred long before Renaud Camus popularized the expression – we must remember that the concept was forged in early 1950s by a racist and anti-Semitic activist, formerly of the SS Charlemagne division, René Binet [1913-1957]. Venner read Binet, and he was convinced that the West and the “white race” were under siege, hence my title. It is first of all this terror which motivates his gesture, this vision of a West submerged and collapsing. He was 78 years old, but in good health. It is not a suicide linked to any physical decline. It is an entirely political gesture, a symbolic act of calling for the revolt of the “white race”.

Why did he choose Notre Dame to accomplish it?

This choice surprised a certain number of people, who knew it to be fundamentally anti-Christian. In reality, Notre-Dame only mattered to him to the extent that it was built on the site of a Gallo-Roman temple. He was, with his friend Alain de Benoist, one of the representatives of the so-called “pagan” current of the extreme right, opposed to the traditionalist Catholic current. He considered Christianity as a religion of the weak which, by defending forgiveness and welcome, initiated the decadence of the West. He inscribed his death in a celebration of this mythologized ancient ideal, where Sparta played a central role, as a symbol of a cult of honor and war. But Sparta ended up being defeated by Athens. The thought of absolute decadence is always identified with the camp of the vanquished. This is radical defeatism.

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