# Alain de Benoist **Alain de Benoist** (born 11 December 1943) is a French political philosopher and the central intellectual figure of the **[[Nouvelle Droite]]** (French [[New Right]]). He is the principal theorist behind two ideas the entire [[Identitarian Movement]] runs on — [[Ethnopluralism]] and metapolitics — making him the upstream source code for movements he never formally led, from [[Génération Identitaire]] to the American alt-right. ## GRECE and the metapolitical project In **1968**, de Benoist co-founded **GRECE** (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne — "Research and Study Group for European Civilization"), the think tank established in Nice that became the institutional heart of the Nouvelle Droite. GRECE's strategy was explicitly **metapolitical**: borrowing the concept of cultural hegemony from the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and inverting it, de Benoist argued that the right must win the battle of ideas and culture *before* it can win political power. The goal was not to contest elections but to change what a society takes for granted — to make certain ideas sayable and others unsayable. This is the strategic doctrine that [[Génération Identitaire]] and [[Identity Evropa]] later operationalized as flyering, stunts, and viral media. De Benoist was a prolific output machine in service of this strategy, producing hundreds of books and articles; his 1977 essay collection *Vu de droite* ("A View from the Right") won a prize from the Académie française, a marker of the Nouvelle Droite's bid for intellectual respectability. ## The "cultural turn in racism": ethnopluralism De Benoist's most consequential contribution is **[[Ethnopluralism]]**. In the 1970s he shifted the French far right's framing away from biological, hierarchical racism toward a **cultural** model: the claim that all peoples possess distinct ethnocultural identities, that each has a "right to difference" (*droit à la différence*), and that the mixing of peoples therefore destroys human diversity and should be opposed. By recasting exclusion as the defense of diversity, ethnopluralism let the far right borrow the vocabulary of multiculturalism and anti-colonial "respect for difference" to argue for ethnic separation. Scholars have named this move precisely. The French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff called it **"differentialist racism"** — racism that operates through the absolutization of cultural difference rather than the assertion of racial hierarchy — and described ethnopluralism as a strategic disguise for supremacist ideas behind egalitarian-sounding language. Academics situate it within "the cultural turn in racism," the passage from pseudo-scientific biological racism to culture-and-ethnicity-based exclusion among European far-right intellectuals. ## Influence and significance De Benoist's framework diffused across Europe — into Germany, Italy, Belgium, and beyond — and supplied the conceptual toolkit for the next generation: the [[Identitarian Movement]] is essentially the Nouvelle Droite's metapolitics and ethnopluralism turned into a youth brand. His ideas also circulate in the broader transnational anti-liberal milieu connected to figures like Russia's [[Alexander Dugin]]. For the KB, de Benoist is the theorist-tier anchor of the identitarian cluster: where [[Renaud Camus]] supplied the conspiracy ([[Great Replacement Theory]]) and [[Martin Sellner]] supplied the activism, de Benoist supplied the **strategy** (metapolitics) and the **disguise** (ethnopluralism) that make the whole project legible as something other than classical white supremacism. ## See Also - [[New Right]] — the Nouvelle Droite tradition he leads - [[Ethnopluralism]] — his signature doctrine - [[Identitarian Movement]] — the downstream youth movement - [[Renaud Camus]] — supplied the Great Replacement conspiracy - [[Alexander Dugin]] — parallel anti-liberal theorist ## See Also - [[French History Hub]] — where metapolitics sits in the longer French sequence - [[Marion Maréchal]] — the cadre-school version of the same premise