2,165 words
Part 3 of 5
Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here
A VIRILE HUMANISM
The European peoples have built a unique civilization in history. Its creative power, despite the millennial, has not diminished. Those who are its declared enemies implicitly recognize its universality. Between the traditional East submissive to metaphysical rules and the new materialist societies, European civilization synthesizes spiritual aspirations and material necessities. Even when the uniformity of the mass is proclaimed as an ideal everywhere in the world, it exalts the individualism of the strong, the triumph of human quality over mediocrity.
It summarizes within itself the equilibrium to be established as a solution to the upheavals created by the technical revolution in the life of mankind. Founded on the values of the individual and the community, this new harmony can be defined as a virile humanism.
A new table of values, this virile humanism rejects the false laws of numbers and seeks to submit the power of technique and of the economy to the civilizing will of the European man. He will find again, on a familiar ground, within his lineage and in the original culture of his own people, a world to his measure. He will discover the meaning of his life in the accomplishment of his own destiny, in the fidelity to a way of life founded on the European ethic of honor.
The ethic of honor is opposed to the slave morality of liberal or Marxist materialism. It affirms that life is a battle. It exalts the value of sacrifice. It believes in the power of the will over events. It bases the relationship between men of the same community on loyalty and solidarity. It confers on work an importance independent of profit. It recovers the sense of the true dignity of mankind, not granted but conquered by permanent effort. It develops in the European man the consciousness of his responsibilities in relation to the humanity of which he is the natural organizer.
A LIVING ORDER
The legitimacy of a power cannot be summarized as the observation of eminently variable written laws or to the consent of the masses obtained by the psychological pressure of propaganda. A power is legitimate which observes the rights of the Nation, its unwritten laws revealed by history.
A power is illegitimate which departs from the national destiny and destroys the national realities. Then legitimacy belongs to those who struggle to restore the rights of the Nation. A lucid minority, they form the revolutionary élite on which the future rests.
The world does not yield to a system, but to a will. It is not the system that you must look for, but the will. Of course, the very structure of the State must be conceptualized around some guiding principles: authority, continuity, the power of design are combined in a collegial form; this one must draw on a hierarchical corps of political cadres, assisted by a true popular representation of the professions and the regional communities qualified to deliberate on their own problems. But it is especially important to forge the men on whom the community and the future of civilization will rest.
It is neither electronic equipment nor the scientists that will decide the fate of humanity. The immense problems presented by the new technical developments demand a political élite called by vocation, endowed with an iron will at the service of a clear consciousness of its historical mission. This overwhelming responsibility will justifiably demand more from them than from other men.
Five percent of individuals, the sociologists admit, are profoundly perverted, crazy, vicious. At the other extreme, one can observe the same proportion of men who possess, naturally and in a developed way, particular qualities of energy and self-sacrifice that predispose them to serve the community and to lead it. The democracies that install the reign of fraud and money are, in large part, dominated by the first. The Nationalist revolution will have to eliminate the former and impose the latter.
The selection and the education, from youth, of this élite of men will be among the primary preoccupations of the new society. Their formation will stimulate the vigor of their character, develop their spirit of sacrifice, and will open their intelligence to the intellectual disciplines. Maintained in their original purity, not only by their commitment of honor, but also by a strict and particular rule, they will form a living order constantly renewed over time, but always similar in its spirit. Thus, the power of financiers will be replaced by that of believers and of combatants.
AN ORGANIC ECONOMY
The economy is not an end in itself. It is an element in the life of societies, among the principal ones, but only one element. It is not the source or the explanation of the evolution of humanity. It is an agent or a consequence. It is in the psychology of peoples, their energy, and their political virtues that one finds the explanation of history.
The economy must be subjected to the political will. Let this disappear—as is characteristic of liberal régimes—and unchecked economic forces drag society towards anarchy.
Also, the immense problem of the economy is naturally part of the Nationalist revolution. It would be to revert to the mortal errors of the “nationals” to deny its importance or to get rid of it by a miracle word also subject to confusion and to dispute, such as “corporatism,” for example.
Capitalism has created an artificial world where mankind is maladjusted. In other respects, the popular community is exploited by a narrow caste that monopolizes all power and aspires to international supremacy. Finally, capitalism hides under a debauch of new words an anachronistic conception where the economy carries all the consequences. These criticisms apply word for word to communism.
The solution to the maladjustment of mankind in a world that is not made for him is, as we have seen, a political problem. Technical and economic development does not find in itself its own justification; this is dependent on its utilization. The new State will subject the economy to its designs, to make it a tool of a new European spring. Creating civilized values, forging the weapons of the necessary power, elevating the quality of the people, will then be its goals.
It is in a total transformation of the structure of the company (we speak only of the company that financial capitalism has assimilated, not the small family company which must be preserved and where there is no problem) and the general organization of the economy that the means reside to destroy the exorbitant power of the technocratic caste, to suppress the exploitation of the workers, to establish a real justice, to find again true economy and healthy functioning.
In a capitalist régime as in a communist régime, the company is the exclusive property of the financiers in the former and the State in the latter. For the wage earners, be they managers or simple workers, the results are the same: they are robbed, the wealth produced by their work is absorbed by capital.
This privileged position gives to capital all the powers of the company: direction, management, even when they are external and aim before everything else to make a financial profit, sometimes to the detriment of production and of the enterprise itself.
The famous words of Proudhon find their full meaning here: “Property Is Theft!” To abolish appropriation is the just solution that will give birth to the community enterprise. Capital will then take its just place as an element of production, side by side with work. The one and the other will participate, with a power proportionate to their importance in the enterprise, in the appointment of management, in its economic management, and in the distribution of real profits.
This revolution in the enterprise will fit in a new organization of the economy having for its base the professions and the regional geographic framework. To do away with the parasites and the power of financiers, it will create a group of intermediary bodies. These new structures, capable of being easily integrated into Europe, can find no better definition than that of “organic economy.”
A YOUNG EUROPE
The American and Soviet victory in 1945 has put an end to the conflicts of European Nations. The menace of adversaries and the common dangers, an obvious solidarity of fate in good and bad days, and similar interests have developed the sentiment of unity.
This sentiment is confirmed by reasoning. Unity is indispensable to the future of European Nations. They have lost the supremacy of numbers; united, they would recover that of civilization, of creative genius, of organizing power, and of economic power. Divided, their territories are doomed to be invaded and their armies to defeat; united, they would constitute an invincible force.
Isolated, they will become satellites, with the certainty of falling, as some have already done, under Soviet domination. European civilization will come under systematic attack and it will be the final end of the evolution of humanity. United, they will have, on the contrary, the means of imposing and of ensuring their civilizing mission.
Unity does not mean the continuation of financial and political organisms instituted after the war. Their purpose is to extend the international power of the technocracy that controls all its mechanisms, and to preserve the political and economic privileges that are hidden behind the advertisements of democracy. These institutions bring today, on a European scale, the vices and the words generated by the régime in each Nation, and multiply them. In the name of Europe, the development of these institutions accelerates its decline.
Unity does not mean leveling. Standardization and cosmopolitanism would destroy Europe. Its unity will be built around the national realities that each people intend to defend: historical community, original culture, attachment to the soil. To want to limit Europe to either Latin or Germanic influence would be to maintain its division, even develop a new hostility. But above all, it would deny the European reality realized by Rome and by the medieval era in the fusion of its two currents, Continental and Mediterranean.
To imagine Europe under the hegemony of one Nation would be to renew a bloody dream of which history bears recent scars. The diversity of languages and of origins is not an obstacle. Many States are multilingual and the Roman Empire, which built up the first European unity with regard to the peoples assembled and their cultures, had Emperors born in Rome as well as in Gaul, in Elyria, and in Spain.
Europe’s boundaries do not stop at the artificial limit of the Iron Curtain imposed by the victors of 1945. It includes the totality of European nations and peoples. Thinking of unity is, in the first place, to think of the liberation of all the captive nations from the Ukraine to Germany. The destiny of Europe is in the East: breaking the chains, overthrowing the Soviet tyranny, driving back the Asiatic tide.
Out of the European continental bloc, the peoples and the States that belong to its civilization form the West. Europe is its soul. Its complete solidarity will assert itself, notably with the Western centers of Africa. These positions are the bases for a new organization of the African continent, whose fate is tied to that of Europe.
In the construction of Europe, the underdeveloped peoples will find an example and solutions to their own difficulties. It is not beggary that they need, but organization. Europe possesses an incomparable corps of cadres specializing in overseas matters. No other power could compete with the organizational talent of these cadres shouldered by the awakened European dynamism. They will take these people out of misery and anarchy and bring them back to the West.
It will not be economic treaties that will unify Europe, but the adherence of its peoples to Nationalism. The obstacles that appear insurmountable are due to the democratic structures. Once the régime is swept out, these false problems will disappear by themselves. It is therefore obvious that without revolution no European unity is possible.
The success of the revolution in one Nation of Europe—and France is the only one to possess all the necessary conditions—will allow a rapid extension to the other Nations. The unity of two Nations independent of the régime will develop such a force of seduction and dynamism that the old system, the Iron Curtain, and the frontiers will collapse. The first step of unity will be political and will create a single collegial State in an evolutionary form. The other steps, military and economic, will follow. The Nationalist movements of Europe will be the agents of this unity and the core of the future living European order.
Thus the Young Europe, founded on the same civilization, the same space, and the same destiny, will be the active center of the West and of the world order. The youth of Europe will have new cathedrals to construct and a new empire to build.
3 Comments
This is an interesting series.
It would be helpful to know when the essay was written, and the original French title, date and publication source.
Textual analysis suggests that it was penned sometime before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Pour une critique positive” was written by Dominique Venner in prison and first published in 1962 after his release. I don’t know where and by whom the first edition was published. It is often difficult or impossible to identify such details for these kinds of publications, as they are often self-published and have a small and narrow circulation. I have read somewhere that “Pour une critique positive” was first published anonymously, but Venner definitely wrote it.
Very impressive! Thank you for your information.
While I’m at it, I should mention that the National Alliance published an analysis in 1977 entitled “Roger Degueldre and the O.A.S.”
It was republished in Kevin Alfred Strom, ed., The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid, 1970–1982 (1984), 106–109.