Dressed in pastel-coloured Sunday best, Charles does not look like your typical far-right extremist. Yet he is a member of Génération Identitaire, a militant French youth group keen to overcome the thuggish reputation of the far right. Génération Identitaire is a key example of contemporary nationalist movements and has become particularly notorious after the attack perpetrated by one of its members in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Génération Identitaire’s rallies in the suburbs of French cities feature speeches lamenting the replacement of Europeans by Muslims, “métissage imposé” (forced inter-breeding), chanting “La France est à nous” (“France is ours”), and provocative marches through areas inhabited by minorities, that often descend into beatings. These young nationalists told us that they march to reclaim Europe from foreign invasion by migrants that destroy French culture, stifle their aspirations, steal their jobs, their cities, and even their women.

They also seek to demonstrate the kindness of their ideas by assisting homeless people with food, clothes and hot drinks – but only if the people they help are French and, more specifically, “français de souche”, which usually refers to having white French ancestors.

As we march through the Parisian streets, Charles explains that Génération Identitaire is fuelled by love for the “real” French. For him, it is natural that patriotism should produce love for “his” people, as we saw with the beggars, as well as hatred and violence towards foreigners and feminists. Charles, following the example of Identitarian leaders, believes that nature has already produced a perfectly functional Western culture based around white race, Christianity and a “proper” social order.

They argue that any change in that “nature”, such as inclusion of foreigners or changes to the social role of women, is bound to destroy Western cultures. This is not racist, xenophobic or even harassment, Charles reassures as the march pauses to scream at a dark-skinned young woman to “go home”.

In common with the American alt-right and many anti-migration nationalists throughout the West, Charles believes that it is only natural that an identity looks after its own kin at the expense of others. It is not hatred, Charles insists, just self-preservation.

The New Right

Nationalists such as Charles often refer to themselves as the New Right, or read thinkers who do. They are not all as radical as he is, but a diverse grouping of politicians share the stream of New Right ideas. These include Donald Trump, Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg, European nationalists like Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbán, and newcomers such as Santiago Abascal and his Vox party in Spain.

All of these politicians maintain informal yet relatively loyal alliances with more extreme groups like Génération Identitaire, the US alt-right, or Fratelli d’Italia. Such groups bring together young activists and champion extreme nationalist causes and campaigning. Not content with democratic engagement, they act vigorously online and in the street against those they consider as threats to their very survival: immigrants, feminists and liberals.

It is very common for liberals and leftists to accuse new nationalists like Trump or Le Pen of returning to 1930s Nazism. Such accusations of fascism are mostly aesthetic: insults hurled at nationalists by ever more outraged liberal echo chambers. To nationalists, all opponents have become communist feminists; to liberals, nationalists are all wannabe Hitlers.

Our new research shows that the nationalist far right arises from a deeper history. New Right ideas are clearly not a revival of 1930s fascism. Despite some similarities, today’s nationalists are more directly inspired by a late 19th-century French line of thinking.

We spent the last two years analysing hundreds of documents written by New Right thinkers and their forebears to explain how and why these ideas take root. This ideological history is important if today’s nationalists are to be understood, and if there is to be any hope of overcoming the racism and sexism inherent to their ideas.

What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.

Beginnings

Nationalism is the dark cousin of liberalism. Both seek to establish freedoms and rights. If the French Revolution gave rise to the “rights of man”, Napoleon’s subsequent coup and his idea of the “nation” argued that only the French, not all men, should enjoy those rights. Half a century later, nationalism was being regularly used by politicians like Otto von Bismarck to confront expanding claims to political rights with the argument that the national necessity of a vaguely defined identity trumped granting certain rights to citizens.

These ideas drew heavily on ethno-nationalist geopolitics, which treated each nation as a distinct species struggling for survival. International relations was viewed as a zero-sum game where the survival of a nation sometimes necessitates the destruction of others.

Then Maurice Barrès came along 1897. He was the thinker behind a very specific set of nationalist ideas that developed more restrictive definitions of national identity than those of the previous nationalist pioneers. His idea of nationalism was focused on birth and culture, rather than civil belonging (as for Napoleon) or loyalty (as for Bismarck). Our research has found that key ideas in today’s New Right find their roots in Barrès and especially retain his ideas about culture and racial birth.

Barrès theorised that the culture and integrity of a nation was “eternal”, and that any change to it, whether brought about by foreign influence or progressive politics, would bring about its demise. Any cultural change, be it to the arts, to the role of women, or to racial assumptions, was seen to erode the spirit of the nation and its way of life. Ideas about the state, belonging and politics, which emerged from Barrès and like-minded thinkers like Charles Maurrastended to advocate racial and cultural exclusion as necessary to national survival.

The key idea introduced by Barrès was the link between race and culture. It meant that culture needed to remain unchanged if it was to survive, as did the race that produced it. Even more importantly, it introduced the notion that any progressive, modern or culture-changing idea endangered the nation’s survival. This idea has found its way to the heart of New Right nationalism today, which is why they attack liberals, socialists, feminists, progressives, and their institutions as much as foreigners.

BREAKING: Nigel Farage has joined President Trump in declaring: ‘I am not a feminist’. He told @GMB : ‘I don’t know what it means.’

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) January 29, 2018

Fascist nationalism

Today’s New Right share much more with these 19th-century nationalists than the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s, like Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal. Yet it is important to understand why.

Fascists also believed that geopolitics was characterised by competition between states struggling for survival. But, rather than professing faith in the status quo, they pursued a revolution in all aspects of society to prepare for this existential struggle. They advocated radical social and even biological change. Cultural change was not avoided – as it is by nationalists today and was in the 19th century – but designed for.

Mussolini, for example, sought to dismantle Italian family values and relations, so as to foster new relations between individuals and the state. Working Italians were organised to eat, exercise and even socialise together, rather than with their families. This proposed a huge change to everyday life, reforming the structure of society to instil loyalty to the state and its leader.

Likewise, fascists sought racial purification and expansion through modern science. In anticipation of populating huge empires after the destruction of their original populations, Nazi scientific ambitionssought to double the German population by intervening in women’s bodies to ensure each pregnancy yielded twins.

Fascist nationalism gave total control to a saviour-leader. It demanded total discipline over the entire country and all of its social, cultural, biological, economic and even artistic functions.

Nostalgia and purification

Fascist revolution is clearly not the intellectual precedent of the nationalisms of today. The fascist generation of nationalists hoped to radically change their societies. Today’s nationalists want only to stop and reverse social change.

If we explore the New Right’s reasons for wishing to do so, we find the idea, pioneered by Barrès, that cultural change signifies decadence and corruption. This is why nationalists in our time have no plans to supercharge and empower their nation. They don’t need one. They believe in the perfection of national culture, and want to set it free from any presumption of equality with other identities. Once freed in this way, they argue, culture will thrive and fulfil its innate potential.