European New Right

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

Where is Alain Soral coming from? Or, from “Game” to Social Conservatism

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A young Alain Soral discusses “game” on television

Born on October 2, 1958, Alain Soral had by all accounts a miserable family life, beaten by his father, a downwardly-mobile déclassé who was convicted of fraud and lost his properties. He went to Paris in 1976 doing odd jobs. Despite having no high school diploma, he found work in the cultural-media-advertising world through his sister Agnès Soral, who as an aspiring actress had a growing network in the mondain world of Paris show business and commercial culture (e.g. marketing).

Alain apparently hated this work as unfulfilling and morally bankrupt, finding it terribly boring. He seems to have been motivated by a sharp sense of humiliation as a bourgeois-turned-proletarian (saying he had a “double consciousness” as both proletarian and bourgeois as a result), a sharp intellect, an acute sensitivity to the nuances of social life around him, and a hunger to prove himself and be loved. Those who have followed the careers of Roissy/Heartiste and RooshV may find it interesting that the young Soral was a dragueur de rue (a street pick-up artist), apparently coming to bed over 800 women, especially enjoying young, narcissistic bourgeois women as a form of “class struggle.”

Jonathan Bowden, who stressed the link between art and radical, dissident politics, might not be surprised to learn that Soral’s first interest was in the arts, going on to study at the Paris Beaux-Arts. He read a large amount of political literature, mainly Marxist, including Michel Clouscard, Lucien Goldmann, György Lukács and others. He would later write in the third person: “Alain Soral, former dragueur de rue who loved books as much as girls, so much so that he has not chosen between them.” Here is clearly a “cultured thug”…

Depressed and reportedly contemplating suicide, he co-authored a book on fashion (Les Mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, 1984), apparently as a challenge to himself, which became a surprise best-seller. It soon became Soral’s ambition to liberate himself from wage slavery by living modestly from books. Over the next decades he would publish the following works:

  • La création de mode: Comment comprendre, maîtriser et créer la mode(1987)
  • Le Jour et la Nuit, ou la vie d’un vaurien(1991): An autobiographical novel he wrote while being a castle caretaker; did not sell well.
  • Sociologie du dragueur(1996): His guide to “game,” really a kind of autobiographical essay with powerful meditations on epistemology (theory vs. practice, intellectual vs. practitioner), male-female roles, and human existence.
  • Vers la feminization ? : Démontage d’un complot antidémocratique(1999): An attack on official and narcissistic bourgeois feminism.
  • Jusqu’où va-t-on descendre ? Abécédaire de la bêtise ambiante(2002): Politically incorrect analyses of various aspects of contemporary politics and society.
  • Socrate à Saint-Tropez: texticules(2003): The same as above, with legally risqué critiques of communautarisme(e.g., the rise of lobbying by gay/feminist/Jewish elites), the subtitle being a pun on “small-texts” and “testicles”.
  • Misères du désir(2004): A novel.
  • CHUTe ! Éloge de la disgrâce(2006): A novel on the decline and fall of an “honest journalist” (or on the inevitability of official journalism as propaganda).

Soral has also directed a film, Confession d’un dragueur, based on his books on seduction.

I will not attempt to psychoanalyze Soral to try to determine what has made him choose the remarkable and difficult path he has taken. But it is important to know the man’s biography given the nature of Soralian epistemology. Read more

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 1

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Gallic greetings

Alain Soral has become an influential presence on the French political and cultural scene. The following attempts to shed some light on this complex and fascinating figure.

Part 1:

  • What are Alain Soral’s political positions?
  • What is Alain Soral’s influence?
  • How has Alain Soral become so successful in building an audience?

Part 2:

  • What is Alain Soral’s background? Or, from “Game” to Social Conservatism
  • What is Alain Soral’s political experience? Or, from Communism to Nationalism
  • What are Alain Soral’s relations with other French nationalists?

Part 3:

  • What are Alain Soral’s relations with foreign nationalists?
  • What are Alain Soral’s views of race?
  • What is Alain Soral’s position on the Jewish Question?
  • Is Alain Soral of the Right?

Part 1

What are Alain Soral’s political positions?

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Typical iconography on the E&R website.

Soral’s political positions are complex but can be summarized as a “French Third Position.” Practical policies include: National sovereignty, halt of immigration, bankster-free economics, social conservatism, non-aligned foreign policy, end to nanny-statism and feminism, return to virility, alliance with Russia, ideally the creation of “European protectionism” to organize the economy on a Continental scale.

A major slogan is “reconciliation.” “Reconciliation” between the “Labor Left” and the “Values Right,” practically meaning a certain economic socialism and social conservatism. “Reconciliation” between ethnic French and Afro-Muslim French citizens around a civic nationalism. “Reconciliation” between the middle and working classes against speculative finance. Read more

Satan Lives in Moscow

The Ukrainian crisis has instigated an effort by the West to get into Putin’s mind, and this has inevitably led to his advisor, Prof Alexander Dugin, a leading Eurasianist and the architect of Putin’s geopolitics.

Inevitably, Dugin’s anti-liberalism has been a source of grave concern for American commentators. His book, The Fourth Political Theory, has been read with interest by a minority of them, who, though not necessarily in concert with Dugin’s geopolitical aims, do share his negative conclusions regarding liberalism and do recognise the need for something better. Needless to say, these commentators are outside the American mainstream.

Those inside the mainstream, being liberals to a man, have felt very threatened. For them, liberalism and Americanism are one and the same, and Dugin must therefore be a mad philosopher calling for the end of the world.

Among those most threatened, apparently, are the folk at the National Review. They have not only felt the need to publish multiple hit pieces about Dugin, but they have also enlisted a rocket scientist to write them. Enter Robert Zubrin. Read more

Nationalist Parties in the European Union: Electoral Goals and Political Hopes

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This is an abridged version of the talk to American Freedom Party members, given in Los Angeles, July 6, 2013.

At first sight it appears that launching a nationalist or a racialist, or a so-called right- wing party in Europe is a relatively easy task — easier than in the USA, where the two party system reigns supreme. But there are often legal and electoral tricks and traps in Europe, not to mention the powerful impact of the ideology of political correctness that hinders nationalist parties in Europe to advance in the political system. Unlike the United States, all 28 member states in the European Union have a fair number of nationalist parties, many of them with representatives at the national, local, or at the European level—although the number of their representatives is almost negligible and their voices hardly audible.

The advantage of the European electoral process is the proportional representation system, common to all states in the EU. It means in practice that a party, however large or small it may be, is assigned a number of seats in the parliament, or at the local council, or municipal level,  based on its proportional score in the election. Thus, if a party obtains 5 %, or 10 %, or 30% of votes it will be theoretically awarded with 5 %, 10%, or 30% of seats in a national parliament or at a local city council. Read more