The New Right and Metapolitics in France and Italy

The label New Right (Nuova Destra in Italian or Nouvelle Droite in French), coined by the French press in the course of an intense media campaign during the summer of 1979, has long been a source of controversy and misunderstanding for both the protagonists of that political phenomenon and the various scholars who have dedicated themselves to the study of the history of the movement and its place in the politological catalog. Marco Tarchi, the foremost intellectual of the Nuova Destra in Italy, has shown how neither studies in the field of political science or historiography were able for many years to reach a consensus on a clear definition of the political phenomenon; rather, it was often associated with ideological subjects from the most heterogeneous of origins, "from Forza Italia to Skinheads, from Venetians to Reagan, from Thatcher to Sgarbi, from the Allenza Nazionale to Le Pen, from the anarcho-capitalists of the Northern League, from the Republican Visentini, who in the 1980s extolled the virtues of a technocratic government, up to intellectuals of Neofascist origin who made technocracy one of their favorite targets."¹ This innate confusion makes it difficult to argue with Pierre-André Taguieff, one of the foremost scholars of the phenomenon, when he claims that today this label seems "empty," "deceptive," "devoid of precise references," and that it maintains a "value of distinction" solely in the scientific realm, for the purposes of historical and politological research."²

The difficulty of approaching this singular movement in a critical way also appears in the work of Réne Remond, who during the course of his studies focused largely on the idea of the Right as a political category. In the preface to Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol's volume dedicated to the history of the GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne,or the Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization), the cultural association which served for years as the fulcrum of the New Right movement, he writes that the case of the New Right provides an excellent opportunity to bring to light those still unresolved questions that plague the researcher every time he or she prepares to investigate the explosion of "a new star in the ideological heavens." According to Remond, a study that attempts to analyze a recent political phenomenon faces a diverse set of problems, as the newness of the phenomenon makes it susceptible to different and often contrasting interpretations.

The first is that of originality . . . The first impulse of historians of ideas is always the search for influences ... From this a second problem arises, that of identifying the previous affiliations and associations of these influences. A particularly delicate task for the Nouvelle Droite that emerges in an already highly saturated sector. From here a range of comparisons among the schools of thought, movements, and ideologies to which the ideas of the GRECE seem to be related ... Infact, these papers might include reminiscences of counterrevolutionary theories, similarities to the Action Française, or resemblances to Fascist philosophies. Therefore, the temptation to reduce the phenomenon to a resurgence of one of these philosophical or political traditions is strong. But the study of ... Duranton-Crabol highlights the particularities of the movement that keep it from being assimilated into this or that antecedent ... Third question, also closely related to the other two: that of the identification of new phenomena. In the political universe, organized around a binary Right-Left division, where do we put the new schools of thought? ... The last question that the historian encounters, if he or she is interested in the patrimony of ideas as much as in their formation and coherence, is that of their diffusion and their influence.³

In the attempt to study or define the New Right in its basic form—that is to say, as a European phenomenon that gave rise to orientations that were either similar or directly inspired by the original French case throughout the entire continent—or some aspects of its ideological evolution, it is necessary to consider the...