Christian Bouchet
Christian Bouchet (born 17 January 1955 in Angers, Maine-et-Loire) is a French far right journalist and politician.
Coming from a far right family with monarchist and Organisation de l'armée secrète links, in 1970 Bouchet became a member of the monarchist group Restauration nationale, and, in 1971, a member of Nouvelle Action française which was a split (called in France a "Mao-maurrassien" group) of the former.[1]
In 1973, he served the Organisation lutte du peuple which is a nationalist revolutionary split of the far-right movement Ordre Nouveau and which is defending the nationalist movements of the Third World, particularly the Arabic states opposite to the Zionism and to the American imperialism. Then he was a member of the Groupes nationalistes révolutionnaires of François Duprat and of the Mouvement nationaliste révolutionnaire of Jean-Gilles Malliarakis [2] After a spell in the Troisième Voie he set up Nouvelle Résistance in 1991 whilst also refounding the European Liberation Front.[3] This group was absorbed by Unité Radicale in 1998. He has since gone on to lead the study group Réseau Radical which emphasised anti-Zionism[4] and after that the association Les Nôtres. He has also led the 'radical' tendency within the National Republican Movement and has sat on its national council. Bouchet who was an exponent of the Third Position until 1990, was later influenced by Aleksandr Dugin and advocated National Bolshevism and then Eurasianism.
After declaring to have broken with his former activism, he joined the Front National in 2008 and became a local branch leader from October 2010 to May 2011 and from March 2013 to actually.[5] He was candidate of the Front National for every poll since 2008 and, in 2013, the Front National choose him to lead his list for the municipal elections in Nantes (the 6th town of France).[6][7] He is the father of Gauthier Bouchet, FN municipal councillor of Saint-Nazaire.
He had published journals like Lutte de Peuple and Résistance which focused on ultra-nationalist and anti-Zionist themes. He owned the publishing house Ars magna and Avatar which published volumes of Savitri Devi, Jean-François Thiriart, Francis Parker Yockey, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Aleksandr Dugin and others.[8]
In the original edition of his book Hitler's Priestess Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke wrote that Bouchet has been associated with Nazi mysticism and that, whilst spending a year in India, he met with Savitri Devi to study Kali Yuga and her ideas about Adolf Hitler as an Avatar.[9] These claims did not however appear in the French language edition of the same work.[10] In the postscript to the book Le national-socialisme et la tradition indienne Bouchet claimed that Goodrick-Clarkes's allegations were fake, stating that he had met Savitri Devi only once and considered her to be a crank, adding that he has no personal interest in Nazi mysticism.[11] Bouchet, who is not an Islamophobe, has advocated a closer link between European nationalist groups and Muslim traditionalists.[12]
Christian Bouchet has done a PhD in anthropology in the University Paris Diderot about Aleister Crowley and wrote a lot of books about the extremist engagement in politics and religion.[13]
References
- ^ Biographical interview
- ^ Biographical interview
- ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler's Priestess
- ^ 'France' from the Stephen Roth Institute
- ^ List of the FN branch leaders in Loire-Atlantique
- ^ Christian Bouchet investi tête de liste du Front National à Nantes
- ^ Christian Bouchet investi tête de liste du Front National à Nantes
- ^ "Je suis un des animateurs des Éditions Ars magna ainsi qu’éditeur-associé aux Éditions Avatar".
- ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler's Priestess, p. 216
- ^ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Savitri Devi, la prêtresse d’Hitler, Akribeia, 2000.
- ^ Savitri Devi Mukherji, Le national-socialisme et la tradition indienne, Avatar, 2004.
- ^ 'French intellectual Christian Bouchet on why the nationalist Right should welcome Islam'
- ^ Books of Christian Bouchet in catalogue SUDOC Books of Christian Bouchet in catalogue Worldcat