Jean-Yves Le Gallou: The Legacy of a French Far-Right Idea Broker

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: The Legacy of a French Far-Right Idea Broker

Pauline Picco

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Keywords: Far right, new right, broker, France, Le Gallou

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Invited to speak at the so-called Remigration Summit in May 2025, a rally of the young European identitarians in Italy,[1] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, then 76 years old, declared: “… Remigration is legitimate. It is also essential. Quite simply to prevent submersion, to avoid Europeans becoming a minority in their own land.” By taking up this long-standing theme of radical far-right discourse, Le Gallou embraces conspiracy and racism, fusing denunciation of the alleged “Great Replacement” of white people in Europe with the promotion of a policy of “remigration” of racialized populations, presented as both a “solution” and a “political myth.”[2]

As an intellectual and far-right politician whose five-decade-long career lies at the crossroads of metapolitical work and partisan commitment, Le Gallou seems to be a guiding figure for young identitarian activists. Relatively unknown to the broader public, this secondary figure of the French far right is a case study in the dissemination and institutionalization of far-right ideas in France and across Europe over the last 50 years, specifically how concepts first elaborated by marginal metapolitical circles can gradually traverse structural boundaries and reshape the mainstream, “legitimate” political discourse.[3] Analysis of his intellectual and political career also underlines the role of “ideological brokers,” who contribute to the spreading of far-right discourse and practices across borders and generations.[4]

A product of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right),[5] and later active in the French high administration, political-party circles, and the media space, Le Gallou translated metapolitical constructs into the programs and strategies of far-right parties. Relying on a mix of entryism, linguistic reframing,[6] militancy, and “reinformation,” Le Gallou has contributed to the progressive erosion of the “cordon sanitaire”[7] traditionally separating far-right actors from the mainstream.[8]

Based on a critical review of his publications, social media accounts, online interviews, and websites of associated institutions, this study first examines the ideological foundations of his thought, specifically those related to the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilization; GRECE) and the New Right. It then looks at his tactic of institutional embedding through the Club de l’Horloge and the Front National (FN), highlighting mechanisms of doctrinal evolution and “cross-pollination” across fields. Finally, it explores the transnational extensions and contemporary reformulations of Le Gallou’s activism, assessing how “remigration” and the Great Replacement conspiracy theory function as concepts within what is reconfiguring the French and European right.[9]

Ideological Roots

Le Gallou’s ability to act as a broker spanning various fields can be traced back to the intellectual environment in which he accumulated symbolic and “human” capital, specifically his early socialization at elite educational institutions and in the New Right.

Elitist Metapolitics from May ‘68 to GRECE

Born in 1948, Le Gallou situates the genesis of his worldview in the events of May 1968, which he interprets as a “revolution breaking with permanence and roots,”[10] a civilizational rupture reflective of a symbolic severing of tradition, continuity, and collective identity. In his retrospective reading, these upheavals inaugurated cultural liberalization and excited egalitarian aspirations in France, which he portrays as symptoms of cultural deracination. This interpretation aligns with a broader far-right narrative that emerged during the events and in the following decades, according to which May 1968 revealed both the incapacity of the French governing elites to maintain order and the moral decline and “de-virilization” of Western societies.[11] According to Le Gallou, it accelerated France’s civilizational and demographic decline.

In a 2025 interview, Le Gallou recalled provocatively: “On May 1, I was a centrist; by the end of the month, I was a fascist. And as you know, ‘once a fascist, always a fascist.’”[12] The moral and cultural dislocation he associates with that period serves, in his thought, to justify his quest for ancestral continuity and civilizational rootedness.[13] During his studies at Sciences Po (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris), Le Gallou met Yvan Blot, who inducted him into the right‑wing intellectual milieu. Blot, himself a product of France’s elite administrative education system, introduced Le Gallou to the Cercle Pareto, called by scholar Philippe Lamy the “ideological laboratory” from which the Club de l’Horloge later emerged.[14] Comprising roughly 30 members, the Cercle Pareto met regularly at the Le Gallou family residence to contemplate philosophical provocations (e.g., Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto). Members also participated in “lecture‑debates” at universities with figures such as Alain de Benoist, the founder of GRECE.[15] In addition, they organized structured research sessions on topics related to GRECE’s interests and gatherings. The Cercle Pareto’s internal documents describe it as a self-consciously elitist enterprise, intended to prepare a vanguard capable of entryism.[16]

The club’s choice of Vilfredo Pareto for its name was symbolic. Within GRECE circles, the Italian philosopher was admired as the “leading theoretician of elitism and the ruling class,” whose elite circulation theory provided a scientific justification for a hierarchical social order. Pareto’s cause was championed by G.H. Bousquet, a French law professor and defender of French Algeria who served as the Cercle Pareto’s honorary president and contributed to the patronage committee of GRECE’s flagship journal, Nouvelle École, since 1970.[17] This intellectual lineage underscored the group’s disdain for mass democracy and its aspiration eventually to steer what it saw as political renewal.

Le Gallou was thus introduced to GRECE, where Blot officially helped him to join its leadership. GRECE brought together the successors of Action Française, followers of sociobiology, former members of the Organisation Armée Secrète (Secret Army Organization; OAS), and generally those nostalgic for the Vichy regime and collaborationism. Even in his contemporary reflections, Le Gallou praises Alain de Benoist as “a bit like a spiritual father to us all,” while acknowledging divergences, particularly on immigration, as he was deemed “a little radical” by de Benoist.[18] From January to September 1973, Le Gallou assumed the leadership for GRECE’s Paris section, contributing to a regional seminar on the “radioscopy of France”—an autopsy of the nation’s ills—and promoting Nouvelle École.

Even though Le Gallou published only once in Nouvelle École during this period,[19] his various intellectual influences reflect those of the younger generation, which formed part of the GRECE leadership. They included Georges Dumézil’s comparative mythology on Indo-European trifunctional structures, which were adapted to emphasize archaic warrior-aristocratic virtues. Pareto’s theory of elite circulation also informed Le Gallou’s thinking, while J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings provided a literary model of a hierarchical society structured as a brotherhood confronting external threats. The latter reference reflects a generational affinity among 1970s European far-right militants, particularly in Italy and in New Right milieus, where Tolkien’s works symbolized resistance to modernity.[20] Along with other members of the New Right, Le Gallou took Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist theory of “cultural hegemony”[21] and inverted it to prescribe the right-wing capture of universities, the media, and spheres of art, which he saw as the metapolitical high ground for dismantling egalitarian norms.

His personal life intersected with his professional one through his 1975 marriage to Anne-Laure Blanc, a fellow GRECE militant and the daughter of Robert Blanc, a former Waffen-SS Charlemagne division member, who provided a “strong identity anchor,”[22] as well as a connection to far-right networks.[23] This early phase shaped Le Gallou’s ideology. Part of that was contesting dominant egalitarian norms from the margins of political and cultural institutions, preparing the ground for the diffusion of radical ideas about hierarchy, identity, and elitism into mainstream right-wing discourse.

Immigration, Islam, and European Identity

Le Gallou’s reflection on immigration happened within the broader far-right context in the early 1970s,[24] when France was experiencing a gradual increase in unemployment. He framed immigration as the main threat to European civilization, a term that, within GRECE, replaced “race” because it had too many charged connotations. These ideas were articulated both in metapolitical circles and among senior French civil servants. In a 1976 internal prefecture document, he argued that migration might have demographic and cultural consequences, including difficulties in integrating migrants with more ethno-cultural distance from France and thus higher social, economic, and psychological costs, which he interpreted as a potential long-term challenge to national cohesion and identity.[25] The biological markers were replaced by cultural ones.

In his 2025 memoirs, Le Gallou discusses the figure who, as early as 1968, influenced his struggle against immigration: Enoch Powell. He highlights Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech as a watershed in the rhetorical fight against immigration.[26] Then a member of parliament for the Conservative Party, Powell warned that, by the 2000s, populations of foreign descent would dominate parts of English towns, leading to ethnic enclaves and social tensions. His proposed solution, “re-emigration,” included financial incentives for voluntary repatriation—a measure later championed by Le Gallou—strict entry quotas, and a rejection of multiculturalism as harmful to national unity. Le Gallou presents him as an intellectual precursor,[27] alongside Jean Raspail, author of Le Camp des Saints.[28] Raspail’s 1973 novel,[29] depicting a migrant armada overwhelming a decadent West, frames otherness as a threat. Le Gallou completes his overview of the pioneering anti-immigration political figures with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the FN, who adopted this as a theme of his political program as early as 1973.[30]

Le Gallou further developed anti-immigration ideas in his key 1985 book La préférence nationale,[31] which advocates as essential for national preservation a hierarchical model of citizenship, with limited political, economic, and social rights for noncitizens. In 1984, he also ghostwrote Les immigrés: le choc for Alain Griotteray, a right-wing deputy and journalist.[32] It cites statistics to back up the estimated fiscal, housing, and cultural costs of immigration, identifies the “risk of Islam” as a barrier to integration, and advocates deportations. These publications established Le Gallou as a leading far-right analyst of alleged demographic problems related to immigration. Upon joining the FN, he shaped one of the party’s core ideological markers, “préférence nationale,”[33] later reformulated by Marine Le Pen as “priorité nationale.”[34]

Later, because the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in the United States and on November 13, 2015, in Paris led to immigration, Islam, and terrorism being rhetorically conflated, Le Gallou could merge security and identity concerns into a single exclusionary anti-immigration framework, whereas his earlier formulations framed immigration primarily in civilizational and demographic terms. He portrays multicultural suburbs as “Islamistans” and sees Islam as a social system incompatible with French identity, particularly with state secularism (laïcité) and gender equality.[35] His reading echoes a broader far‑right narrative portraying Islam and Muslims as the “enemy within,” an internal threat to national cohesion.

Le Gallou and his associates have engaged in the tactic of entryism, leveraging networks such as the Club de l’Horloge to infiltrate public institutions and influence policy from within. This has had the effect of shaping mainstream narratives and official decision-making in favor of far-right conceptions about identity and national survival.

Strategic Entryism: From Intellectual Circles to the Front National Leadership

Club de l’Horloge: Doctrinal Renovation and a Political Bridge

Founded in 1974 by Le Gallou and Blot, both graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration (National School of Administration; ENA) and engaged with GRECE, the Club de l’Horloge aimed to strengthen the ideological foundation of the French right during the Valéry Giscard d’Estaing presidency and amid challenges from socialism.[36] It was a strategic forum for intellectuals, politicians, and policy-makers, seeking to reshape right-wing doctrine by countering egalitarian principles in France and promoting a hierarchical, “rooted” perspective. Its initial document, the so-called “Minimum Doctrinal,” outlined its key positions: It rejected the “egalitarian utopia” as a factor contributing to “cultural genocide” through the erosion of traditions, identity, and civilizational references; instead, it proposed a “scientific analysis” drawing on Konrad Lorenz’s ideas on hierarchies, Friedrich Hayek’s neoliberal views on market competition, and Pareto’s theory of elite circulation.[37] Just as the magazine Europe-Action denounced, in the mid-1960s, the “white genocide” allegedly suffered by white people in the context of decolonization, the Club de l’Horloge misappropriates the legal term “genocide” to denounce what it claims to be the cultural replacement of European populations.[38]

In its early days, before the 1979 press revelations of far-right influences from GRECE in Giscard’s ministries,[39] the Club de l’Horloge organized discussions with political figures from the president’s circle, introducing its agenda to them. During the summer of 1979, the French press witnessed intense debate over the emergence of the New Right and its relationship to far-right ideologies that had lost legitimacy after 1945, bringing to public attention the Club de l’Horloge, GRECE, and de Benoist. The club relied on a network spanning French government, business, and culture to operate. Among these were, in particular, young senior civil servants opposed to progressivism; conservative business groups, including Algerian War veterans, which provided resources to the Club de l’Horloge; and the publisher Albin Michel, who distributed materials. This gave them access to major newspapers to spread their ideas until the 1979 media controversy, when some journalists denounced their far-right political views and links to various political figures. Following this, the club pursued academic ties, engaging scholars from Lyon 3 University (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3),[40] as well as demographers at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (Institut National d’Études Démographiques), who addressed “demographic decline,” immigration, and abortion as issues of national concern. This tactic foreshadowed Le Gallou’s later role in the FN’s “scientific council,” where ideological claims were presented as technical expertise.[41]

Following François Mitterrand’s victory in the 1981 presidential election, the club repositioned itself as an ideological intermediary between the parliamentary right—incorporating his views on immigration into the programs of Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République; RPR)—and the rising far-right, a role exemplified by Le Gallou’s endorsement of the 1983 Dreux accord.[42] This RPR-UDF-FN alliance in local elections to end socialist control of the Dreux City Hall—said to have been “perfectly natural” by Le Gallou in a recent interview—triggered numerous objections, particularly within the UDF. Former minister and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil notably rejected it.[43]

The club systematically produced materials supporting the right-wing opposition during François Mitterrand’s socialist presidency. Le Gallou’s 1984 symposium on “national preference,”[44] or priority for nationals, aligned with the FN’s electoral rise. By 1986, members drafted programs for the mainstream right and the FN; from 1985 to 1989, founders like Le Gallou and Blot joined the FN.[45]

Professionalizing the Front National: The Mégret-Le Gallou Axis and Local Entrenchment

Having joined the Republican Party (PR), an offshoot of the UDF, as early as 1979, Le Gallou made a decisive leap into the FN in 1985, later aligning himself with civil servant Bruno Mégret in a partnership that would professionalize and ideologically fortify the nascent far-right party during its formative years. [46] In the mid-1980s, as the FN enjoyed its first electoral successes, Le Gallou and Mégret, following in his footsteps, saw the political opportunities that the far-right party could offer them, where their profiles attracted interest and their skills as senior civil servants were quickly recognized.[47]

In the FN, while Brunot Mégret was appointed number two in the party, Le Gallou ascended rapidly to positions of strategic influence, including party general secretary from November 1988 to December 1998; member of the political council; leader of the FN group in the Île-de-France regional council in 1992; European Parliament deputy in 1994; and national secretary responsible for elected officials. In these roles, he drafted party programs, forged networks of regional councilors, and spearheaded the ideological formation of militants. Le Gallou was one of the few senior civil servants in a party historically bereft of such high-caliber technocratic talent.[48]  

In December 1988, the Mégret-Le Gallou partnership produced the Conseil scientifique du Front national (FN Scientific Council), which aimed to provide FN activists (in particular youth organizations) with a solid doctrinal foundation. According to Alexandre Dézé, by involving academics, this internal organization aimed to provide scholarly credibility to the party’s xenophobia, presenting it as intellectually grounded. The Scientific Council soon launched Identité magazine in April 1989, a monthly publication on “national studies,” positioning the FN as the voice of a coherent far-right doctrine and set of values. Jean-Marie Le Pen wrote the editorials, while thematic issues addressing identity-related topics featured contributions from Blot, Pierre Vial (historian and Lyon 3 academic), Le Gallou, Jacques Robichez (university professor of French literature), and Pierre Milloz (ENA alumnus, with PhDs in law and political science). Identité outlined arguments about immigration, identity, and anti-egalitarianism to align and professionalize the party’s diverse factions in pursuit of local and national electoral gains.[49]

Mégret and Le Gallou later reflected on the need for that—the party base was diverse, including Algerian War veterans, Tridentine Catholics, New Right intellectuals, and RPR defectors.[50] Under Le Gallou’s operational leadership, the Mégret period (1988–1998) followed a strategy modeled on the French Communist Party’s postwar municipal victories.[51] Between 1995 and 1997, the FN gained control of four municipalities, creating “territorial bases of support” that Le Gallou saw as scalable to dozens of other municipalities without causing internal divisions.

This progress ended with the 1998 split, which Le Gallou helped orchestrate by rallying most FN executives and elected officials to Mégret’s side against Jean-Marie Le Pen’s centralized control.[52] Le Gallou later criticized Le Pen’s resistance to local entrenchment, favoring Mégret’s approach of alliances with the mainstream right. This phase, which lasted until the FN split in 1998, combined image moderation with radical positions on key issues, shifting the FN’s focus to identity, influenced by GRECE ideas,[53] as its central theme, a model later adapted during Marine Le Pen’s presidency of the party. After successive electoral defeats of the Mouvement national républicain (National Republican Movement; MNR), Le Gallou turned to the medium of the internet as he developed his metapolitical tactic of “reinformation.”

Shaping Far-Right Discourse: Language, Media, and ‘Reinformation’

‘Reinformation’ as an Antidote to ‘Media Terror’, ‘Mental Gulag’[54]

In 2002, Le Gallou founded a think tank, Polémia, to promote discussion on identity, sovereignty, and civilizational issues. It has engaged in research and advocacy around European identity and demography, with its publications linking contemporary cultural and population changes to globalist and multiculturalist policies and presenting them as challenges to native European populations. They criticize “political correctness” in the mainstream media,[55] arguing that it distorts coverage of immigration, identity, and national sovereignty to support specific agendas.

Central to Polémia’s work is Le Gallou’s concept of “reinformation,”[56] defined in his 2010 Dictionnaire de Réinformation as a critical review of dominant media content to correct facts and expose alleged manipulations by various actors.[57] This approach transcends mere fact-checking, advancing alternative interpretations characteristic of far-right analytical frameworks, like purported underreporting of migrant-related offenses.[58]

Le Gallou presents his media strategy in his 2008 Douze thèses pour un gramscisme technologique (“Twelve Theses for a Technological Gramscianism”), viewing the internet as a major tool—“the best news in 40 years”—to challenge alleged “cultural dominance.” Adapting Gramsci’s ideas on cultural struggle, he promotes digital platforms like social media, blogs, and viral content to reach wider audiences with a political message. He aims to engage a “silent majority,” supposedly sidelined by elites and traditional media, with the goal of gradually making ideas like “national preference” and identity protection more acceptable in the public discourse.[59]

Polémia puts these ideas into practice through specific projects. The annual Bobards d’Or (Golden Fibs) awards, started under Le Gallou, casts light on media accounts seen as inaccurate on the topics of immigration, Islam, and identity. From 2007, he hosted “Le Bulletin de Réinformation” on Radio Courtoisie, providing weekly analysis of events, and contributed to TV Libertés, an alternative far-right news channel founded in 2014 by Martial Bild, a former FN chief. Combined with Le Gallou’s activity on X, these efforts have spread GRECE and Club de l’Horloge ideas—immigration as a threat, identity as essential to politics, anti-egalitarianism—into broader conservative circles, including parts of Les Républicains.

As Le Gallou notes in his 2025 memoirs, they have contributed to a widening of the “Overton window,” normalizing previously marginal political ideas and undermining measures like the cordon sanitaire that restricted far-right participation in public politics.[60] Thus, narrative control is shifting from mainstream media to alternative sources. Overall, since the early 2000s, Le Gallou redirected his political activity from elections to the struggle over narratives.

Linguistic Framing and the ‘Battle of Words’

Le Gallou, who drew from GRECE’s metapolitical emphasis on “cultural hegemony,” followed a position on language that can be traced back to a 1982 seminar organized by the Club de l’Horloge on the “battle of words.” It had aimed to reframe far-right positions using euphemistic language, facilitating their entry into the mainstream discourse and normalizing previously taboo concepts.

Over subsequent decades, a series of terms were coined, structuring public debates on immigration, identity, and culture. For instance, “national preference,” initially formulated as assigning political, economic, and social rights according to citizenship status, expanded into the broader notion of “civilizational preference” in Le Défi Gaulois (2000), coauthored by Anne-Laure Le Gallou.[61] Other expressions situate Jean-Yves Le Gallou firmly on the fringes of the far right. These include identitarian vocabulary such as “preservation of European civilization” and “remigration,” and the “Great Replacement,” among other immigration-related conspiracy theories, attacks on democratic institutions and mainstream media, and alarmist terms like “invasion,” “colonization,” and “submersion.”

Initially elaborated by New Right intellectuals, these concepts were reformulated, euphemized, and redeployed through party platforms, think tanks, and transnational identitarian networks. Among these notions, remigration has crystallized the radical programmatic horizon of Le Gallou’s project, articulating demographic reversal as a civilizational imperative.[62] He employs neologisms to advance these narratives: “damaging expenses” (dépenses nuisibles),[63] meaning welfare costs associated with immigration; “francocide,”[64] when nonwhite persons commit crimes against white Frenchmen and Frenchwomen; and “gwer,” an expression of antiwhite racism in far-right discourse. These terms are systematically disseminated via pamphlets, symposia, media appearances, and publications to reshape the political lexicon and frame policy debates.[65]

In his 2025 memoirs and a recent interview, Le Gallou dismisses accusations of racism against “racialized populations,” describing it as a “demonization technique” allegedly meant to cover up crime data, education failure, unemployment, and welfare dependency among African and Arab‑Muslim groups.[66] He further claims that Europe is now marked by pervasive “antiwhite racism,”[67] propagated through the media, public policy, and culture.[68] Le Gallou frames “identity” as both a defense against cultural transformation and a principle for restoring “civilizational homogeneity.”

Legitimizing Discrimination Through Historical and Legal Critique

In this context, Le Gallou has consistently defended “discrimination” as a fundamental matter of human choice rather than a legal offense. In a 2019 statement, he declared: “Discrimination is life, it’s about choice. You can choose a man or a woman; you have the right to choose a blonde rather than a brunette.”[69] This serves to naturalize a system of preference, framing legal restrictions on discrimination as impediments to natural human behavior.

Further confirming his stance on discrimination is his activity on X from 2023 to 2025 and on Polémia’s website, where he has criticized what he terms the “thought police.”[70] He alleged pervasive “propaganda and censorship” in France in 2024. He cites, among other examples, the removal of television channels (like Bolloré’s channel C8 in 2025), regulatory pressure from Arcom (the French regulator overseeing television, radio, and online audiovisual content, including compliance with laws on media pluralism and hate speech) on Vincent Bolloré’s far-right channel CNews, and the 2024 arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France. According to Le Gallou, these measures have been justified by the state as campaigns against racism, homophobia, viruses, global warming, and “the evil Putin,” among other pretexts. His irony enumerates, in a reversal characteristic of the far right, the central themes of his political agenda.[71]

A central element of Le Gallou’s discursive framework is deconstruction of what he terms the “guilt complex,”[72] an ever-expanding domain of collective culpability allegedly designed to constrain European self-assertion and policy autonomy. In a 2024 interview, he traced its purported history: beginning with the perpetrators of World War II, extending to all Germans, and then to Europeans more broadly. In the French context, he includes Vichy collaboration, the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, colonial practices, slavery, and even anthropogenic climate change. He summarizes this as, “We are guilty of everything, so we can’t do anything,” contending that effective immigration policy is hindered by such criticism around an expanding “catalogue” of historical and contemporary wrongs.[73] This rhetoric echoes anti-Semitic Holocaust denial narratives.

Le Gallou has indeed maintained contacts with French negationist networks.[74] Close to Henri Roques, who was convicted for negationism around the Holocaust,[75] Le Gallou endorsed in 2010 a petition for the release of Vincent Reynouard, a neo-Nazi activist known for publications denying the Holocaust. Personal and professional ties reinforce these associations: Roques’ wife was a candidate for Mégret’s party (MNR) in the early 2000s, while Le Gallou is also connected to Philippe Schleiter, nephew of Robert Faurisson, a prominent French Holocaust denier.[76] Le Gallou consistently frames such affiliations as a principled stand for freedom of speech and historical inquiry.[77] More generally, since the 2000s, Le Gallou has consistently framed freedom of speech not simply as a civil liberty, but as the primary battleground in what he describes as a broader civilizational and cultural struggle.[78]

In terms of legislation, Le Gallou advocates reforming or abolishing the 1972 Pleven law, instituted to combat discriminatory speech, which penalizes racist insults, defamation, and incitement to hatred or violence. He has characterized the 2021 administrative dissolution of Génération Identitaire as an overreach infringing on freedom of expression. Furthermore, he views institutions like the Council of State (Conseil d’État) and the Constitutional Council (Conseil Constitutionnel) as barriers to implementing immigration restrictions, criticizing Constitutional Council head and former socialist minister Laurent Fabius’ role in constitutional reviews.[79] Fabius has opposed the idea of national preference, which, as law professor Samy Benzina explains, is “at the very least contrary to the principle of national solidarity guaranteed by… the [French] Constitution.”[80]

Le Gallou thus is directly attacking the foundational institutions of the French legal system, presenting them as technocratic veto machines meant to obstruct popular sovereignty and civilizational imperatives. On X, he describes the rule of law as a “liberticidal sham”[81] and denounces the “tyranny of judges,” who he claims now rule France.[82] On this point and others—including resistance to the “deep state” and “wokeness” and support for deportation of migrants—the views of the Trump administration and Le Gallou converge.[83] Le Gallou advocates amending the French Constitution to limit judicial authority on immigration and identity issues—ostensibly to safeguard free speech. This reflects a classic far-right critique of the rule of law and the judicial branch. Indeed, a May 2025 X post by Le Gallou could not be clearer: “Down with the rule of law, long live illiberalism.”[84] In reclaiming the term, he positions illiberalism[85] as the normative backbone of his far-right project. This explicit embrace of the idea goes hand in hand with his radical program of remigration. Le Gallou’s recent appropriation of illiberalism functions as a bridge, connecting identitarian premises to broader conservative criticisms of liberal constitutionalism, judicial authority, and supranational governance.

Le Gallou as a Broker: Networks, Institutions, and Party Convergence

Le Gallou has acted as a transnational broker, connecting far-right and identitarian persons and organizations across Europe, Russia, and the Anglophone world through institutions, media, and personal contacts, as he pursues coordinated strategies, culminating in initiatives such as Éric Zemmour’s 2021-2022 presidential campaign.

Russian Sympathies

Le Gallou’s deep affinity for Russia publicly surfaced on May 26, 2013, during a demonstration in front of the Russian embassy in Paris, organized in support of the movement La Manif Pour Tous (“The Protest for All”) amid debates over same-sex marriage legislation.[86] Protesters displayed banners reading “SOS Russia, French democracy is in danger” and chanted “Putin help us!” This portrayed Russia and specifically Vladimir Putin as a defender of the traditional family and a traditional society against egalitarian demands coming from the LGBTQI movement. In his speech, recorded and later shared by media outlets, including the French catholic newspaper La Croix and on YouTube, Le Gallou argues that Russia represents one of the few countries upholding traditional family structures in the face of “gender theory”[87] and that Russia, as a Council of Europe member, has a responsibility to address human rights concerns in other member states, including alleged excessive police actions against La Manif Pour Tous demonstrators.[88]

This event reflects Le Gallou’s established connections with Russian diplomats; during that time, in 2012, he was advising Marine Le Pen. They go back to his GRECE days, where sympathies toward Russian radical-conservative movements flourished among New Right thinkers.[89] Le Gallou acted on these, through media appearances, including multiple interviews with Voice of Russia,[90] and ongoing comments contrasting, on the one hand, the patriotism, skilled statecraft, and independence supposedly guiding the Putin-led Kremlin versus, on the other hand, French leaders’ alignment with the foreign policies of the U.S., Israeli, and Gulf Arab states.[91]

Transnational Networks: Institut Iliade and European Offshoots

Cofounded in 2014 by Philippe Conrad and the Africanist Bernard Lugan, as a tribute to far-right theorician Dominique Venner, the Institut Iliade (Iliade Institute)aims to preserve what it terms the “European long memory” by training far-right activists. In particular, its annual conferences are one of the regular events for transnational identitarian networks. Featuring speakers from groups like Italy’s CasaPound,[92] including Carlomanno Adinolfi and Adriano Scianca,[93] the Iliade Institute has inspired initiatives across Italy and Spain under the slogan “Identitarians of all countries, unite!” Other links in this transnational network include the Instituto Carlo V (Madrid), a Spanish affiliate mirroring Iliade Institute’s model for forming civilizationalist elites, and the Istituto Eneide, Iliade Institute’s Italian offshoot based in Australia, founded in 2024 by Pierluigi Locchi, son of New Right pioneer Giorgio Locchi). Both organizations are dedicated to “contributing to the worldview for a European revival” through seminars. In addition to a shared ideological framework, they are shaped by common role models, symbols, and logos.[94] Overall, they act as bridges linking national-conservative dissidents, centered on the French Iliade Institute.

The November 2024 Cercle Europa conference, organized by the Iliade Institute and specifically Le Gallou, explicitly invoked the notion of “vital space” (espace vital), a racialized term that prompted legal complaints from anti-racist organizations. Reported by the daily Libération as a fundraising effort, the event featured Anne Sicard (National Rally MP, former chief of staff to Marion Maréchal), Alexandre Avril (mayor of Salbris), and Alice Cordier (leader of Collectif Némésis, a femonationalist group[95]).[96] Following these revelations, Le Gallou defended the conference against mainstream-media scrutiny, emphasizing the Iliade Institute’s transnational metapolitical mission.[97]

The Iliade Institute holds regular book signings at La Nouvelle Librairie, a far-right bookstore in Paris, and some of its publications are shared on The European Conservative,[98] an Anglophone website and journal based in Budapest since 2021 and associated with European national-conservative and traditionalist intellectual currents.[99] This is where Le Gallou’s and Iliade’s anti-globalist lexicon converges with broader sovereigntist and civilizationist critiques of liberal internationalism and supranational governance. Economically, the Le Nid business incubator, launched in 2020 with funding from Pierre-Edouard Stérin, a traditionalist philanthropist, supports ventures grounded in the concept of “rootedness” (enracinement) by providing access to Iliade Institute’s Club des Cent (Club of 100) investors and its network of more than 300 alumni.[100] For example, in the summer of 2025, a Catholic Identitarian event was organized in the Allier Department (central France), supported by Le Nid and funded by Stérin.[101]

In 2025, Le Gallou articulates a synthetic conception of European identity reconciling the Christian and Indo-European pagan legacies. Two millennia of Christianity overlay five millennia of Indo-European heritage, as well as, symbolically, a 40,000-year prehistoric continuum, based on art such as at the Lascaux and Altamira caves. On this basis, he argues that Europeans should be regarded as “indigenous peoples” under the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—which lacks historical or anthropological coherence, instead serving as an ideological narrative for identitarian discourse.[102]

In his role as a broker, Le Gallou manages to fuse the Kremlin’s rhetoric around multipolarity, Martin Sellner’s remigration, and CasaPound activism into a unified civilizationist front. Deftly avoiding friction around doctrinal questions, he constructs a pragmatic synthesis where Christian teleology reinforces Indo-European ethnogenesis, with both seen as complementary metapolitical bulwarks against globalist modernity.

Transatlantic Ties and Party Action

Le Gallou has links to Anglo-American networks through white supremacist Jared Taylor, editor of the online magazine American Renaissance.[103] Taylor attended the FN’s “bleu-blanc-rouge” party in 1998 and established relationships with several FN leaders, notably Le Gallou and Bruno Gollnisch, which he discusses extensively in American Renaissance.[104] Taylor addressed the March 2012 France in Danger Conference (Assises de la France en Danger) in Paris, and the Le Gallou-Taylor connection subsequently manifested itself in 2021, when Polémia published Taylor’s analysis of the January 6 riots, introducing him as an “American patriot with a European culture.”[105] Both were subsequently invited to the May 2025 Remigration Summit in Milan,[106] where they passed down their ideological frameworks to young European identitarians.

Arktos Media,[107] the English-language publisher of New Right and identitarian literature, further illustrates the transatlantic ties. Founded by Daniel Friberg, a leading figure of the Swedish neofascist movement, and American white supremacist Richard Spencer, Arktos systematically translates and publishes core texts from GRECE, the Club de l’Horloge, and Polémia circles, including de Benoist’s works and remigration-adjacent essays, circulating Le Gallou’s intellectual lineage to Anglophone audiences receptive to civilizational diagnostics.[108] As he has exported French metapolitical concepts, Le Gallou has also imported American white-supremacist ones, reinforcing identitarian narratives across linguistic and national divides.

The influence of Le Gallou’s networking reappeared in domestic politics with the creation of Zemmour’s political committee in October 2021, ahead of the 2022 presidential election. This “rallying point” and “forum for discussion, information gathering, and reflection,” as Le Gallou describes it in April 2022,[109] brought together figures from across the right and far right, including sovereignist Jean-Frédéric Poisson, Catholic intellectual Laurence Trochu, Yellow Vest representatives Benjamin Cauchy and Jacline Mouraud,[110] geopolitical analyst Caroline Galactéros, former UDF president Charles Millon, Movement for France (Mouvement pour la France) founder Philippe de Villiers, former Les Républicains deputy Guillaume Peltier, and National Rally defectors Nicolas Bay and Marion Maréchal.[111] Parallel to this, Le Gallou constituted Zemmour’s strategic committee with operatives from established metapolitical networks: Committee members included Grégoire Dupont-Tingaud (a graduate of the Saint-Cyr Special Military School and Sciences Po with an OAS-family background), Philippe Schleiter (Polémia cofounder and former Front National de la Jeunesse leader), and Marion Maréchal (Institute of Social, Economic, and Political Sciences),[112] as well as identitarian activist Damien Rieu and digital strategist Samuel Lafont.

The pro-Zemmour coalition also included regional and media figures like Philippe Milliau, whose career spanned GRECE, FN city council members, MNR membership, a brief Bloc Identitaire stint, and TV Libertés leadership, and Paul-Marie Coûteaux, who supported multiple French political figures, from various political factions on the right and the far right, serving, in his own words, as “Zemmour’s friend.”[113] Together, these networks translated decades of metapolitical and identitarian work into electoral strategy, centered on the slogan “Let France remain France”—defending white, European, Christian civilization against “Islamization” and “Africanization.”[114] Overall, the political committee ensured ideological breadth across a certain part of the Gaullist, populist, and identitarian milieus. Zemmour’s first-round result, 7.07%,[115] was considered by Le Gallou to be an “electoral disappointment coupled with a metapolitical success.”[116] In this context, immigration, initially the focus of Le Gallou’s thought, was reformulated as a prescriptive civilizational program through the concept of remigration.

Remigration as a Civilizational and Racial Imperative

Le Gallou did not invent remigration, but he is widely recognized as one of its main intellectual inspirations. His reflections on the topic begin in the 1980s with the proposal of “migration flow reversal”[117] to eliminate “uncontrolled” immigration through organized repatriation. In the 2000s, he participated in anti-immigration events, including the France in Danger Conference in March 2012 and Remigration Conference (Assises de la Remigration) in 2014,[118] and in May 2025, Le Gallou was invited to attend the first Remigration Summit, as mentioned above. In Le Gallou’s current formulation, remigration is a practical necessity, independent of political affiliation, as a response to the so-called great replacement, described metaphorically as “demographic submersion” or “invasive colonization” orchestrated by globalist actors. Le Gallou contends that multicultural societies are inherently prone to conflict. His solution: a “policy of reconquering Europe” through the removal of populations he characterizes as the “armed wing of the colonizer” to restore civilizational sovereignty.[119]

Le Gallou engaged in a conversation on this issue with Martin Sellner, the Austrian identitarian leader, his fluency in French allowing for effective dialogue. Sellner describes France as the “motherland of remigration,” citing the Identitaires’ 2017 manifesto called 30 Mesures pour une politique identitaire et de remigration (“30 Measures for an Identitarian and Remigration Policy”)[120] as a model for pan-European action, and emphasizes that “the discussion about remigration is the same everywhere,” addressing “civilizational replacement” on a continental scale.[121] The intellectual cooperation between Sellner and Le Gallou reflects the transnational scope of the remigration agenda. Indeed, it continues to this day, with Sellner writing the foreword to Le Gallou’s book on this very topic in April 2026.[122]

In his 2025 Remigration Summit presentation, Le Gallou proposes a graduated typology of target populations, prioritizing expulsion according to levels of assimilation and hostility: first, naturalized individuals deemed unassimilated and hostile, who “control territory and intimidate others,” would have their citizenship revoked and be repatriated immediately; second for repatriation would be nonhostile but unassimilated populations; and third, fully assimilated individuals whose nationality may be retained depending on context, forming a smaller cohort. This three-part approach is based on incremental implementation to enhance the feasibility of the policy and reduce political and societal resistance.[123] Le Gallou stresses the need to “change the logic” of immigration policy, placing host-society preservation above all. In cases where remigration is obstructed by judicial rulings or political inaction, he envisions an alternative scenario of “communautarization”: white Europeans forming self-protective enclaves based on racial criteria, which could coalesce into what he describes as “a kind of new European empire,” where cultural affinities override national borders and internal divisions become secondary.[124] Owing to his view of multicultural societies as structurally prone to violence, Le Gallou, in his memoirs, says remigration is a prerequisite for “the preservation of European peoples.”[125] Today, remigration is able to encapsulate his radical political program, which is motivated by a belief in demographic and civilizational decline. The issue, in other words, offers ideological continuity and coherence.

Conclusion

The trajectory of Le Gallou highlights the importance of intermediary actors in the long-term diffusion and normalization of far-right ideas. Not a charismatic political leader or doctrinal innovator, he is a broker across generations, connecting right-wing intellectuals, French state administrators, fringe party officials and politicians, and the conservative media.

Over time, Le Gallou’s metapolitical work helped expand the range of publicly discussable positions on issues such as immigration, identity, and national sovereignty, shifting the symbolic boundaries between the radical right and segments of the mainstream right. Key notions such as national preference and remigration exemplify this process of gradual rhetorical institutionalization and normalization, while Le Gallou’s recent appropriation of “illiberalism” serves as a discursive bridge toward broader conservative milieus. Framed as a critique of judicial overreach, technocratic governance, and liberal universalism, this concept, increasingly circulating beyond the far right, allows Le Gallou to repackage long-standing identitarian themes. In this sense, illiberalism functions less as a doctrinal innovation than as a legitimating—to more mainstream conservatives—interface.

More broadly, the case of Le Gallou invites renewed attention to how radical actors can reshape politics not only through elections, but also by engaging in metapolitics, working across fields, and adapting their discourse to the times. The reconfiguration of the contemporary far right in France and, more widely, in Europe may therefore be understood less as a sudden rupture than as the cumulative effect of sustained efforts to bring radical programs into mainstream politics.

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[1] On Identitarian European and global networks, see: José Pedro Zuquete, The identitarians: The movement against globalism and islam in Europe, (Notre-Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018); José Pedro Zuquete Riccardo Marchi, eds., Global identitarianism, (London: Routledge, 2023); Marion Jacquet-Vaillant, “An identitarian Europe? Successes and limits of the diffusion of the French identitarian movement,” Illiberalism studies program Working papers no. 7 (May 2021). https://www.illiberalism.org/an-identitarian-europe-successes-and-limits-of-the-diffusion-of-the-french-identitarian-movement/.

[2] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “La remigration: légitimité, nécessité, possibilité,” Institut Iliade, accessed October 25, 2025, https://institut-iliade.com/la-remigration-legitimite-necessite-possibilite.

[3] On metapolitical strategy, see: Eliah Bures, “The Intellectual as Cultural Warrior: Metapolitics and the European New Right,” Fascism 12, no. 1 (September 2023): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10055; Eve Gianoncelli, “The Metapolitics of Reactionary Ideologies,” International Workshop ‘Reactionary Ideas and Ideologies Online&Offline’ (2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR6ewUUtduU.

[4] Manuela Caiani, La transnazionalizzazione della destra radicale: Identità, reticoli, pratiche (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2025).

[5] The term “New Right” appeared in an article in Le Nouvel Observateur magazine in 1979, at a time when the press was only beginning to take notice of the movement, sparking debates about its ideological positions and the potential influence of its thinkers on French politics (see below).

[6] Cécile Alduy, “Le ‘Grand Remplacement’ Lexical: Enjeux Sémantiques, Performatifs et Démocratiques de ‘la Bataille des Mots’ à l’Extrême Droite, du Front National à Éric Zemmour,” Mots. Les langages du politique 136, no. 3 (2024): 23–40. https://shs.cairn.info/revue-mots-2024-3-page-23?lang=fr.

[7] On the “cordon sanitaire,” see: William M. Downs, “How Effective Is the Cordon Sanitaire? Lessons from Efforts to Contain the Far Right in Belgium, France, Denmark and Norway,” Journal of Conflict and Violence Research 4, no. 1 (2002): 32–51, https://doi.org/10.11576/jkg-5614. Luke Shuttleworth, Katy Brown, and Aurélien Mondon, “The Pretence of the Cordon Sanitaire: Non-Collaboration as a Distraction from Discursive Congruence,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2025): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2025.2549800.

[8] Aurélien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso, 2020).

[9] Laurent Joffrin, “Laurent Wauquiez valide à son tour la théorie conspirationniste d’extrême droite du ‘grand remplacement’,” Libération, April 9, 2025, https://www.liberation.fr/politique/laurent-wauquiez-valide-a-son-tour-la-theorie-conspirationniste-dextreme-droite-du-grand-remplacement-20250409_MDEFAOU545DBNLTSV6JQPP5NCM/.

[10] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires. 1968–2025. Les dessous du grand basculement (Paris: Via Romana, 2025), 31.

[11] Todd Shepard, “L’extrême droite et « Mai 68 ». Une obsession d’Algérie et de virilité,” Clio. Femmes et sociétés 29, no. 1 (2009): 37–57, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-clio-2009-1-page-37?lang=fr.

[12] “Comment la droite s’est laissée faire comme un rat,” Les Conversations avec Jean-Yves Le Gallou, TV Libertés, January 28, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6PIc64RMI.

[13] On the theme of rootedness among Identitarians, see: Samuel Bouron, “Se « Réenraciner ». Alignement et mise en cohérence de soi des militants identitaires,” Politix 37, no. 147 (April 2025): 55–79, https://hal.science/hal-05461277v1.

[14] On Club de l’Horloge see: Philippe Lamy, Le Club de l’Horloge (1974–2002): évolution et mutation d’un laboratoire idéologique (PhD diss., Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis, 2016); Sylvain Laurens, “Le Club de l’Horloge et la haute administration: promouvoir l’hostilité à l’immigration dans l’entre-soi mondain,” Agone 54, no. 2 (2014): 73–94, accessed online, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-agone-2014-2-page-73?lang=en.

[15] On GRECE, see: Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle droite (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1988); Pierre-André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes et cie, 1994); Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16, no. 3 (2008): 327–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/14782800802500981; Stéphane François, La Nouvelle Droite et le nazisme, une histoire sans fin (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2023).

[16] Lamy, Le Club de l’Horloge, 6.

[17] Ibid.

[18] TV Libertés, “Comment la droite s’est laissée faire comme un rat.”

[19] He used the pseudonym Jean-Yves Ménébray. Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “La sémantique générale et les méthodes d’évaluation non-aristotéliciennes,” Nouvelle École, no. 16 (February 1972): 55–65.

[20] Giuseppe Bessarione, Lambro/Hobbit. La cultura giovanile di destra in Italia e in Europa, collana Situazioni, no. 37 (Roma: Arcana Editrice, 1979); Robert Stuart, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth (Cham: Springer Nature, 2022).

[21] On the misappropriation of Antonio Gramsci’s thinking and its use by the far right, see: Tristan Boursier, “Métapolitique d’extrême droite: usages et limites d’un concept,” Revue canadienne de science politique (2026): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423926101103.

[22] Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 42.

[23] Anne-Laure Blanc is still member of Eléments editorial board. She runs a bookbinding workshop in Salbris, where the mayor is Alexandre Avril, vice president of Eric Ciotti’s party, L’union des droites pour la République, and a close associate of Pierre-Edouard Stérin, a traditionalist Catholic philanthropist.

[24] The framing of immigration as a national problem was already present in the Front National’s inaugural political program, drafted for the 1973 presidential election.

[25] Jean-Yves Le Gallou and P. Baccou, “Le bilan économique de l’immigration,” Administration, March 1976: 34, quoted in Laurens, “Le Club de l’horloge,” 82 ff.

[26] On Enoch Powell and his “rivers of blood” speech, see: Stéphane Porion, “Des limites du dicible. Le cas d’Enoch Powell au sein du parti conservateur britannique: d’un discours de rupture à une transgression de l’affiliation (1968–1974),” Parlement(s), Revue d’histoire politique 2016, no. 1 (no. 23): 79–93, https://doi.org/10.3917/parl2.023.0079.

[27]“Nécessité et faisabilité de la remigration: un sommet européen à Milan,” Polémia, May 9, 2025, https://www.polemia.com/necessite-et-faisabilite-de-la-remigration-un-sommet-europeen-a-milan/. Jean-Yves Le Gallou also devotes several pages to Enoch Powell in his memoirs. See: Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 27ff.  

[28] For a brief summary of the novel and its political use, see: Piero-Dominique Galloro, “Le Camp des Saints ou la mondialisation de l’idée d’Apocalypse migratoire,” Hommes & Migrations, no. 3 (2020): 80–81. On Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints, also see: Marlene Laruelle and Périne Schir, “Social and Discursive Capital as Illiberal Enabler: A Tale of Two Far-Right Fictions in France,” Politics and Governance 13 (2025), https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.9654.

[29] Jean Raspail, Le Camp des Saints (Paris: Laffont, 2011 [1973]).

[30] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” April 16, 2023, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1647686893838954497.

[31] SeeJean-Yves Le Gallou, La Préférence nationale. Réponse à l’immigration (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985).

[32] Alain Griotteray, Les immigrés. Le choc (Paris: Plon, 1984).

[33]  Nonna Mayer, “Préférence nationale,” in Dictionnaire de l’extrême droite (Paris: Larousse, March 2007), 239–241.

[34] The expression appears in 2011 and it is part of Marine Le Pen’s de-demonization strategy. “Marine Le Pen espère banaliser la ‘préférence nationale’,” Le Point, September 9, 2011, https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/marine-le-pen-espere-banaliser-la-preference-nationale-09-09-2011-1371397_20.php.

[35] Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 116.

[36] Elected in 1974, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was the first president from the liberal right, not Gaullist, in the French Fifth Republic.

[37] Lamy, Le Club de l’Horloge, 306 ff.

[38] Pauline Picco, Liaisons dangereuses (Rennes: PUR, 2016), 112 ff.

[39] On this controversy, see: Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle droite, 14.

[40] Lyon 3 University was founded in 1973 following a split with Lyon 2 in the wake of the events of May–June 1968. From the late 1970s onwards, Lyon 3 welcomed a small core group of GRECE members. It thus became one of the strongholds of the far right in French academic circles. On this topic, see: Commission sur le racisme et le négationnisme à l’Université Jean-Moulin Lyon 3, Rapport à Monsieur le Ministre de l’Éducation nationale, prepared by Henry Rousso (September 2004).

[41] Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle droite, 14.

[42] This refers to the electoral (local) alliance formed in Dreux, a small town on the outskirts of Paris, between the right and the far-right parties, which formed a joint ticket in the second round of the mayoral election to defeat the Socialists.

[43] TV Libertés, “Comment la droite s’est laissée faire comme un rat.”

[44] As stated by the Constitutional Council, national preference is not legal in France and “advertising a job vacancy… that gives preference to French nationals constitutes… a penal offence (Art. R 225-1).” Yves Lequette, “Réflexions sur la nationalité française,” Cahiers du Conseil constitutionnel, no. 23 (February 2008), https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/nouveaux-cahiers-du-conseil-constitutionnel/reflexions-sur-la-nationalite-francaise.

[45] Camus, “Le Front national et la nouvelle droite,” in Les faux-semblants du Front National, 97–120.

[46] On Bruno Mégret, see: Valérie Igounet, Le Front national de 1972 à nos jours: le parti, les hommes, les idées (Paris: Seuil, 2014); Joseph Beauregard and Nicolas Lebourg, Dans l’ombre des Le Pen. Une histoire des numéros 2 du FN (Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2012).

[47] Beauregard and Lebourg, Dans l’ombre des Le Pen, 156.

[48] On the FN training sessions, see: Valérie Igounet, “La formation au Front national (1972–2015),” in Sylvain Crépon, Alexandre Dézé, and Nonna Mayer, eds., Les faux-semblants du Front National (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016), 269–296; Magali Boumaza, “Le Front national et la formation des jeunes: l’échec d’une tentative d’homogénéisation de cultures politiques,” paper presented at the conference Les tendances récentes de l’étude des partis politiques dans la science politique française: organisations, réseaux, acteurs, Association française de science politique, Institut d’études politiques de Paris, January 31–February 1, 2002.

[49] Alexandre Dézé, “Le Front national comme entreprise doctrinale,” in Florence Haegel, ed., Partis politiques et système partisan en France (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007), 255–284, accessed online, https://historiapolitica.com/datos/biblioteca/peuropa_deze.pdf.

[50] Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 160.

[51] Igounet, Le Front national de 1972 à nos jours, 252 ff.

[52] In December 1998, Bruno Mégret, then number two of the Front National and in political and strategic conflict with Jean-Marie Le Pen, was expelled from the party. Mégret secured the support of a majority of FN officials and founded the Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) in 1999. On the 1998–1999 split, see: Igounet, Le Front national de 1972 à nos jours, 301.

[53] Camus, “Le Front national et la Nouvelle droite,” in Les faux-semblants du Front National, 97–120.

[54] “Mon plan face au goulag mental – Le Zoom – Jean-Yves Le Gallou,” TVL, November 10, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ThF9YOAe8

[55] “Allocution d’ouverture de Jean-Yves Le Gallou, président de Polémia,” Polémia, April 6, 2011, https://www.polemia.com/allocution-douverture-de-jean-yves-le-gallou-president-de-polemia/.

[56] On “reinformation,” see: Gaël Stephan, “La réinformation par l’archive (2003–2013). Doctrine et constitution d’un réseau médiactiviste,” Le Temps des médias. Revue d’histoire 35, no. 2 (2020): 72–86, https://doi.org/10.3917/tdm.035.0072.

[57] Collectif Polémia, Dictionnaire de la réinformation. Cinq cent mots pour la dissidence (Paris: Polémia, 2010).

[58] Gaël Stéphan, La réinformation: un monde aux frontières du journalisme (PhD diss., Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, December 2, 2022).

[59] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “12 thèses pour un gramscisme technologique,” Polémia, November 1, 2008, https://archives.polemia.com/article.php?id=1763.

[60] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” September 9, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1965442190219329849; Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 246.

[61] Jean-Yves Le Gallou and Anne-Laure Blanc, Le Défi gaulois: Carnets de route en France réelle (Paris: Librairie nationale, 2000).

[62] Eviane Leidig and Zenith Khan, Remigration: The Rise of a Fringe Idea into the Political Mainstream (Center for the Study of Organized Hate, 2026), https://www.csohate.org/2026/01/20/remigration/.

[63] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” January 4, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1875597225167896583; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” August 24, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1959697367026065527; “Parasitisme, clientélisme… Haro sur les dépenses nuisibles !,” Le Zoom – Jean-Yves Le Gallou, TV Libertés (TVL), November 7, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSajwtOsjtU; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” August 24, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1962087251589947634.

[64] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Il serait temps d’appeler les choses par leur nom #francocide,” January 27, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1883810598535995765; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Pour l’islam le musulman est supérieur au non musulman,” July 25, 2023, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1683833920574439424; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),,” https://x.com/jylgallou/status/172659428455866788 (tweet deleted); Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” n.d., https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1845843119872385475 (tweet deleted); Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Le #Francocide ça coûte pas cher” (Twitter),” January 23, 2023, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1617463793721966592.

[65] “The Soft Totalitarianism of the Mental Gulag,” Arktos Journal, accessed October 25, 2025, https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/the-soft-totalitarianism-of-the-mental-gulag; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “A la louche il y a cinq paquets d’économies en tapant dans les dépenses NUISIBLES,” April 18, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1913122083015376956; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Pourquoi l’islam prend il une tournure plus radicale en France que dans bien des pays musulmans?,” May, 24, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1926316595904757978; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “La haine des “gwers” est une forme de racisme toléré et même encouragé,” June 3, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1929921114060263621; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Je résume: 1-Il y a bien du racism anti blanc,” March 24, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1903946980755128725.

[66] Note that there are no ethnic statistics in France.

[67] On “anti-white racism,” see: Sylvie Laurent and Thierry Leclère, De quelle couleur sont les Blancs? (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Reihane Merazka, “Le ‘racisme anti-blancs’. Carrière d’un problème public dans la presse quotidienne nationale française,” Réseaux 2020, no. 223 (2020); Vincent Aubert, “Le racisme anti-blancs: un oxymore?,” Mouvements 2022, HS no. 2 (2022).

[68] “Nécessité et faisabilité de la remigration: un sommet européen à Milan,” Polémia, May 9, 2025, https://www.polemia.com/necessite-et-faisabilite-de-la-remigration-un-sommet-europeen-a-milan/; Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 281 ff.

[69] “Vive l’Europe. Jean-Yves Le Gallou s’entretient avec Daniel Conversano,” YouTube, March 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VcCyN4iJJs.

[70] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” August 24, 2024, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1827244392588939629.

Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” August 25, 2024, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1827602945015185695.

Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X (Twitter),” August 4, 2023, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1687456828970430464.

[71] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “L’extrême centre, un danger totalitaire,” Polémia, accessed October 25, 2025, 2026, https://www.polemia.com/lextreme-centre-un-danger-totalitaire-par-jean-yves-le-gallou/

[72] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “Forteresse Europe: Dresde, Européens, sortez de la culpabilité,” Institut Iliade, accessed October 25, 2025, https://institut-iliade.com/forteresse-europe-dresde-europeens-sortez-de-la-culpabilite/; Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Manuel de lutte contre la diabolisation (Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie, 2020).

[73] TV Libertés, “Comment la droite s’est laissée faire comme un rat.”

[74] On Holocaust denial in France, see: Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 2000). “L’écrivain Yann Moix, la pétition et les négationnistes,” Le Monde, November 1, 2010, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/11/01/l-ecrivain-yann-moix-la-petition-et-les-negationnistes_5976963_823448.html.

[75] On Henri Roques, see: Rousso, Rapport sur le racisme et le négationnisme à l’université Lyon 3; https://www.conspiracywatch.info/notice/henri-roques.

[76] On Robert Faurisson, see: Valérie Igounet, Robert Faurisson. Portrait d’un négationniste (Paris: Denoël, 2012).

[77] “Non à la prison pour délit d’opinion,” Polémia, July 21, 2013, https://www.polemia.com/non-a-la-prison-pour-delit-dopinion.

[78] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “La liberté d’expression est en régression constante!,” YouTube video, accessed October 25, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgRkmiyd1Tk.

[79] “Jean-Yves le Gallou face aux juges: jusqu’où ira la censure sur l’immigration?,” TVLibertés, YouTube video, February 6, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ17cO7iUbE.

[80] “La préférence nationale prônée par le RN, une posture anticonstitutionnelle,” Le Monde, June 21, 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/06/21/la-preference-nationale-pronee-par-le-rn-une-posture-anticonstitutionnelle_6242155_3232.html.

[81] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X,” July 19, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1946528428460536149.

[82] TVLofficiel (@tvlofficiel), “Jean-Yves Le Gallou,” Instagram, April 4, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DIBGge0o-gS/; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Post on X,” July 6, 2018, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/990280992412778496 (tweet deleted).

[83] Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 165-166; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “@JDVance a raison” May 20, 2025; Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “Aux Etats-Unis, la Cour supreme defend la démocratie face aux tentatives de dictature judiciaire des adversaires de #Trump,” June 28, 2025. Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “États-Unis: échec à la dictature des juges! C’est pour quand en France?,” July 1, 2025 (screenshots in author’s possession).

[84] Jean-Yves Le Gallou (@jylgallou), “À bas l’État de droit vive l’illibéralisme,” X, May 28, 2025, https://x.com/jylgallou/status/1927723501131125181.

[85] On illiberalism, see: Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Oxford University Press, 2024).

[86] In spring 2013, the French parliament passed a law opening marriage to same-sex couples, known as “marriage for all.” The heated parliamentary debates were accompanied by large demonstrations uniting the right and far right in the “Manif pour tous” (“Protest for All”) movement.

[87] On the concept of “gender theory” and its use by Vatican networks and subsequently by the far right, see: Sara Garbagnoli and Massimo Prearo, La croisade “anti-genre”: Du Vatican aux manifs pour tous(Paris: Textuel, 2017); Sara Garbagnoli, “Against the Heresy of Immanence: Vatican’s ‘Gender’ as a New Rhetorical Device Against the Denaturalization of the Sexual Order,” Religion & Gender 6, no. 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.18352/rg.10156: 187–204; David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar, eds., Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018); David Paternotte, Sara Van der Dussen, and Valérie Piette, eds., Sextant, no. 31 (2015), “Habemus gender! Déconstruction d’une riposte religieuse.”

[88]  “Répression police politique de Valls: Manif symbolique devant Ambassade Russie,” France mariage, YouTube video, May 30, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liR3aIOnsKE; Rémi Noyon, “La Manif pour tous et la Fondation Jérôme-Lejeune porte plainte contre Act Up,” La Croix, August 5, 2013.

[89] Marlene Laruelle, ed., Entangled Far Rights:  A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

[90] See: Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the European Far Right (PhD diss., University College London, 2018): 140. accessed online https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10047343/1/Shekhovtsov_ID_thesis.pdf.

[91] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “Une petite histoire de la tyrannie médiatique,” Polémia, https://www.polemia.com/une-petite-histoire-de-la-tyrannie-mediatique/.

[92] On Casa Pound, see: Caterina Froio, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli, and Matteo Albanese, CasaPound Italia: Contemporary Extreme Right Politics (London: Routledge, 2020); Marie Tassa, “La question sociale chez Casapound Italia: discours et modalités d’action,” Parlement[s], Revue d’histoire politique 43, no. 1 (2026): 135–57, https://doi.org/10.3917/parl2.043.0135.

[93] Carlomanno Adinolfi is Gabriele Adinolfi’s son. The latter is a former leader of Terza Posizione, an Italian nationalist-revolutionary group active in the late 1970s. Carlomanno Adinolfi spoke at the 2024 Iliade conference on “Work, Civilization, and the Future.” Institut ILIADE (@InstitutILIADE), X post, February 27, 2025, https://x.com/InstitutILIADE/status/1894804177986990127. Journalist and writer Adriano Scianca is the cultural director of CasaPound and author of CasaPound, une terrible beauté est née, Paris, Éditions du Rubicon, 2012, reprinted under the title CasaPound, Tout se réapproprier. 40 concepts pour une révolution en marche, Paris, Éditions Nimésis, 2019.

[94] https://institutocarlosv.com; https://istitutoeneide.it.

[95] On femonationalism, see: Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). On Nemesis, see: Magali Della Sudda, Les Nouvelles femmes de droite (Marseille: Hors d’atteinte, 2022): 150-160.

[96] “Club réservé aux Européens: le parquet de Paris a été saisi,” Libération, February 27, 2025, https://www.liberation.fr/societe/police-justice/club-reserve-aux-europeens-le-parquet-de-paris-a-ete-saisi-20250227_HMRRHEBEX5HD7JLZMP4DLACHMI/?redirected=1.

[97] “Interview matinale de Radio Courtoisie,” YouTube video, February 7, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykEEPpwMr6E.

[98] On The European Conservative, see: Valentin Behr and Eve Gianoncelli, “The Radicalization of ‘Intellectual Conservatism’ in the Illiberal Moment: The Case of The European Conservative,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 5, no. 3 (2025): 59–74, https://doi.org/10.53483/zcrw3612, HALSHS preprint, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-05515985.

[99] “Search results for ‘iliade institute’,” The European Conservative, accessed May 22, 2026, https://europeanconservative.com/?s=iliade+institute.

[100] “À propos du Club des Cent,” Institut Iliade, n.d., https://dons.institut-iliade.com/a-propos-du-club-des-cent/; “Le Nid Incubateur,” Le Nid, accessed December 20, 2025, https://incubateurlenid.fr/.

[101] Clément Guillou, “Dans l’Allier, des catholiques identitaires mettent en scène leur vision de l’histoire avec le soutien de la droite,” Le Monde, August 16, 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2025/08/16/dans-l-allier-des-catholiques-identitaires-mettent-en-scene-leur-vision-de-l-histoire-avec-le-soutien-de-la-droite_6630084_823448.html.

[102] Le Gallou, “La remigration: légitimité, nécessité, possibilité,” Polémia, https://www.polemia.com/la-remigration-legitimite-necessite-possibilite-discours-de-jean-yves-le-gallou/.

[103] On Jared Taylor and American Renaissance, see: Russell Nieli, “Jared Taylor and White Identity,” in Mark Sedgwick (ed.), Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190877583.001.0001.

[104] See in particular, “Affirmative Action, French Style,” American Renaissance, November 1998. Le Gallou reciprocated by attending the 1999 American Renaissance conference.

[105] “Les dissidents doivent bien choisir les batailles à mener – Jared Taylor sur les événements du Capitole,” Polémia, accessed January 23, 2026, https://www.polemia.com/les-dissidents-doivent-bien-choisir-les-batailles-a-mener-jared-taylor-sur-les-evenements-du-capitole/.

[106] Jared Taylor, “Remigration summit: un succès éclatant,” Polémia, May 18, 2025, https://www.polemia.com/remigration-summit-un-succes-eclatant-par-jared-taylor/.

[107] On Arktos, see: Kye Allen, “‘Arktos 2.0’: Deplatforming and Digital Innovation in Far-Right Publishing,” Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), June 16, 2023, https://gnet-research.org/2023/06/16/arktos-2-0-deplatforming-and-digital-innovation-in-far-right-publishing/.

[108] “Jean-Yves Le Gallou,” author page, Arktos, accessed January 23, 2026, https://arktos.com/book-author/jean-yves-le-gallou/; “De Benoist,” Arktos, accessed January 23, 2026, https://arktos.com/?s=de+benoist.

[109] François Bousquet, “Exclusif: la campagne Zemmour vue de l’intérieur par Jean-Yves Le Gallou,” Revue Éléments, accessed January 23, 2026, https://www.revue-elements.com/exclusif-la-campagne-zemmour-vue-de-linterieur-par-jean-yves-le-gallou/.

[110] The Yellow Vest movement is a politically diverse French social movement that emerged in late 2018, initially protesting fuel taxes and later broader social and economic inequalities, characterized by its grassroots organization and decentralized leadership. On the movement, see: Quentin Ravelli, Johanna Siméant-Germanos, Loïc Bonin, and Pauline Liochon, Les Gilets jaunes: Une révolte inclassable (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2024); Christian Le Bart, Petite sociologie des Gilets jaunes: La contestation en mode post-institutionnel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020).

[111] Jérémie Baruch, Maxime Vaudano, Vincent Nouvet, and Anne Michel, “Derrière Éric Zemmour, les cinquante lieutenants d’une campagne d’extrême droite,” Le Monde – Les Décodeurs, December 12, 2021, https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2021/12/12/derriere-eric-zemmour-les-cinquante-lieutenants-d-une-campagne-d-extreme-droite_6105788_4355770.html.

[112] On Marion Maréchal ISSEP school, see: “La face cachée de l’Issep, l’école lyonnaise de Marion Maréchal,” Mediacités (Lyon edition), accessed January 23, 2026, https://www.mediacites.fr/lyon/dossier/la-face-cachee-de-lissep-lecole-lyonnaise-de-marion-marechal/.

[113] He successively supported, among others, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Philippe Séguin, Philippe de Villiers, François Fillon, and Marine Le Pen.

[114] Baruch et al., “Behind Éric Zemmour,” Le Monde, December 12, 2021.

[115] French Government Information Service, “2022 Presidential Election: First Round Results,” info.gouv.fr, accessed October 25, 2025, https://www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/election-presidentielle-2022-les-resultats-du-premier-tour.

[116] Bousquet, “Exclusif: la campagne Zemmour.”

[117] Le Gallou, La Préférence nationale, 157 ff.

[118] “Ma plongée au milieu des identitaires obsédés de l’islam,” Nouvel Obs, March 11, 2012, https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-nos-vies-connectees/20120311.RUE8444/ma-plongee-au-milieu-des-identitaires-obsedes-de-l-islam.html; “Photo de la manifestation,” Flickr, photograph, https://www.flickr.com/photos/novopress/6836375702/in/photostream/; “La ‘remigration’ des Identitaires aux portes du FN,” Libération, November 18, 2014, https://www.liberation.fr/france/2014/11/18/la-remigration-des-identitaires-aux-portes-du-fn_1145502/?redirected=1.

[119] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, “Nécessité et faisabilité de la remigration: un sommet européen à Milan,” Polé mia, https://www.polemia.com/necessite-et-faisabilite-de-la-remigration-un-sommet-europeen-a-milan/; Le Gallou, “La remigration: légitimité, nécessité, possibilité,” Institut Iliade, accessed October 25, 2025, https://institut-iliade.com/la-remigration-legitimite-necessite-possibilite/.

[120] Les Identitaires, 30 mesures pour une politique d’identité et de remigration (Éditions IDées, 2017).

[121] “La Remigration. Lubie romantique ou solution politique? with J-Y Le Gallou, Arthur de Watrigant and Martin Sellner,” Radio Courtoisie, May 12, 2025, https://institut-iliade.com/la-remigration-lubie-romantique-ou-solution-politique/.

[122] Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Remigration. Pour l’Europe de nos enfants (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Editions, 2026), preface by Martin Sellner.

[123] Le Gallou, “La remigration: légitimité, nécessité, possibilité.”

[124] “Grand Angle – Jean-Yves Le Gallou: Sommet pour la remigration de Milan,” TV Libertés, video, Dailymotion, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9lhvpa

[125] Le Gallou, Mémoires identitaires, 263.