Ten days after the death of far-right activist Quentin Deranque in Lyon, President Emmanuel Macron convened government officials this week to discuss the fight against 'violent extreme groups'. Although France's far right has historically been divided into several factions, there have been signs of rapprochement in recent years, as seen at the march in Deranque's name held on 21 February.
According to French domestic intelligence services, there are 3,300 individuals currently involved with one of the three main factions of the extreme right in the country: identitarians, revolutionary nationalists and monarchists.
The ethno-nationalist identitarian movement emerged in the early 2000s, before being represented on a national scale by the small group Génération Identitaire from 2012 onwards.
Its supporters advocate an "ethnic definition" of identity based on a "triptych of identity", explained Marion Jacquet-Vaillant, a specialist in the movement, to French news agency AFP. "For example, an individual is from Nice, French and European."
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Revolutionary nationalist ideology is anti-parliamentarian and neo-fascist. It has long been represented in France by the Groupe Union Défense, better known by its acronym GUD.
This neo-fascist movement made headlines in 2013 when the young anti-fascist activist Clément Méric was beaten to death by skinheads linked to a small group close to this movement, which was subsequently dissolved by the government.
"Revolutionary nationalism is a movement that claims to be social, popular, anti-bourgeois and internationalist," said Lebourg.
The third and final movement is that of the monarchists, whose main incarnation in France is the group Action Française. Founded in 1898, it originally advocated for a return to the monarchy to restore traditional values and national unity. It is now focused on cultural identity and Euroscepticism.
While the group share ideological similarities, their approach to violent action differs.
The monarchists of Action Française make little or no use of violent methods.
The identitarian movement, meanwhile, has resorted to violence in the past – most prominently the attempted assassination of then President Jacques Chirac in 2002 by Maxime Brunerie, an identitarian activist. Since then, this movement has favoured shock tactics, such as occupying mosques or displaying banners with racist connotations, such as the one targeting singer Aya Nakamura.
Among revolutionary nationalists, violence is in the movement's DNA. Lebourg notes: "Seventy-five percent of their violent acts since 2017 have been assaults."
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A changing landscape
The landscape of the far right in France has been changing over the past decade, mainly as a result of the French government ordering the dissolution of several groups.
Macron's time in office has seen the dissolution of more political groups than during any other administration, and since 2017 half of those dissolved have been far-right groups. Génération Identitaire was banned in March 2021, and the GUD in June 2024.
However, with the disappearance of these national structures, small collectives have reformed at the local level, both in cities and rural areas – sometimes with as few as 15 members. The online media outlet StreetPress lists 141 such groups on its website.
The effectiveness of banning these groups is disputed by academics, who argue that dismantling larger national organisations means intelligence services lose track of certain activists.
It also reinforces the sense of belonging among members to the same ostracised movement, explains political scientist Jean-Yves Camus.
"These activists say to themselves, since repression affects us all, why do we continue to divide ourselves? There is a widespread feeling of 'what unites us is stronger than what divides us', despite ideological and historical differences."
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Camus says the march organised in Lyon on 21 February in tribute to Deranque demonstrated this new unity between the various factions of the far right – as did Deranque himself, having rubbed shoulders with identitarian and monarchist groups as well as revolutionary nationalists.
Of the three factions of the far right, the ideology of the identitarians is increasingly dominating the other two – in particular its adherence to the racist conspiracy theory of the "Great Replacement".
Popularised by Renaud Camus, a theorist of the radical far right in France, it argues that there is an orchestrated plot to replace white European populations with non-white immigrants, primarily from Muslim-majority countries and advocates the forced return of immigrants to their countries of origin.
Thus, Lebourg says: "[With] the obsession with the ethnic question, we have a great simplification of the movement that has been under way since 2015," adding that there has effectively been a collapse of the "ideological barriers" that once divided the far right.
This article has been adapted from the original version in French by Baptiste Coulon.
