Dominique Venner: A Life straight out of Plutarch

Who was, really, Dominique Venner? In an age of bugmen, Venner was a character straight out of Plutarch, a man of thumos, someone who could not be tamed into bourgeois bug life. At fifteen he attempted to enroll in the Foreign Legion to find adventure. It was the age of the Indochina War, precursor to the American Vietnam conflict. He was caught at the eleventh hour before he could abscond, and dispatched by his unimpressed parents to a special school bordering on the reformatory. From there, he conceived and led a raid on the local headquarters of the Communist Party, guilty at the time of defaming the French troops fighting in Vietnam. At nineteen, he volunteered to join the fight against the Arab separatists who were trying to take over Algeria (then part of France and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of French families who had lived there for many generations). He returned to Paris in 1956, and became embroiled in street fights, plots, and a notable attempt to storm the Presidential Palace in order to stop the weaselly de Gaulle from surrendering Algeria. After his release from the political unit of the notorious La Santé prison, he formulated a long-term program of cultural reconquest, a way ultimately to defeat the New Leftists that were by then taking over the universities, the mass media, the foundations, and (in the United States) the federal bureaucracy--in what would become known as "the long march through the institutions". Read the spiritual testament of a man who managed to live the heroic life in the modern age: A Handbook for Dissidents.

 

"This Handbook was written by a European for Europeans, or Hyperboreans, as Nietzsche would have put it. Others, coming from other peoples, other cultures, other civilizations, will be able to read it, of course, but only out of intellectual curiosity. Because for the Europeans, sons of the different peoples of our great Borean homeland, this book is a bit about their particular destiny in the universe. It is a reflection on the causes of the decline and lethargy of the European spirit."