Baptiste Roger Lacan

Baptiste Roger-Lacan's edited volume, "Nouvelle histoire de l'extrême droite (France, 1780–2025)," tells the story of the French far right as a long-lasting cultural formation that, since the late 18th century, has repeatedly grappled with waves of modernization, republican self-images, and social conflicts. Instead of examining individual organizations or eras in isolation, the book sketches a panorama of deep ideological structures—anti-liberalism, ethno-cultural conceptions of nationhood, aestheticized politics—that have renewed themselves over two and a half centuries without disappearing. The far right thus appears not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a productive counter-movement to French modernity, reflecting its promises and ruptures. This review praises this approach as a precise genealogical work that demonstrates how right-wing ideologemes adapt to changing media, actors, and political situations, thereby deriving their historical persistence. At the same time, the book interprets the present not as a state of exception, but as the culmination of a long transformation process: through metapolitical strategies, cultural shifts, and digital acceleration, the far right has become a permanently relevant actor. Its normalization can be explained by long-term continuities in which old discourses—narratives of threat, identity politics, and sensitivities to crisis—reappear in new forms. The book thus demonstrates that the political strength of the far right in 21st-century France can only be understood against the backdrop of a longue durée in which cultural unrest, critiques of modernity, and national imaginaries are constantly being reconfigured.