Abstract
This article examines the Federation des etudiants nationalistes (FEN) and its journal Cahiers universitaires between 1961 and 1963 in the context of post-war Parisian political and intellectual life. These dates encompass the launch of the journal and the loss of French Algeria - a fundamental preoccupation of the group. The group's militancy on behalf of the maintenance of France's three North African departements was interwoven with its far right political orientation and its striking conceptualisation of Europe . This article analyses five strands of discourse about Europe that recur in the journal: a Europe of nationalism, a Europe of imperialism, a Europe of hierarchy, a Europe defined against materialism, and a Europe of youth. I will argue that these different conceptions of Europe are closely interconnected.
Highlights
The Fédération des étudiants nationalistes was formed in 1960, partly as a hostile reaction to the new policy of the Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) regarding France‟s ongoing war in Algeria.[1]
The Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN) was not a major force in post-war French politics and it is more common to look at predominant actors in the emerging European community, there are two justifications for paying attention to the European discourse articulated in Cahiers universitaires
What is characteristic of the discourse of the FEN, is its invocation of Europe with regret rather than expectation, and yet with a sense of purposefulness that this regret might be channelled into a positive project, as they conceived it
Summary
Cahiers universitaires demonstrated a keen sense of trans-European nationalism. The FEN saw France, and European nations in general, as suffering from the same problems – political, technical, social lethargy, resignation and disarray This was unbecoming of a Europe formerly characterized by creative energy and spirit.[22] Such was the message of the group‟s foundational manifesto (the Manifeste de la classe soixante) which was continually referenced in Cahiers universitaires and reproduced and reworked in its September-October 1962 edition. Whilst the permanence of Western civilisation was contrasted to ephemeral „pseudos-civilisations colorées.‟26 Two things should be emphasized here: the term „the West‟ was for the FEN an expression of European values and did not imply any concessions to the importance of the United States This aversion to non-European nationalism was, laying the ground for its opposition to decolonization. This leads us on to the second conception of Europe in Cahiers universitaires – the idea of a Europe of imperialism
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