René Binet (neo-Fascist)

René Binet was born on 16 October 1913 in Darnétal, Seine-Maritime.[1] He became a communist sympathizer in high school following a trip to the Soviet Union. Aged 16 in 1930, Binet joined the French Communist Youth and became the secretary of its local Le Havre section, before getting expelled from that group in 1934 after he supported Jacques Doriot's ideas of "common front" (front unique).[1][2]

Binet then moved towards the Fourth International, joining Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier around the journal La Commune. In March 1936, he became a founding member of Molinier's Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) following his election to the party's Central Committee. Binet was also a member the Le Havre employees trade union's countcil, but he got expelled in February 1937 because after he refused to follow the internal refereeing procedure.[1]

When the PCI was dissolved in December 1938 to merge into the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (POSP), Binet withdrew from the group and continued his own journal, Le Prolétaire du Havre. His group sent an observer to the 3rd congress of the Internationalist Workers Party (POI) in January 1939, a rival organization of the PCI led by Pierre Naville and Jean Rous.[1] Binet wrote in his memoirs that he felt hatred for the Soviet Union and the Jews during the period 1934–1939.[2]

In 1940, Binet was taken as a prisoner-of-war by the Germans for a time, then liberated.[3] Whilst held in a prisoner camp, he moved from his anti-Stalinist stance to become a supporter of Nazism, serving as a staff sergeant in the SS Charlemagne Division from 1944.[1][4] In 1943, the Comité Communiste Internationaliste published a "warning" about Binet, dismissing him as a traitor to the Trotskyist cause.[1]

After the war, Binet spent 6 months in a French prison for serving in the German military, then returned to political activism.[5] He founded the bulletin Le Drapeau Noir to defend "the demands of the soldiers of the East" – that is former Waffen-SS and LVF members. His sympathizers belonged to the Front Noir, a clandestine organization that contemplated armed struggle in order to build a "new Europe" relying on fascism.[6] The organization had linked with other neo-fascist groups abroad via a Front Noir International and a Secours Noir International, which acted as an "embryonic" and "ephemeral" transnational union of fascist activists according to political scientist Jean-Paul Gautier.[7] Binet also collaborated with Marc Augier (also known as "Saint-Loup") in founding the journal Combattant européen in March 1946.[8]

In the late 1940s, he helped set up a number of political parties and organizations. Binet founded the Parti Républicain d'Unité Populaire (PRUP) in 1946, which adopted the slogan "France for the Real French!". According to scholar James G. Shields, the PRUP followed "an ideological hotchpotch mixing nationalism with Europeanism and socialist themes with collaborationist sympathies." The party had around 150 members and joined forces with the Rassemblement Travailliste Français to contest the 1947 municipal elections. Following an electoral defeat, Binet converted the PRUP into the Mouvement Socialiste d'Unité Française (MSUF) in 1948.[9] Its periodical, L'Unité, led a campaign against the Épuration of Nazi collaborators and demanded the departure of Arabs from France to stop an alleged "African invasion". The party, which had 250 members at most, was banned by the authorities in March 1949.[10][9]

From 1949 to 1952, Binet published two bulletins: L'Étincelle, which appeared irregularly published,[7] and Sentinelle, where one could read the contributions of Jean-André Faucher, Karl-Heinz Priester or Gaston-Armand Amaudruz.[10] In Sentinelle, Binet advocated his views on "national socialism" and "scientific racism" while promoting the establishment of a "fascist international".[11]

In July 1950, Binet launched the magazine Le Nouveau Prométhée, where he developed his theories on "biological realism". The text published in the first issue was adapted the same year as a brochure entitled Théorie du racisme to serve as a doctrinal pamphlet advocating racial separation.[8] The magazine disappeared after one year of existence.[7] Binet also became close to Maurice Bardèche and the Comité National Français. He accompanied Bardèche in 1951 to the meeting in Malmö that saw the formation of the European Social Movement.[12]

However, Binet soon broke from the new group which he felt did not go far enough in terms of racialism and anti-communism, and joined instead Amaudruz in establishing the Zurich-based New European Order as a more radical alternative.[13] The group called at its founding for a "European racial policy" to improve the European gene pool via eugenicist interventions and control of ethnic inter-marriages.[14] Binet aimed to federate the nationalists of Europe – from former Waffen-SS members to former resistance fighter – against what he called the Russo-American occupation of the continent by "niggers", "Mongols" and "Jews".[5]

In the later years of his life, Binet worked as a librarian, running the small publishing house Comptoir National du Livre, then led a property development company called Baticoop.[1] He died in a car accident on 16 October 1957 in Pontoise, the day of his 44th birthday.[1][15]

Noted for his domineering personality, Binet was not always popular with his far right colleagues, leading to allegations that some of them may have arranged his death.[16] Fellow fascist writer Maurice Bardèche described him as a "fascist of the puritan type who spends his life founding parties and publishing roneotyped newspapers".[17]