Alain Soral

Soral's personal journey has led some to compare him with Jacques Doriot, one of the neo-socialists in the early 1930s and Collaborationist under Pétain.

Alain Bonnet, known as Alain Soral (born 2 October 1958), is a far-right Franco-Swiss ideologue, essayist, filmmaker and actor.

Having been a member of the French Communist Party in the 1990s, Soral worked for the National Front before leaving in 2009.

Soral defined himself as a Marxist, and claims to have been a member of the French Communist Party in the early 1990s.

He declares to have left the PCF because of his opposition to the party's renunciation of revolutionary content.

Soral performed in Catherine Breillat's 1996 film Parfait Amour! in the role of Philippe.

He then published another polemical essay, Vers la féminisation? – Démontage d'un complot antidémocratique ("Towards feminisation? – Analysis of an antidemocratic plot"), and spent the following couple of years writing and directing his first full-length movie, Confession d'un dragueur ("Confessions of a womaniser"), which was a commercial and critical failure.

Disgusted by what he called "a lynching", Soral gave up cinema altogether and returned to writing.

He published ''Jusqu'où va-t-on descendre?

This book was later turned into a feature-length film, Confession d'un Dragueur in 2001 starring Said Taghmaoui, Thomas Dutronc, Catherine Lachens, François Levantal and Cloe Lambert.

Soral supported left-wing dissident candidate Jean-Pierre Chevènement during the 2002 presidential election.

– Abécédaire de la bêtise ambiante ("How far down are we going? – ABC's of ambient stupidity"), followed by Socrate à Saint-Tropez (2003) and Misères du désir'' (2004).

In 2005, Soral turned to the far-right, joining the National Front's campaign committee; he was given responsibility for social issues and for the suburbs under the authority of Marine Le Pen.

He supported the Bloc identitaire's distribution of food in January 2006.

In 2007 he founded his own political association, Égalité & Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation), with former GUD members.

At the same time, he also launched a publishing company, KontreKulture, which he uses to publish contemporary controversial authors.

In 2007, he became part of the central committee of Front National, trying to place social issues and even elements of marxist analysis in the program of the party (historically strongly opposed to Communism); but this proved to misfire as the score of candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen at the 2007 election turned out to be significantly inferior to his 2002 breakthrough as second round finalist.

He left the party in 2009.

He has a dysfunctional relationship with his family.

According to his sister, they had a tyrannical father and he hasn't spoken to his mother for 20 years after he said he wanted time to reconstruct himself.

Besides the sociological Marxist analysis of the modern-day society, Soral's books tend to focus on seven main themes:

Notably, Soral has written:

In France, all forms of growing communitarianism (gay, Islamic, etc.) form and strengthen through imitation of, hostility towards and opposition to Judeo-Zionist communitarianism, whose privileged status constitutes the communitarian jurisprudence by which their claims against the Republic are supported.

Soral's analysis of society focuses on what he terms "desire society", promoted by the media and the cult of celebrity.

He has especially criticised monthly women's publications, which he believes alter the conscience and relegate women to the status of "objects" (femme-objet).

As part of the debate on "laïcité" in French schools, Soral claimed to prefer the Muslim veil to thong underwear.

In 2019, Soral received a prison sentence in France for using anti-semitic slurs to label the Pantheon in a video.

incentive to racial hatred, apology of crime against humanity and Holocaust denial.

In 2023, he received another prison sentence in Switzerland for defamation, discrimination, and incitement to hatred.

Soral was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie and grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (department of Haute-Savoie), where he attended a local primary school.

When Soral was about 12, his family moved to Meudon la Forêt so that he could go to a private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris.

Soral spent two years doing small jobs before being accepted into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at 20, where he studied for two years.

Soral was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enroll at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis.

Following his studies, and working with Hector Obalk and Alexandre Pasche, Soral wrote a book on the sociology of trendiness, Les mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, as well as a fictionalised autobiography, Le Jour et la nuit ou la vie d'un vaurien.

The latter work sold badly, and this led Soral to turn away from writing for a time.

Soral then focused on cinematic techniques, and after 2 promotional films, wrote and directed his first short film, Chouabadaballet, une dispute amoureuse entre deux essuie-glaces.

After a stint as a reporter in Zimbabwe, Soral wrote and directed his second short film, Les Rameurs, misère affective et culture physique à Carrière-sur-Seine.

Around that time, Soral had joined the French Communist Party.

He became interested in the works of Karl Marx and other Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Henri Wallon, Lucien Goldmann and Michel Clouscard.

He published Sociologie du dragueur ("Sociology of the womaniser"), his most successful sociological essay to date.