René Binet (neo-Fascist)

René Binet (16 October 1913 – 16 October 1957) was a French fascist political activist.

René Valentin Binet was born on 16 October 1913 in Darnétal, Seine-Maritime.

He became a communist sympathizer in high school after a trip to the Soviet Union.

Initially a Trotskyist in the 1930s, he espoused fascism during World War II and joined the SS Charlemagne Division.

Soon after the end of the war, Binet became involved in numerous neo-fascist and white supremacist publications and parties.

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).

Binet then moved towards the Fourth International, joining Pierre Frank and Raymond Molinier around the journal La Commune.

He wrote in his memoirs that he felt hatred for the Soviet Union and the Jews during the period 1934–1939.

In March 1936, he became a founding member of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI) along with Frank and Molinier, and was elected to the party's Central Committee.

Binet was also a member the Le Havre employees trade union's council, but got expelled in February 1937 after he refused to follow the internal refereeing procedure.

When the PCI was dissolved in December 1938 in order 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.

In August 1939, Binet was arrested for distributing pacifist propaganda.

Enlisted in the French army in May 1940, Binet was soon taken as a prisoner-of-war by the Germans.

During the war, he moved away from his communist stance to become an open supporter of Nazism.

In 1943, he enrolled in Nazi Germany's Compulsory Work Service.

In April of the same year, the Internationalist Communist Committee published a "warning" about Binet, dismissing him as a traitor to the Trotskyist cause.

In February 1944, he joined the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF), then served as a staff sergeant within the SS Charlemagne Division.

On 3 May 1945, claiming to be an escapee from German camps, Binet surrendered to the Americans and was repatriated to France.

He spent 6 months in a French prison for serving in the German military, then returned to political activism.

His wife Marie-Angèle Lamisse created a support group for former prisoners which served as the basis of the first organization Binet founded in 1945, the Republican Party for Popular Unity (PRUP).

The group denounced "Slavic and American imperialism" and the cultural influence of the Vatican, adopted the slogan "France for the Real French!", and tried to recruit leftists on radical nationalist slogans.

According to scholar James G. Shields, the PRUP followed "an ideological hotchpotch mixing nationalism with Europeanism and socialist themes with collaborationist sympathies."

Binet also co-founded with fascist writer Saint-Loup the newspaper Combattant européen in March 1946, which claimed to fight the "colonization of Europe" by "negroes" and "Mongols" and advocated the union of former communist resistance fighters and the Waffen-SS in order to build "the European nation".

The party, which militated "against the massive arrival of North African workers", had around 150 members when it 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.

The MSUF advocated the emergence of a Franco-German union which, according to them, was "alone capable of saving the white race from the invasion of the Negroes."

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, obtained financial aid from the Argentinian embassy and maintained relations with the Egyptian embassy, the Arab League and the Bruderschaft.

The MSUF was banned by the French authorities in March 1949.

Binet 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.

The organization had linked with other neo-fascist groups abroad via a Front Noir International and a Secours Noir International, two organizations that acted as an "embryonic" and "ephemeral" transnational union of fascist activists according to political scientist Jean-Paul Gautier.

From 1949 to 1952, Binet published two bulletins: L'Étincelle, which saw an irregular publication, and Sentinelle, where one could read the contributions of Jean-André Faucher, Karl-Heinz Priester or Gaston-Armand Amaudruz.

In Sentinelle, Binet advocated his views on "national socialism" and "scientific racism" while promoting the establishment of a "fascist international".

He wrote the 1950 book Théorie du racisme (Theory of Racism), deemed influential on the European far-right at large.

In July 1950, Binet launched the magazine Le Nouveau Prométhée, which presented itself as "national-progressist" and tried to appear more mainstream, and 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 in order to serve as a doctrinal pamphlet advocating racial segregation.

Binet died in a car accident in 1957, aged 44.

According to scholar Nicolas Lebourg, "Binet’s openly advertised racialism has paved the way to an anti-colonialist and anti-immigrant ethnopluralism celebrated by the New Right and then the Identitarians. Abandoning classic nationalism and Aryanism for the notion of a 'white world', Binet clearly outlined the forthcoming themes of 'white genocide' and the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government)."