The campaign to isolate Nouvelle Alliance (NA), led by various components of Québec’s anti-fascist movement, has finally borne fruit. First with the events surrounding their failed May 19 rally, where the nationalist identitarian organization showed its true colors by physically attacking anti-fascist activists, and more recently with their attempt to organize a large pro-independence demonstration in Québec City on September 20. This initiative attracted hundreds of independentists who acted to oppose and isolate Nouvelle Alliance, preventing NA from marching.
These events have alienated most of the key pro-independence forces active today, from the Mouvement des étudiants et étudiantes indépendantistes (MEI) to OUI-Québec, including the very centrist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, which generally favours a big-tent approach. Even the door to the Parti Québécois, which had long remained ajar, is increasingly closed to them. The more this particular far-right organization exposes itself (or is exposed), the more solid the cordon sanitaire around it. We consider this to be excellent news.
That being said, this closure on its left flank is leading the young organization to increasingly turn to the right for support. Nouvelle Alliance recently crossed another symbolic line in its rightward drift—a troubling and very dark line to cross.
By organizing its October 4 “Perspectives nationalistes” in Trois-Rivières, with François Dumas of the Cercle Jeune Nation as a guest of honor, Nouvelle Alliance is literally opening the door to fascism. To be clear, this is not simply another conference but, rather, a quasi-mandatory political training session Nouvelle Alliance members.
What Is the Cercle Jeune Nation (CJN)?
Jeune Nation, which later became Cercle Jeune Nation, was founded in the mid-1980s by two students at the Université de Montréal: François Dumas and Rock Tousignant. Jeune Nation was inspired by two French organizations, both linked to Nazism and fascism by their history and affiliations: Jeune Nation, active in the 1940s and 1950s and Ordre Nouveau, which brought together several factions of the radical far right in the late 1960s, giving rise to the infamous Front National. Jeune Nation—the Québec version—was, thus, inspired by the French neo-fascist “revolutionary nationalist” movement, in particular by its intellectual leader François Duprat.
Beyond CJN’s core concerns, it also revered Abbé Lionel Groulx and fiercely opposed (non-white) immigration, which, it was argued, would dilute both the French Canadian “race” and the “French fact” in Québec.
The Cercle Jeune Nation also drew direct inspiration from the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), the flagship organization of the French “New Right,” whose unspoken goal has always been to rehabilitate fascism using a “metapolitical” approach (cultural, intellectual endeavors, etc.).
An excerpt from the text “Quelques jalons pour l’histoire d’une organisation nationaliste de droite au Québec,” by François Dumas, Cahiers de Jeunes Nation no. 2 (July 1992). Dumas reveals his strategy of not explicitly identifying himself as far-right in public, while privately acknowledging that he is, a strategy adopted in full by Nouvelle Alliance
The Cercle Jeune Nation advocated a philosophy of “no enemies on the right,” which led them to invite all right-wing and far-right nationalists to gather under their banner. This approach also characterized the Fédération des Québécois de souche (FQS; founded by neo-Nazis, it should be noted) and its newspaper Le Harfang, to which Roch Tousignant, co-founder of the CJN, still contributes today. This collaboration is reflected to this day on the Le Harfang Telegram channel, where the content of the CJN blog is regularly reproduced.
Originally, Nouvelle Alliance saw itself as a vehicle open to all separatists and defined itself as neither right-wing nor left-wing. It is clear that this ambition has been abandoned, due to a total lack of left-wing support. NA is now a united front for Québec’s far right, from Alexandre Cormier-Denis to the Cercle Jeune Nation, including white supremacist boneheads like David Leblanc and Catholic secularists who protest against Muslim street prayer. This is very similar to the “no enemies on the right” principle.
We know that a number of early members of Nouvelle Alliance have defected in recent months in response to the leadership’s drift toward the far right. As to those remaining: it is becoming increasingly difficult for you to claim that you don’t know what is happening.
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Could this be the same François Dumas, from Outremont, who was the subject of this brief 1972 article in Serviam, the newsletter of the Parti de l’unité nationale du Canada (PUNC), the successor to the “Canadian Nazi” Adrien Arcand?
