Interview
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A counterweight to the United States, a conservative and authoritarian state model… For the extreme right, the Moscow regime sometimes takes on the appearance of an ideal. In their book “Paris-Moscow”, researchers Nicolas Lebourg and Olivier Schmitt decipher a century of ideological links, which the Russian government knows how to exploit perfectly.
The European election campaign saw Jordan Bardella be assailed with questions about the National Rally’s links with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A liability that Marine Le Pen’s successor is having a hard time getting rid of, as the attraction to Russian power remains powerful on the far right. Historian Nicolas Lebourg (CNRS-University of Montpellier) and professor of international relations Olivier Schmitt (Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark) return to the subject in their book Paris-Moscow, a century of the extreme right (éditions du Seuil) to be published on September 6. With a fairly innovative multidisciplinary approach, the book analyzes the links established ideologically between right-wing radicals and Russia since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. It shows how the dynamics established since then converge in the Russian narrative of the war in Ukraine as well as its appropriation by the French extreme right.
Why did you write this book?
Olivier Schmitt : For some time now, there has been a question in the public space as to whether the National Rally was an ally of Putin’s Russia. There was even
