This chubby-faced, bespectacled photo of Robert Brasillach is familiar to Frenchmen and others who remember him. Brasillach loved his nation—France—and inspired an entire generation through his various writings. The problem was, he made openly clear to all his admiration for the accomplishments of the energetic national socialist states rising in Europe. France, he thought, had become complacent, led by aging men with even older ideas. Honestly voicing such admiration for national socialism and the Vichy government cost him his life. This was his only crime.

“The Bolshevik partisans will wonder what we are preparing for them. Simply, another Revolution, a little more terrible than theirs. They love the red star. We celebrate the yellow sun. Religious war.”

Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg in Jean Mabire’s The God of War

“Comrades! To confront plutocratic conservatism, democratic capitalism and a Bolshevism that destroys everything in its path, the purist leveler in the last three decades or so has arrived: the Fascist idea, which has come up with solutions of social problems that have wearied millenniums of humanity … [the Fascist idea] today glows with a new, pure, and bright light. Embodied in the resurgent Italian Social Republic, Fascism applies and realizes its fundamental postulates. Tomorrow, this idea will bestow on the country its definite national and social structure. Comrades! Faced by plutocratic conservatism, capitalist democracy, and the destructive force of Bolshevism, we emerge. Moved by the purest ideas, we religiously swear to achieve a secure and correct consciousness that will guarantee an absolute faith for life and in death.”

Rodolfo Graziani, 9 February 1944.

The profound idea of the Medieval Holy Empire has today been revived in the common orientation of the political, military, and economic energies, which, from Flanders to Sicily, found within the Axis .... The New Europe organizes herself around the Axis just as the states and peoples of the Middle Ages ... organized themselves around the Holy-Empire.

Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Cahiers franco-allemands, 1940.

Avanguardia Nazionale Giovanile was founded in 1959 by Stefano Delle Chiaie and other national revolutionaries who considered both the MSI and Ordine Nuovo too tame. Like ON, AN arrayed itself on the radical Evolan wing of the neo-fascist spectrum and bitterly denounced the moderate bourgeois elements at the helm of the MSI, although its ideological views were less sophisticated than those propounded by Rauti’s group and it attracted more marginal social elements. It was, even more than ON, a group geared toward direct action rather than sterile philosophizing. As one early AN militant later claimed, "we didn’t give a fuck for ideology, we were just angry...and wanted to hit back". A later AN pamphlet had this to say: "We are for man-to-man engagements...Before setting out our men are morally prepared, so that they learn to break the bones, even of someone who gets down on his knees and cries".