Steven Bissuel is a French right-wing extremist, who is known for his involvement in the militant far-right group Groupe Union Défense (GUD), today Bastion Social.
Around September 2011, Bissuel founded a section of the GUD in Lyon, which was mainly active at the University Jean-Moulin-Lyon-III.1 With its growing influence among students in the Lyon and Paris regions, Bissuel named the group Union des lycéens nationalistes (ULN), taking over the acronym of a group initially set up by the Ordre Nouveau in 1970.2
GUD demonstration on May 13, 2012. To the very left is Steven Bissuel, head of the Lyon's GUD chapter.
When in 2017 the GUD merged into Bastion Social, Bissuel became the leader of Lyon's Bastion Social chapter. The by now outlawed Bastion Social was a French neofascist political movement modeled on the Italian CasaPound. CasaPound's eminence gris, Gabriele Adinolfi, appeared as a speaker at Lyon's Bastion Social chapter on February 17, 2018. On a picture posted by the Lansquenet Alix Grabé, Adinolfi can be seen together with Bissuel.3
Gabriele Adinolfi (right) and Steven Bissuel (left) at a Bastion Social event in 2018.
Bissuel appeared as a speaker at the 1st Paneuropa Conference in Kyiv 2017 on the invitation of Ukrainian nationalists of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. At that time he was still the leader of the Groupe Union Défense (GUD) Lyon, which in 2017 merged into Bastion Social. Bissuel got arrested for violent acts in October 2018. He was supposed to speak at the Synthèse Nationale meeting in Rungis in 2018, but was replaced by Valentin Linder.
A report from the 1st Paneuropa Conference in 2017 says the following about Bissuel's appearance at the conference:4
The next two speakers came from France, the land which renounced its heritage along with the anti-feudal revolution of 1789, which inspired the bloodiest leftist upheavals of the XXth century, and simultaneously gave birth to the first synthesis of the European political tradition with the spirit of modernity – Action Francaise, if not Counterrevolution (which does not equal restauration) itself. French New Right, linked to us through Dominique Venner, an encyclopedic intellectual and a man of action in one, still leads the way in communicating the legacy of the classic Third Way to the next generation of third positionists.
Groupe Union Défense (GUD) represented at the 1st Paneuropa conference in Kyiv by Steven Bissuel, the leading member of GUD-Lyon, in fact, is closer to the emblematic national-revolutionaries of the former century. Founded in the turbulent 68th as a radical student organization against time itself, it has always combined metapolitics with social initiatives and the direct street action. “Revolt against fatality” bequeathed by Dominique Venner, long before his death became the main principle of the community of French who, in Steven Bissuel’s words, do not want to lose a centuries-old civilization because of the fault of globalization.
Since October 2016, the movement established its “fortress” in Lyon – Pavillion Noir. Far from an intent to settle down and switch to calmer activities, GUD marked the fourth anniversary of Dominique Venner’s power suicide on May 21, 2013 by occupying an abandoned house at Rue du Port-du-Temple 18 in Lyon to provide decent free housing for the French. As Steven Bissuel explained in his recent interviews, many considered it impossible in France, and June 13 the police, after previous failed attempts to enter the house, finally brutally expulsed its barricaded defenders. However, following the groundbreaking example of CasaPound Italia (Gianluca Iannone, President of CPI, paid a symbolic visit to Bastion Social), as well as Spanish Hogar Social, GUD has managed not only to seize a building named Bastion Social, but to launch the social movement of the same title aimed at the revision and requisition of the abandoned houses in all France, as well as facilitating terms of the residence acquisition for students and low-income families. So after the expulsion by the police, GUD says to take only a short break on the way to a new suitable free housing target. Dozens of organizations worldwide have already expressed their passionate support for the Bastion Social movement.
According to Bastion Social, more than 8.8 million French people are below the poverty line, that is, one in seven people; between 140,000 and 150,000 citizens are homeless. That being said, the French state currently owns 78 million square meters of which 11 million are officially vacant (unoccupied), including 1 million dwellings. Yet the government spends billions to allocate non-European economic refugees who continue arriving to France on a daily basis, since no restrictions have been imposed after the gruesome terror acts in Paris and Nice. That’s why GUD feels fully justified in launching this long-term social program, thus building “a state within a state” and preparing for a quite possible future “civil” war in migrant-flooded European countries.
Pincers closing around the French, oligarchs surrendering the country to the foreign capital and the replacement of population aggravated by the US-led destabilization in the Middle East, was one of the main messages of Steven Bissuel’s speech. But the sharpest attention of the audience drew his commentary on the presidential election in France the final round of which happened in the aftermath of the conference in Kyiv, for the opinions about led by Marine Le Pen Front National are heavily polarized. Not only in the case of Ukrainians who are well aware of the political alliance between the Kremlin and Front National and the infamous change of political partnership after Marine Le Pen’s visit to Crimea in 2013 and obtaining a 9-million-euro loan from the First Russian bank in the Czech Republic in 2014.
(In 2005, Ukrainian nationalist Svoboda party was the first to make a public statement in support of Front National which condemned the violent immigrant gangs on the streets setting hundreds of cars on fire and the policy of unlimited immigration as a whole. The same 2005 year, in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv was held a meeting of FN’s delegation with Svoboda invariably led by Oleh Tiahnybok. In 2009, Jean-Marie Le Pen, having underlined common political attitudes, signed a memorandum of cooperation between Svoboda and FN. In 2011, after Marine Le Pen took leadership of FN, Tiahnybok also met with her at FN’s headquarters on the outskirts of Paris and extended their partnership. The next year, when Europarliament adopted an amendment warning the democratic parties against forming a coalition with “racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic” Svoboda party on the rise, FN returned a favor to Svoboda and didn’t concur with this assessment.)
French and other European nationalists also understand that moderate “civic nationalism” of Front National will hardly make any change in France which in some respects has already passed the point of no return. However, Steven Bissuel emphasized that his organization, once embracing the elder Le Pen in its ranks, had no illusions about FN but considered Marine Le Pen’s candidateship far better than that of Emmanuel Macron and, what is more important, believed that on condition of FN’s victory the political climate in France would be much more favorable for the nationalist forces, including the collaboration with Ukrainian patriots and gradual promotion of their perspective.
Such plans are set, anyway. After all, GUD was one of the first French and, overall, European organizations to support the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists for the third way, for Ukraine and all Europe. Just to quote an excerpt from GUD’s statement on Ukraine’s war with Putin-backed militants in 2014:
“In this context, it seemed natural for GUD to support the initiative of Pravyi Sektor and the Ukrainian army that are fighting for Ukraine’s right to self-determination and against the interference of the pro-Russian terrorist militias. GUD consists of young activists that may find common grounds with the AZOV battalion that is also formed by the young volunteers who fight by improvised means and are not funded, as some gossips claim, by CIA, Mossad and Soros. History has shown that young people who fight for their land and die for it, as a rule, are very rarely supported by the global powers.
It is strange to look deeper at the supporters of the pro-Russian militias and encounter bizzare acquaintances with the antifascists from all countries…
However, we would like to say that we are not fooled by the game of the big world powers. We are against interference in Ukraine and anywhere else of both Russian and Western agents (NATO, EU…), our only party are people. On the contrary to those who want to force people into a rigid bilateral system, Russia or the West, we promote our third way, beyond the current geopolitical chessboard.”
Read the full statement here: http://rozum.info/news/2014-09-14-381
Quite surprisingly, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the extreme Left, took over 19% of votes in the first-round count. In tune with Sebastien Manificat’s take on modern “politics,” Steven Bissuel remarked that this result showed not so much the strength of the Left as the complete disorientation of a society and the absurdity of contemporary “ideological” parties totally separated from the social action: “You can’t be a revolutionary when you have been a senator for the traditional Left for thirty years.” The decisive disposition that informs the national-revolutionary current and transcends the narrow ideological divisions is what truly attracted vanguard movements of our time like GUD and Casapound to first the street, then the front struggle of Ukrainian patriots.
- 1Emmanuelle Sautot, "La rentrée agitée du professeur Gollnisch," Lyon Capitale, September 15, 2011, https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/videos/la-rentree-agitee-du-professeur-gollnisch/.
- 2Joseph Beauregard, Nicolas Lebourg and Jonathan Preda, "Aux racines du FN. L’histoire du mouvement Ordre nouveau," Fondation Jean Jaurés, 2014.
- 3Facebook post by Alix Grabé, February 17, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/alix.grabe/posts/10156235883408793.
- 4"1st Paneuropa Conference Report," Reconquista Europe, June 15, 2017. Archived version from June 13, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180613133924/http://reconquista-europe.tumblr.com/post/161847863121/1st-paneuropa-conference-report-the-1st-paneuropa.