Giorgio Locchi and Dominique Venner, thinkers on history

Giorgio Locchi and Dominique Venner, thinkers on history

Clotilde Venner

Two different paths, but a common conclusion: history is a place of the unforeseen, and it is made by human beings.

Two thoughts that help to combat the "everything's fucked" attitude so often heard in right-wing circles, against which Dominique has always railed.

But before developing this idea of the unexpected, I'd like to return to Dominique's itinerary and his relationship with history.

I. Dominique Venner and history

Dominique became interested in history for several reasons. As I explain in my book (A la rencontre d'un cœur rebelle), Dominique had three lives, a first in which he was a political activist, a second more meditative, which I call the recourse to the forests, and a third in which he became the historian we know. The study of history, I think, took on its full importance when he gave up politics, at the end of his first life. He experienced his retirement from politics as a small death. To overcome this ordeal, he retired to the countryside, started a family, and for about fifteen years devoted himself to writing books on the history of arms, but at the same time he read, methodically and intensively, mainly historical works. Throughout these years, he never stopped asking himself the question "what to do" and "what to pass on". And it was in the study of history that he found the answers. History, if questioned with active thought, is an inexhaustible source of reflection. His attitude to history was that of a thinker, not a scholar interested in insignificant details. It was the study of history that enabled him to understand the crisis of civilisation and meaning that the peoples of Europe were going through. He went on to write a number of historical works in response to this crisis of meaning, including two books: Histoire et Traditions des européens (History and Traditions of the Europeans) and Le Samouraï d'Occident (The Samurai of the West).

II. Thinking with history

By studying history and meditating on it, Dominique came to the idea that history was the place of the permanently unforeseen, and in this he joins Giorgio Locchi's intuitions on the fact that history is open.

What's interesting about their two intellectual itineraries is that they reached the same conclusions but by completely different routes. In his youth, Dominique had been an activist who had spent time in prison. Now a recognised historian, he never stopped questioning the events that change the course of history (Histoire du Terrorisme, L'Imprévu dans l'histoire). And he was keenly aware of the role of active minorities in political upheavals (portrait of Lenin in L'imprévu dans l'histoire). Dominique, like Locchi, believed that history was made by men and not by some providence.

He used to say to me, it's easy to analyse events once they've happened (e.g. the fall of the Berlin Wall) but rarely to predict them. This notion of the unforeseen in history, instead of making Dominique pessimistic, in a way made him optimistic, not in the sense of blissful optimism, but in the sense that nothing is ever set in stone. At any moment, an apparently hopeless situation can change. This means that we should never despair, because even the most tragic situations are subject to change. In 1970, no one imagined the collapse of Soviet power. In 1913, no one foresaw the European conflagration that would take place in 1914, as Dominique analyses so well in Le Siècle de 1914. Absolute pessimism and blissful optimism are equally stupid, because nothing is ever definitive, either good or bad. Long-windedness and joyful pessimism exasperated him to no end. This trait is found in certain right-wing circles. All his life, he never ceased to combat this state of mind. He considered that these postures are often a front for a form of laziness and cowardice.

When I say that Dominique was an optimist, that doesn't mean that he wasn't more than aware that history is tragic. If I had to define his conception of history, I'd say he was a tragic-optimist, a slightly oxymoronic concept that sums up his thinking. But you might say to me, how can you be optimistic when you study human history, which is a constant succession of horrors? It's true that throughout history, people go through trials and tragedies that threaten to annihilate them, but at the same time this same history remains permanently open, it is never static, it is what people make of it, it has the meaning that we give it. That's why Dominique writes at the end of Le choc de l'histoire: "As far as Europeans are concerned, everything shows, in my opinion, that they will be forced to face immense challenges and fearsome catastrophes in the future, and not just those of immigration. In these trials, they will be given the opportunity to be reborn and to find themselves again.

I believe in the specific qualities of Europeans who are temporarily dormant. I believe in their active individuality, in their inventiveness and in the awakening of their energy.

The awakening will come. But when? I don't know. But I have no doubt that it will".

III. The unexpected in history

Dominique had read Marx, Spengler and Evola carefully, and had found some interesting ideas in them, but his thinking was far removed from any form of historical teleology, and in this he was very close to Giorgio Locchi. He did not believe that history had a meaning or obeyed cycles; he thought that it was people who made history. In Le choc de l'histoire, he wrote: "On the other hand, I can criticise the theories that were fashionable at the time of Marx or Spengler. Each in its own register, they denied the freedom of men to decide their own destiny".

To make his point clearer, I would like to borrow a phrase from the sociologist Michel Maffesoli: events often seem unpredictable to us because "we don't know how to listen to the grass grow". Major historical events are more often than not the fruit of a subterranean maturation that is invisible to the untrained eye.

Another element that was important to Dominique was the notion of representations. For him, human beings live and distinguish themselves through their representations (religious, political, aesthetic). And if we want to understand major historical phenomena, we have to study mentalities. In Le Siècle de 1914, he analyses with great finesse the great ideologies of the twentieth century - fascism, liberalism, immigrationism - and how they influenced the course of European destiny.

IV. Difference of approach with Giorgio Locchi

Dominique's approach is much less abstract and philosophical than that of Giorgio Locchi. In many of his books, Dominique portrayed exceptional men and women. These portraits had several functions. The first was to flesh out events. In the book he devoted to Jünger (Un autre destin européen), he wrote a long portrait of Stauffenberg. I think that by evoking the officer's life, he gives us an inside view of the opposition of part of the German aristocracy to Hitler. In his books, there are also many portraits of women, who I think have an educational role as 'exemplary' figures in the Latin sense of the word, in the sense of Plutarch and his 'Lives of Illustrious Men'. Through his evocations of Catherine de la Guette, Madame de Lafayette in Histoire et Traditions des européens, and the portrait of Penelope and Helen in Le Samouraï d'Occident, he shows us what it is to be a European woman.

Conclusion: What history can teach us

In these dark and decadent times, I think we need role models, and these evocations of historical figures can be a great source of inspiration. They tell us how our ancestors loved, suffered and overcame the tragedies of history.

Philosophical reflection is necessary to arm us intellectually, and that's where Giorgio Locchi's work is valuable and important, but I think we also need to project ourselves imaginatively into the lives of our ancestors. So I'd say that Giorgio Locchi and Dominique Venner are two complementary authors on whom we can rely to 'fight that which denies us', to use Dominique's phrase.

Giorgio Locchi Symposium 1923-2023

A symposium devoted entirely to Giorgio Locchi (Rome, 15 April 1923 - Paris, 25 October 1992) will be held on 25 November in Rieti, the capital of the Province of Sabina and the geographical heart of Italy, to mark the centenary of the philosopher's birth. The event is under the patronage of the town, which intends to honour "the figure of Giorgio Locchi, an intellectual, philosopher and journalist born in Rome but originally from Sabina and more specifically from Salisano, a great protagonist of European thought in the second half of the 20th century".  

A great protagonist who is only just beginning to be fully appreciated, the true scope of his thinking having only begun to emerge in recent years. His main essay, Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste, recently published in French by @InstitutILIADE and @LaNouvelleLibr1 remains a milestone in philosophical thought, the significance of which has yet to be fully understood. In it, Locchi takes a fresh look at the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, identifying in the two great protagonists of nineteenth-century culture the initiators of a new historical trend, a 'new myth', the superhumanist myth, destined to do battle with egalitarian ideologies. In addition, in a text that has recently come to light and will shortly be translated into French, Locchi sees Martin Heidegger as the main philosophical continuator of the path opened up by Wagner and Nietzsche, once again providing completely original categories for interpreting the thought of the man who was by far the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. This is an invaluable contribution, which gives rise to a close struggle with the dominant academic interpretations of Heideggerian thought and provides invaluable keys to opposing its 'recuperation' by the proponents of egalitarian ideology.   

The result of this impressive theoretical effort is a radical, non-nostalgic way of thinking, rooted in the challenges of the present and the future, capable of framing current debates from a wholly innovative perspective, as well as providing new arguments and stimuli for those concerned with European identity and the fight against the ever-increasing threats to it.   

This conference will undoubtedly be a landmark event, as his son Pierluigi will be unveiling a whole new side of Giorgio Locchi's thinking and work on the anthropological mutation underway, work that is destined to be disseminated and extended by a Centre for Locchian Studies soon to be founded across the Alps.  Speakers at the conference:

☑ @AdrianoScianca
author of Ezra Pound et le sacré, le temple n'est pas à vendre (Institut Iliade - La Nouvelle Librairie, Paris, 2023 - https://boutique.institut-iliade.com/product/ezra-pound-et-le-sacre/... ), on Locchi between Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gentile;

☑ Stefano Vaj, editor of the first Italian collection of essays by Giorgio Locchi, Definizioni (SEB, Milan, 2006) and author of Scritti su Giorgio Locchi (Moira,2023) on: Origin, myth and freedom, at the heart of Giorgio Locchi's journey;

☑ Clotilde Venner, former wife of Dominique Venner, author under the pseudonym Pauline Lecomte with Dominique Venner of Le Choc de l'histoire (Via Romana, Paris, 2011), and with Antoine Dresse of À la rencontre d'un cœur rebelle, entretiens sur Dominique Venner (La Nouvelle Librairie, Paris, 2023; https://boutiquetvl.fr/les-inclassables/clotilde-venner-a...) on: Giorgio Locchi, Dominique Venner: les parcours parallèles de deux penseurs de l'histoire;  

☑ Pierluigi Locchi, head of international development at the Iliad Institute for the Long European Memory, where he is also a trainer, and who has notably edited the French editions of Definitions and Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste by his father Giorgio Locchi and published the afterword to Il pensiero dell'origine in Giorgio Locchi by Giovanni Damiano, on: Looking to the future with Giorgio Locchi: new keys to thinking about a new world.  

A round-table discussion will also hear from those in Italy who knew the philosopher personally: his publisher and friend Enzo Cipriano, Gennaro Malgieri, former editor-in-chief of Secolo d'Italia and former PdL MP, Stefano Vaj and his son Pierluigi.  

Saturday 25 November at 4.30pm 

Palazzo Sanizi - Via Sanizi, 2, Rieti  

To buy books by Giorgio Locchi, visit our online shop
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