Marc helped Le Corbusier launch Plans, imported the existential philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to France, helped Mounier start Esprit, and was an important force in revitalizing traditional French Catholic political culture. Hellman uses interviews, unpublished correspondence, and diaries to situate Marc and the Ordre Nouveau group in the context of the French, German, and Belgian political culture of that time and explains the degree to which the ON group succeeded in institutionalizing their new order under Pétain. Hellman also examines their post-war legacy, represented by Alain de Benoist and the contemporary European New Right, shedding new light on the linkages between early national socialism and the political culture of Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and pioneers of the post World War II European movement.

John Hellman, a member of the History Department at McGill University, is an associate editor of Cross Currents and the author of Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 and of articles on modern European intellectual, political, and religious history. He holds the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University.

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"Hellman is undoubtedly the leading North American scholar in the field of French ‘non-conformist' intellectuals who flirted with fascism in the 1930s. His study is particularly valuable in demonstrating the extensive networking - led by Marc - which not only brought together different kinds of personalities (Christians, secularists, right-wing, left-wing, etc) but formed a cluster of similar thinking individuals who later played important government roles under the Vichy regime." Robert Soucy, professor emeritus, Oberlin College