Jean Mabire


Jean Mabire, was a French journalist and essayist. A neo-pagan and nordicist, Mabire is known for the regionalist and euro-nationalist ideas he developed in both Europe-Action and GRECE, as well as his controversial books on the Waffen-SS.

Biography

Early life

Jean Pol Yves Jacques Mabire was born in Paris on 8 February 1927, to a bourgeois family originally from Vire, Normandy. He attended the Collège Stanislas, where he earned a baccalauréat in literature and philosophy.
In 1949, at the of age 22, Mabire created the regionalist magazine Viking and in 1951 left Paris to settle in Cherbourg, Normandy, where he founded a graphic arts workshop. Mabire wrote more than half of the 162 articles published in the magazine until its end in 1958. Viking had 300 to 400 subscribers and the most popular issues were sold at around 1,000 copies. He regarded the Normans as part of the "Nordic race" and his magazine gave a great importance to Scandinavian cultures and viking history.

Political activism

In 1958, Mabire was sent as a reserved soldier to North Africa during the Algerian War. Between 1963 and 1965, he wrote articles in Philippe Héduy's L'Esprit public, and was a contributor in Cahiers universitaires, the magazine of the Federation of Nationalist Students. In 1965, he was part of the grassroots committees of far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and wrote in January a book to explain his endorsement.
From 1965, he served as the redactor-in-chief of Europe-Action, in which he wrote about neo-paganism, the Waffen SS and the Charlemagne Regiment. Mabire was one of the architects of the euro-nationalist break with the old French nationalism supported by the magazine. He supported instead a pan-European nationalism, decentralized and based on the identities of regions, seen as smaller ethnic nations, a thesis later embodied in Yann Fouéré's "Europe of 100 Flags", published in 1968. His shift towards the radical right was confirmed in many articles Mabire published in Le Spectacle du Monde, Valeurs Actuelles or Minute.
In 1968, Mabire became a founding member of the Mouvement Normand, and the following year he helped Georges Bernage establish Heimdal, a regionalist magazine and intellectual successor of Viking. Mabire wrote in Heimdal about Norman poets, Nordicism and Scandinavian mythology. The magazine was a success and sold at more than 3,000 copies. He became an active member of GRECE in 1970, and took part in its "federal council" and "commission of traditions".
In 1973, Mabire co-founded the neopagan scouting organization Europe-Jeunesse with Jean-Claude Valla and Maurice Rollet. The same year, Mabire's literary career began with the publication of a saga on the history of the French SS: La Brigade Frankreich, La Division Charlemagne and Mourir à Berlin. After his wife died from cancer in 1974, he remarried two years later and settled in the Parisian region. He participated, along with other GRECE members Pierre Vial and Jean Haudry, in the founding of the association Terre et Peuple in 1995.

Later life and death

Jean Mabire died of leukemia on 29 March 2006 in Saint-Malo, Britanny, at the age of 79.

Controversy

His books on the Waffen-SS have been regarded as a hagyographic and romantic rehabilitation of Nazism. Mabire describes for instance some units in those terms: "The SS carry the Prometheus torch and Sigurd's sword to the Caucasus. They are the sons of the old Germanic warriors who emerged from the ice and forests. They are the Teutonics who replaced the cross of Christ with the wheel of the Sun. They are Adolf Hitler's SS."

Works

; On History
; On paganism
; On Normandy