The Gracques, named after the Gracchi brothers, are a French Social liberal think-tank.
During the French presidential election of 2007, a group of former high-ranking civil servants published an open letter titled Merci, François ! ("Thank you, François!"), and signed "Les Gracques", in Le Point of 22 March 2007. [1] The manifesto praised François Bayrou, advocated a Social democrat approach for the Socialist Party, and an alignment of the French political spectrum with that of the "great nations of Europe and Northern America", meaning an alliance between the Left and the Centre against the Right-wing.
After the election, the signatories and their sympathisers founded a thinktank, as a Voluntary association (association loi de 1901), and published a formal manifesto. [2]
The Gracques notably define themselves as democratic, liberal, desegregationist, pro-labour, favourable toward state regulation of the economy, favourable toward wealth redistribution, pro-ecology, pro-European, and internationalist.
The original members have been rumoured to include Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Denis Olivennes, Roger Godino, Matthieu Pigasse, Ariane Obolensky, Bernard Spitz, Guillaume Hannezo, François Villeroy de Galhau, Gilles de Margerie. As of late 2008, the association claims about 770 members. The organisation's Summer Universities in 2007 and 2008 have featured such speakers as Michel Rocard, Anthony Giddens, Walter Veltroni, Peter Mandelson and François Chérèque.
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The Union for French Democracy was a centre-right political party in France. It was founded in 1978 as an electoral alliance to support President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in order to counterbalance the Gaullist preponderance over the political right in France. This name was chosen due to the title of Giscard d'Estaing's 1976 book, Démocratie française. The party brought together Christian democrats, liberals and radicals, and non-Gaullist conservatives, and described itself as centrist.
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The Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, better known as GRECE, is a French ethnonationalist think tank founded in 1968 to promote the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite. GRECE founding member Alain de Benoist has been described as its leader and "most authoritative spokesman". Prominent former members include Guillaume Faye and Jean-Yves Le Gallou.
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Europe-Action was a far-right white nationalist and euro-nationalist magazine and movement, founded by Dominique Venner in 1963 and active until 1966. Distancing itself from pre-WWII fascist ideas such as anti-intellectualism, anti-parliamentarianism and traditional French nationalism, Europe-Action promoted a pan-European nationalism based on the "Occident"—or the "white peoples"— and a social Darwinism escorted by racialism, labeled "biological realism". These theories, along with the meta-political strategy of Venner, influenced young Europe-Action journalist Alain de Benoist and are deemed conducive to the creation of GRECE and the Nouvelle Droite in 1968.
