Dr. Jeremy J. Swist.. Les légions du soleil noir: Classical Antiquity & Far-Right Politics in French Heavy Metal. Since its rise to popularity in the 1980s, heavy metal music has met with misunderstanding and controversy, culminating in “moral

Dr. Jeremy J. Swist.

Les lé gions du soleil noir: Classical Antiquity & Far-Right Politics in French Heavy Metal

Since its rise to popularity in the 1980s, heavy metal music has met with misunderstanding and controversy, culminating in “moral panics” that accused the genre and its culture of corrupting the youth and inspiring people to worship Satan, do drugs, and commit murder and suicide. Today, metal is now a much more respected genre produced and consumed by millions of people of every color, class, and creed worldwide. While heavy metal originated as an outlet for socially alienated white, working-class young men in the UK, Europe, and the US, its core, Dionysiac ethos of transgression, sensuality, and rejection of the status quo appeals to millions worldwide.

Nevertheless, metal’s white, patriarchal roots and rebellious and nostalgic tendencies can make it a vehicle for ultraconservative, racist, and fascist agendas. A small, but in certain cases prominent minority of metal bands, especially those in the extreme subgenres of black metal and death metal, combine the sonically transgressive nature of the music itself with messages of hate toward certain demographics and/or celebrations of the natural superiority of white, European civilization. A subset of these bands, some of which are relatively popular in the underground, appropriate the mythology, history, and iconography of ancient Greece and Rome in service of such rhetoric. These artists include members of the subgenre of National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), i. e. black metal that contains explicitly fascist lyrics and imagery. Other bands are less explicit or more loosely affiliated with far-right movements, but nevertheless show clear evidence of such views that guides our interpretation of their appropriations of antiquity.

This article specifically examines French metal bands that mix classical antiquity with far-right politics. Of course, singing about ancient Greece and Rome does not necessarily say anything about musicians’ political views. Hundreds of bands all over the world, of every political persuasion, have engaged with antiquity to varying degrees. France’s thriving metal scene in particular has been remarkable for its classical reception. In the 1980s, the heavy metal band Sortilè ge and speed metal band ADX, both from Paris, wrote songs such as “Amazone” (1983) and “Caligula” (1985) respectively. They were among the first metal bands in the world, along with Iron Maiden, to incorporate Greco-Roman mythology and history into their music. Since the turn of the millennium, notable French acts with such themes have included the death metal band Kronos from Thaon-les-Vosges who sing on Greek gods and monsters, the black/death metal band Deos from Annecy who write on Roman military history, and the industrial death metal band Autokrator from Paris, whose eponymous debut album explores the dark side of Rome’s emperors and empresses.

These artists have little to do with far-right politics, and to find such ideologies we must look specifically within the subgenre of black metal. Following the establishment of the Norwegian black metal scene in Norway in the early 1990s, the French scene originated in the circle of bands known as Les Lé gionsNoires, such as Mü tilation and VladTepes. LLN had no evident ties to far-right movements themselves, but much as VargVikernes of Burzum used Norwegian black metal for political extremism, so acts in France, where Vikernes now resides, eventually followed suit. According to the Encyclopaedia Metallum, a database of every past and present metal band with recorded material, out of the over 5, 000 bands that have formed in France, 50 are listed with the lyrical theme “National Socialism, ” the third most per country after the United States (102) and Germany (75). Several more bands beyond these can be identified as racist, ultranationalist, or sympathetic to certain national far-right movements.

We begin with an example straight from the country’s NSBM scene. The band BlackSStorm is typical of the NSBM subgenre in their use of fascist symbols such as Celtic and iron crosses, and song titles such as WillezurMacht and France aux Franç ais. Yet they also demonstrate a familiarity with classical Greece and Rome by blending their ideology and iconography with elements of classical mythology, in order to suggest that the resurrection of a European Aryan empire is that of the Roman one, heralded by the return and revenge of the pagan gods who will extirpate all Abrahamic (i. e. “foreign”) religions from the continent. Such an image is conjured in the song Iuppiteradikation, whose title is a portmanteau of “eradication” and the Roman thunder god Jupiter’s Latin name:

Our soil shall vomit
All parasites, all shits
Total and definitive European katharsis…
With war and death we shall find peace!
Iuppiteradikation!
Hail our marble master!
With torches eyes and thunder at hand.

The song implies that white Europeans are autochthonous, the natural products of the land on which the devotees of eastern religions are trespassers, whose removal amounts to a catharsis in the original sense of the Greek word, a purging of unclean elements. Jupiter who leads this campaign, though conceived as a living god, is nevertheless depicted as resembling a classical white marble statue. Though it is now beyond dispute that most marble statues in antiquity were painted with all manner of colors and skin tones, the persistent belief in their whiteness has been used to connect whiteness with ideals of beauty, and thus white marble statues have been frequently fetishized by both the Third Reich and the modern far-right.

Another example of BlackSStorm’s appropriation of classical myth is their song in French called Dans les yeuxd’Athé na, which also invokes gods and heroes to exterminate their enemies: “Clé menceulyssé enne: / Les flè chesd’Arté misfrapperontl’ennemisé mite. / Car le remordsré sidedans le pardon! ”BlackSStorm reject the virtues of clemency and mercy encouraged by Abrahamic monotheism, and in its place favor the “clemency” that Odysseus exercised on Penelope’s suitors and “disloyal” slave women in Book 22 of the Odyssey. His indiscriminate slaughter of the suitors with a bow and arrow is suggested to be just deserts for their abuse of hospitality, and his murderous reclamation of the throne of Ithaca is paralleled by the archer goddess Artemis taking aim at those who do not belong on European soil, as though they were the helpless children of Niobe.

One of the most notorious and high-profile NSBM bands are Peste Noire, formed in Avignon in 2001. While their founding member Famine describes himself as a French national anarchist rather than a national socialist, his music combines a romanticizing view of French premodernity with blatant racism, culminating in their 2018 album Peste Noire – Split – Peste Noire, whose cover art features Famine wearing blackface and a slave collar. A single from this record, Aristocrasse, was released with a lyric video articulating PesteNoire’s messages of hate and elitism through a classicizing lens. It begins with the spoken words “chez Homè re la gloire, le renomacquisdans le milieu compé tent des braves, est la mesure objective de la valeur. Le hé roshomé rique, comme à son exemplel’hommegrec, n’estvraimentheureuxques’ils’affirme, se sent distinct et supé rieur. ” Peste Noire advocate a return to the shame culture of the mythical age of heroes as described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in which the band read the prescriptive models of not only the ideal man for the classical Greeks, but also the means to the good life. Glory according to Homer is kleos, the fame acquired by exhibiting aretē , i. e. “excellence” of body and mind on the battlefield, so that one may earn immortality by being celebrated through the ages by poets and artists like Homer, and Peste Noire. Kleos is closely bound to timē , the “prestige” of a warrior measured in his reputation for excellence, the number of men who follow him, and the amount of spoils and prizes he accumulates through martial and athletic competition. Here lies the key to the good life according to this value system, as one’s self-worth, and therefore happiness, is a function of his prestige in the eyes of others, as opposed to internal feelings of guilt encouraged by moralities such as that of Christianity. Thus Achilles in the Iliad withdraws from the war and sulks in his tent because king Agamemnon had dishonored him by taking away his “prize, ” the enslaved woman Briseis: in short, this theft undermines the whole incentive for risking one’s life in battle, the chance to earn material rewards and respect. Peste Noire emulate this fiercely patriarchal, agonistic culture in which being, and feeling, superior to all others is the goal of human life, hence the title of the song Aristocrasse, alluding to a class of people who are superior by nature, just as were the demigods who fought at Troy. Aristocracy is rule by aristoi (“the best”), a word related to aristeia, a Homeric warrior’s consummate display of superiority on the battlefield.

Yet it is not a classical age of refined and sophisticated culture, or even one ruled by demigods, that Peste Noire wishes to resurrect, but one of barbarism and survival of the fittest, where naked tyranny and cruelty are marks of honor. Later in the song come the lines “Big up Né ron, Tepes, Rais, Sade et les autres! / On estvenusressusciter les berserkers, les Argonautes, / L’autre Age et l’outrage, l’Ancien Age et la rage / Groscomme Babar, avec une blonde barbe, une longue barre / Notre barbarehé ritage. ” Rather than a Roman emperor more interested in poetry than politics and warfare, Peste Noire elevate Nero alongside Vlad the Impaler, Gilles de Rais, and the Marquis de Sade as a masculine ideal simply for his exercise of domination and inhumanity over others. With similar potential for violence, the Greek heroes who sailed on the Argo are grouped with the Vikings as the blonde-haired, superhuman ancestors of white Europeans the band wishes to resurrect. Only by realigning the social hierarchy with the animal food chain can the true aristocracy return, modeled on the barbaric Dark Age when Charles Martel repelled the Muslims from France: “oui nous sommesmoitié rats, moitié rois / Vainqueurspleinsd’rancœ urcomme à Poitiers mon gars. ” Of course, Achilles and the Argonauts, and the Vikings even, would not have even recognized categories such as “white” or “European” as terms of identity. Peste Noire, finally, in emulating the heroes of Greek epic as those who have achieved the good life, seem not to have read their Iliad and Odyssey very carefully, or else they would have realized that nearly every character in these poems is miserable.

While Peste Noire see in Achilles an anarchist icon, the band Cristalys, from Toulon, look to Sparta as their model state. They are not technically categorized as NSBM, although they flirt with fascist symbolism: their drummer goes by the pseudonym Wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol appropriated by Nazis and Neo-Nazis, while their song Gallus Malleus, about Charles Martel’s defense of France against “la razziad’unelunemalsaine” contains the line “Des ruines de nos fiefs et monuments, la colè re / Grandit à l’imaged’unenoirâ trerouesolaire. ” The rouesolaire or Sonnenrad is an even less ambiguous Nazi symbol than the Wolfsangel.

Cristlaly’s brand of far-right politics is certainly fascinating. Their lyrics often express a monarchist form of French nationalism, as in their song Monarchiefranque. The track calls for the return of an absolutist Bourbon dynasty, while also reminiscing of the Celtic and Frankish roots of the French people: “Paraissantdepuis les tempê tes de Gergovie, guerrier de la race des conqué rants / Que ton spectredevienne chair et ta chair devienne sang / Ainsi les sols souillé sseront à nouveau purifié s. ” Like many a proud Frenchman, Cristalys identify the birth of the French nation with the revolt of Vercingetorix and his unification of the Gallic tribes against Julius Caesar in 52 BCE. The battle of Gergovia was the greatest victory scored by the Gauls in a war they would lose at Alesia. But what takes this song from patriotism to extremism is the wish for the reincarnation of the original Gallic warrior race, in order to go on the offensive against those who have “polluted” the French soil and reestablish some form of empire under a restored French monarchy.

Cristalys’ monarchism is also sympathetic to fascism’s long obsession with ancient Sparta. Their song Force ethonneur is an encomium of Spartan culture. It appears on their 2009 album Suré minence, alongside other icons of European defense and offense against the East, such as Charles Martel (Gallus Malleus), Charlemagne (Supré matieCarolingienne), and Frederick Barbarossa (Kaiser Barbarossa). Cristalys begin the song by claiming a genetic continuity between the Spartans and themselves: “leur sang à jamaisincrusté dansnoscoeurs / Comme en les roches de Termopyles. ” They reproduce modern myths of a single, European race that the ancient Greeks, especially the Spartans who even enslaved other Greeks, would have firmly rejected. The next stanza tells of the goddess Athena, one of the chief deities of ancient Sparta: “la dé esseprotectrice de l’ancienne nation / Somme la chevalerie de la ré gé né ration / De dé fendrenoscontré es de l’envahisseur. ” With the pagan gods on their side, the inheritance of Spartan blood effects a renewal of war against foreign invaders. Next, Cristalys claim to be products of the Spartan eugenics program: “lavé sdans le vin, baigné sdansl’eaugelé e et pure / Nous sommes les fils de la parfaiteprogé niture. ” These lines may point to their direct reading of Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus:

[Spartan] women used to bathe their babies not in water, but wine, conducting a kind of test of their constitution. For it is said that epilectic and sickly babies are thrown into convulsions by unmixed wine and go crazy, but healthy babies are rather hardened like iron and strengthen their bodily condition.

Plutarque, Life of Lycurgus, 16. 2 (translation by the author)

Cristalys read the Lycurgus, written half a millennium after the height of Sparta’s power, as a prescription for the ideal society they wish to build. To that effect, they envision a rematch of Thermopylae:

Ané antissantcesImmortelsn’é tantque de vulgaires bê tes mortelles
Jetantdepuis les falaises de Taygè tecetteré pugnancecorporelle
Un mur de cadavregrisâ tre et putride pour rempart et pour gloire.

These lines reveal not only Plutarch as their source, but also the film 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006, based on the 1998 comic series by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley), which premiered two years prior to the album’s release and became an immensely popular and influential film with far-right groups worldwide. The movie depicts the Persian Immortals as a squadron of reptilian humanoids with fangs, whom Cristalys further dehumanize by comparing them to the degenerate masses they oppose. Next, the reference to throwing deformed bodies from the cliffs of Mt. Taygetus combines the killing of Persians at Thermopylae with Sparta’s eugenic policy of infanticide, also depicted by the film, into a single program. According to our sources, the Spartans hurled into the chasm of Kaiadas not only infants deemed physically unfit to become warriors, but also condemned criminals, traitors, and prisoners of war. The wall of Persian corpses built before the showdown with the Immortals, moreover, is pure fiction and tactically impractical, and serves in the film to further dehumanize the Persians by turning them into building materials.

The track ends with the words “enfants de Sparte! JeunesseHyperboré enne / Lé onidas!! ” It is another self-identification as the direct descendant of the Spartans, themselves allegedly descended from the Dorian invaders who originated in Hyperborea. The Nazis identified the Hyperboreans with the Dorians, an Indo-European “Aryan” people who allegedly invaded Greece at the end of the Bronze Age and supplanted the native Pelasgians. The Dorian Invasion hypothesis is now largely discredited by ancient historians. Hyperborea, on the other hand, is an invention of Greek myth, a distant land “beyond the north wind” and home to a race of giants. Pindar describes Hyperborea as a utopia where the arts flourished and everyone was free from old age, disease, toil, and war (Pythian 10. 37-44). The Nazis were influenced by Nietzsche’s identification of his sympathetic readers as Hyperboreans in introduction to The Antichrist (where he quotes Pindar), as well as by Helena Blavatsky’s anti-Darwinian theory of the Hyperborean origins of a human race that subsequently devolved. The Hyperboreans are also a popular theme among some of the most prominent NSBM bands, such as Der Stü rmer (Smyntheus, He Who Beheads the Serpent), Goatmoon (Death BeforeDishonour), and Satanic Warmaster (Der schwarzeOrden). Finally, the last word of the song, “Lé onidas, ” reminds us that integral to this band’s dream is the restoration of absolutism, ignorant that Sparta’s dual monarchy was far more constitutional.

A similar laconophilia is espoused by the Paris black metal band Profane. Like Cristalys, they are not labeled NSBM, but their subscription to fascist ideologies is evident from a casual reading of their lyrics, with such themes as the rejection of egalitarianism, the supremacy of the Olympian Ü bermenschen, and the resurrection of a pagan empire. The eponymous track to their 2009 album Hé ré tiqueÂ rya sums up their neofascist philosophy succinctly. “Â rya” is the Sanskrit word for “noble one” or “one who does noble deeds. ” It is the basis for the word “Aryan” adopted as a racial category in the nineteenth century by Arthur de Gobineau, who in turn influenced Nazi Germany’s notions of a supreme, Aryan race. The song begins “Nous avonsinversé la roue du temps pour quel’ordre du sang dure mille ans. Face à l’humanismeimposteur nous prô nons, nous! Hé ré tiquesÂ ryas, un ordrechevaleresque et spartiate. ” Like the Nazis, Profane call for a “return” to the ancient and medieval empires, to establish a tausendjä hriges Reich. As Aryan heretics they embrace their identity as proud pariahs in the face of mainstream ideologies of egalitarianism and humane values. They endorse a social hierarchy not unlike feudal Europe or ancient Laconia, where Spartan knights ruled over and exploited a majority composed of second-class citizens (perioikoi) and serfs (helots). Sparta’s state-sponsored education system designed to forge children into warriors was highly influential on that of Nazi Germany and its elite boarding schools, the NationalpolitischenErziehungsanstalten.

The song continues and develops this theme: “Marasmeinformepoussé parl’imposturebé nie du mythenihilisteé galitariste / Revendiquel’é galité des cieux, revendiquel’é galité surterre / Chute de l’é litismesouverain des cé sarspaï ens / Maisdansce monde mourant de l’â ge de fer se dressel’é tendard du sang. ” Profane argue that by preaching a gospel of human equality, Christianity was somehow responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire, which occurred following the Christian conversion of its emperors. By denying their natural supremacy as Ü bermenschen, they suggest, the Caesars surrendered their sovereignty. However, the Western half of the Empire fell over a century and a half after Constantine, while the Eastern, Byzantine Empire lasted another millennium (speaking of a “thousand-year empire”! ). The legacy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire dies hard in its claim, now largely discredited, that Christianity hastened its decline and fall. Still, Profane and several artists like them interpret this fall as the transition from a utopian age of gold to a dystopia of iron. The Greek poet Hesiod, our earliest source for this paradigm, predicted that the iron age in which he lived would one day be blotted out by Zeus (Works & Days 174-181); but for Roman poets such as Vergil, the death of the iron age meant the renewal of a cosmic cycle, a return to a golden age under the rule of Augustus after the cataclysms of the civil wars that destroyed the Republic (Eclogue 4): “The great order of the ages is born afresh” (magnusabintegrosaeclorumnasciturordo). Augustan ideology, which entrenched imperial autocracy and the supremacy of the Romans to rule all nations forever (imperium sine fine), has profoundly influenced fascism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Another black metal band from Paris, Né cropole, offer a similar Vergilian vision. Their anti-semitism is clear to anyone who reads the lyrics to their song Ferments de corruption, such as “pouilleuxchamelierssurgis du dé sert / Se sontcouronné srois de toute la Terre, ” “la tumeurjudaï queré duitl’hô te à merci, ” and “la ‘race’ י ה ו ד י doitmourir. ” This song appears on the 2018 album Solarité , which is followed by the track Le culte du hé ros that associates the return of the golden age with the reemergence of a heavenly race of men: “Ainsi je chante le retour d’Astré e / De Justice et Né mé sis / De l’ancienrè gneSaturnien / Par une nouvelle race d’Hommesvenus des Cieux. ” Né cropole demonstrate a familiarity with the Hesiodic declension of the ages of man as retold by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses (1. 76-150). According to Ovid, the golden age, populated by a race of men created by the Titan Prometheus, was overseen by the god Saturn before his overthrow by Jupiter. Henceforth the ages declined from silver, to bronze, to iron, at which point humanity had become so wicked and corrupt that the virgin goddess of justice, Astraea, fled the earth for the heavens. Né cropole combine their reading of Ovid with Vergil’s proclamation (Eclogue 4. 6-7) that “now the virgin too is coming back, the kingdom of Saturn is returning, / now new offspring is being sent down from lofty heaven” (iamredit et Virgo, redeuntSaturnia regna, / iam nova progenies caelodemittitur alto). Vergil’s fourth Eclogue has traditionally been interpreted as foretelling the birth of a child (progenies) who would rule over a new golden age, and later Christians read this poem as “messianic. ” Yet progenies can also mean “race” or “lineage, ” and Né cropole appear to take it as a new golden race created by the gods, whose reign will see the return of Justice and, by their own insertion, Nemesis the goddess of revenge—revenge against whom is suggested by the previous song on the album, Ferments de corruption mentioned above.

The above lines are taken from a song (Le culte des hé ros) that begins and ends with the punishment of Prometheus, chained to the Caucusus for stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to men, and later freed from his chains by the demigod Heracles. Né cropole celebrate those who nullify the gods’ injunctions: their 2018 demo Sisyphecouroné suggests as much with its title, crowning the mortal tyrant who repeatedly cheated death and escaped from Hell, and forever struggles upward. The opening stanza runs “leç onfutprise de Promé thé e / Dé mesureenchaî né e, l’hybriscrucifié / Ses oracles infertiles, son nom usurpé / Attendait un hé ros pour ses liens luibriser. ” Prometheus’ penalty was an archetypal object lesson against committing hubris, against overreaching oneself and challenging the supremacy of the gods. Heracles was a mortal man with divine blood who broke the chains that bound the human spirit under the tyranny of heaven. In the song’s final stanza, the myth of Prometheus and Heracles becomes a paradigm for the return of a golden age of superhumans: “leç onfutprise de Promé thé e / Pour guider les pas des enfants de Boré e / L’hybrissurmonté par la gestehé roï que / Les vestiges de l’Â ge d’Or par Alcé erestauré s. ” Liberated and led by a Heracles-like superman—here called by one of his alternative names, Alcaeus, referring to his descent from Alcaeus the son of Perseus—Prometheus and his satanic rebellion against Zeus become a model for the “enfants de Boré e, ” i. e. the children of the North wind (Hyperboreans? ), who will restore a lost golden age. Né cropole espouse a kind of atavism, a return to a state of nature free of the bounds of law as in Ovid’s age of gold. This romanticizing rejection of modernity, however, depends on the supremacy of a heavenly descended race.

There are many more examples we could have covered in this piece. The Lyon thrash metal band Frakass, which began as a RAC (Rock Against Communism) group in the 1980s, wrote the song Bouclierscontreboucliers about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The anti-semitic black metal band Ad Hominem from the south of France endorse dictators such as Julius Caesar who have “crossed a rubicon of blood” in their song Solitary Supremacy. The Toulon NSBM band Seigneur Voland, finally, composed the track Aigleconqué rant (Titus victorieux) glorifying the Roman general, and later emperor, who sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple during the Jewish War in 70 CE. The record on which this song appears features the 1867 painting of this event by Francesco Hayez, La Destruction du temple de Jé rusalem, in which one can see Roman soldiers carrying off the great menorah that Titus would parade around Rome during his triumph.

France’s rich tradition of classicism has produced majestic works of art, from the paintings of Jacques-Louis David to the “classics” of Sortilè ge; but it has also had a darker side. As Napoleon ruthlessly ascended to emperor of France and fed his megalomania with victory after victory, he styled himself more and more as a new Caesar, Augustus, and Justinian, and his realm a Roman Empire reborn. Likewise, the darker side of France’s extreme metal underground, as we have established here, has made use of classical literature and art to poetically articulate extreme ideologies that aim to rekindle the fires of a romanticized, ancient supremacy, be it that of Sparta, Rome, or Versailles. While it is unproductive to simply slap the label “NSBM” on all these bands, as there is far more nuance than that, you don’t have to worship Hitler to be categorized as a far-right extremist. Far-right metal bands interpret the past through the lens of their own contempt for the present, digging up from antiquity the very xenophobia, anti-semitism, and racism that they bury in it. Whether their goal is to found a Fourth Reich, an anarcho-nationalist collective, or a Baroque-era dynasty, they all aim to preserve the purity and superiority of their race, be they sprung from the soil, possess that soil by right of conquest, or were descended from on high.

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