Nothing could be more emblematic of the Anglosphere’s success in this post-globalization world than the spread of Rock’n’Roll. With minor exception, almost every industrialized nation is home to dozens of active and recording Rock bands supported by thousands of fans spanning all ages. As each nation would interpret the music differently and develop local analogues to more popular bands, politics (local and global) would find their way through Rock’n’Roll. While the vast majority of active recording artists come from apolitical, liberal or leftist persuasions, it comes as no surprise that others on the further fringes sang from an entirely different hymn sheet: Nationalism.
Perhaps France’s earliest known Nationalist Rock musician is Jack Marchal, famous for forming the student activist block Groupe Union Défense along with Alain Robert and four others at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris. After enough hours covering Rolling Stones with close friend Olivier Carré, Jack would team up with Italy’s Mario Ladich, best known for his leading role in the MSI-affiliated act Janus, to record Science & Violence, an album that could roughly be described as the right-wing analogue to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.
As distribution of such music proved difficult, Nationalist Rock would stay in obscurity until the White Nationalist skinhead movement took the Anglosphere and Western Europe by storm. For better or worse, skinheads bequeathed Nationalist Rock with the much needed edge previous iterations sorely lacked, but with that edge came years of controversy that would plague Nationalist movements. With the cultural clout shifting leftwards in no small part due to increasing Americanization along with the long march through the institutions across Western Europe, young artists would be faced with the choice to co-opt this revolutionary genre or lose the culture war to the rising tide of leftism and new laws stymieing their firmly rooted convictions.
Enter Rock Identitaire Français. Eschewing the image of hardened urban guerrillas exemplified by their skinhead peers, this new generation of soft-spoken Frenchmen would express their views with much-needed respectability in both image and art form, and a student activist named Aude Bertrand (later Aude Bertrand- Mirković or simply Aude Mirković) would play her part carrying Nationalism towards a broader audience. Like Jack Marchal in his youth during the ’68 protests, Aude was profoundly influe
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