Tuesday, December 18, 2007

General de Gaulle not a Traditionalist (!)

In a post on "More French Traditionalists of importance" (February 02, 2007), I wrote:

According to Dalil Boubakeur [rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris and president of the Conseil français du culte musulman] . . . "General de Gaulle was a personal admirer of Guénonian thought." This is the first I've heard of it, but Boubakeur is not the sort of person to make baseless claims.
Well, the claim seems to have an origin, if not exactly a base. According to Jean-Pierre Laurant in René Guénon: Les enjeux d'une lecture, Jean Robin alleged that de Gaulle had been initiated by Michel Vâlsan in the gardens of the Élysée palace. Robin also alleged, it seems, that Guénon prefigured the Mahdi (pp. 318-19). Laurant describes both, politely, as "adventurous speculations."

We still have Boubakeur himself as a Traditionalist, though.

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