Conservative Revolutions
Introduction
Biography of Jean-François Bayart
Jean-François Bayart is a specialist in historical sociology and comparative politics. He is a professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, where he holds the Yves Oltramare Chair for Religion and Politics in the Contemporary World.
As part of his teaching, he developed a line of inquiry into the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states, the ethnoreligious definitions of citizenship that resulted from it, and the “conservative revolutions” that are likely to shape them.
In counterpoint to several of his works—The Illusion of Identity (Fayard, 1996); The Government of the World: A Political Critique of Globalization (Fayard, 2004); Republican Islam: Ankara, Tehran, Dakar (Albin Michel, 2010); The Energy of the State: Toward a Historical and Comparative Sociology of Politics (La Découverte, 2022)—he developed a comparative paradigm of the “conservative revolution,” which he revisits in this interview.
Biography of Jean-François Bayart
Jean-François Bayart is a specialist in historical sociology and comparative politics. He is a professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, where he holds the Yves Oltramare Chair for Religion and Politics in the Contemporary World.
As part of his teaching, he developed a line of inquiry into the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states, the ethnoreligious definitions of citizenship that resulted from it, and the “conservative revolutions” that are likely to shape them.
In counterpoint to several of his works—The Illusion of Identity (Fayard, 1996); The Government of the World: A Political Critique of Globalization (Fayard, 2004); Republican Islam: Ankara, Tehran, Dakar (Albin Michel, 2010); The Energy of the State: Toward a Historical and Comparative Sociology of Politics (La Découverte, 2022)—he developed a comparative paradigm of the “conservative revolution,” which he revisits in this interview.
Prolog
The phrase “conservative revolution” made its first appearance in a 1927 speech delivered by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After World War II, it was picked up by the Swiss essayist Armin Mohler and the French historian Louis Dupeux to describe the fears and aspirations of some notorious right-wing intellectuals in the wake of the Spartacist uprising in Germany and the so-called Two Red Years in Italy. For Mohler and Dupeux, however, conservative revolutionaries were not merely anxious to turn back the clock: their aim was above all to enlist the anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal fervor harbored by the radical left for reactionary purposes.
While he revisits existing work on the German conservative revolution of the 1920s, Jean-François Bayart primarily seeks to treat the phrase as a Weberian ideal type, whose relevance extends far beyond interwar Europe. In our interview, the French political scientist begins by describing the conditions that produced what was initially a mindset – both among reactionary opponents of the young Weimar Republic and the Italian futurists who would soon support fascism. He then presents his own historical and comparative approach.
As Jean-François Bayart emphasizes, the most distinctive feature of the conservative revolution is its oxymoronic imaginary: its promoters call for radical change but only to restore ancient hierarchies; and they often dream of merging man with machine, as in the case of Ernst Jünger, but only to revive human spirituality. Because they resent the leveling they associate with their era — caused, they believe, by the commodification of social relations and the democratization of politics — revolutionary conservatives glorify a past and traditions often largely invented, while at the same time relying on the most advanced technologies to revive them.
Rather than the ambition of an empire confident in its genius and determined to project itself globally, the conservative revolution Bayart describes is typical of the transition from an imperial regime to a nation-state. Thus, it should not be confused with its homonym, the conservative revolution led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the turn of the 1980s, for the latter was still a version of postwar liberal imperialism rather than a symptom of its decline.
While often bellicose and harboring expansionist ambitions, conservative revolutionaries nonetheless claim that their goal is to regenerate their own people and enable it to regain full sovereignty over the land to which it is entitled. Therefore, the main sentiment informing their project is not the arrogance of a dominant power invested with a civilizing mission, but the resentment of a historically wronged nation. To make things right, revolutionary conservatives seek to take revenge on treacherous rivals but also to rid their societies of internal enemies.
At the end of World War I, Bayart explains, various instances of conservative revolution arose from the breakdown or decline of empires — whether Wilhelmine, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, or British. Beyond Germany and Italy, Turkish Kemalism, Chancellor Dollfuss’s Austrofascism, and, to some extent, Zionism, especially in the revisionist variant of Vladimir Jabotinsky, fit the conservative revolutionary model. After 1989, Bayart continues, disappointment with the outcome of the Cold war bred a new generation of conservative revolutionaries.
Such characterization applies to Vladimir Putin, whose project to reconstitute the “Russian World” took shape when the West refused his request to join NATO. It is also consistent with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s evolution, for the Turkish president turned his dream of a “New Turkey” into a conservative revolution when France and Germany signaled that his country was too Muslim to join the EU. A similar pattern can be found in Narendra Modi’s India, and more recently among the military regimes in the Sahel as well as in the new Senegalese government: in all these cases, social conservatism, ethno-religious nationalism, and the rollback of civil rights are wrapped in an anti-colonial pride that gives these regimes their revolutionary character.
In Iran, a country Bayart has studied extensively, the Islamic revolution became a conservative revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death: without abandoning the aim of resisting U.S. imperialism and Israeli expansionism, Tehran’s leaders largely gave up on their hopes to export their model throughout the Muslim world and focused instead on the exaltation of Iranian nationalism, including in its pre-Islamic dimension. Finally, the U.S. is both the latest and perhaps the oddest case. Though victorious at the fall of the Soviet empire and hegemonic in its aftermath, America has now shunned the liberal claims of the Cold war era and is experiencing a genuine conservative revolution: indeed, the Trump regime longs to restore the greatness that the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and contemporary “woke” culture have allegedly tarnished. Yet, consistent with the oxymoronic imaginary distinctive of conservative revolutions, MAGA combines the nostalgia of an imaginary past with a techno-futurist utopianism promoted by a circle of libertarian billionaires.
Jean-François Bayart concludes by noticing that similar resentments and fantasies among conservative revolutionaries do not always bring them together — as attested by the reckless war that Israel and the United States are waging today in Iran.
Our interview took place in Paris on March 13, 2026.
Prolog
The phrase “conservative revolution” made its first appearance in a 1927 speech delivered by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After World War II, it was picked up by the Swiss essayist Armin Mohler and the French historian Louis Dupeux to describe the fears and aspirations of some notorious right-wing intellectuals in the wake of the Spartacist uprising in Germany and the so-called Two Red Years in Italy. For Mohler and Dupeux, however, conservative revolutionaries were not merely anxious to turn back the clock: their aim was above all to enlist the anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal fervor harbored by the radical left for reactionary purposes.
While he revisits existing work on the German conservative revolution of the 1920s, Jean-François Bayart primarily seeks to treat the phrase as a Weberian ideal type, whose relevance extends far beyond interwar Europe. In our interview, the French political scientist begins by describing the conditions that produced what was initially a mindset – both among reactionary opponents of the young Weimar Republic and the Italian futurists who would soon support fascism. He then presents his own historical and comparative approach.
As Jean-François Bayart emphasizes, the most distinctive feature of the conservative revolution is its oxymoronic imaginary: its promoters call for radical change but only to restore ancient hierarchies; and they often dream of merging man with machine, as in the case of Ernst Jünger, but only to revive human spirituality. Because they resent the leveling they associate with their era — caused, they believe, by the commodification of social relations and the democratization of politics — revolutionary conservatives glorify a past and traditions often largely invented, while at the same time relying on the most advanced technologies to revive them.
Rather than the ambition of an empire confident in its genius and determined to project itself globally, the conservative revolution Bayart describes is typical of the transition from an imperial regime to a nation-state. Thus, it should not be confused with its homonym, the conservative revolution led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the turn of the 1980s, for the latter was still a version of postwar liberal imperialism rather than a symptom of its decline.
While often bellicose and harboring expansionist ambitions, conservative revolutionaries nonetheless claim that their goal is to regenerate their own people and enable it to regain full sovereignty over the land to which it is entitled. Therefore, the main sentiment informing their project is not the arrogance of a dominant power invested with a civilizing mission, but the resentment of a historically wronged nation. To make things right, revolutionary conservatives seek to take revenge on treacherous rivals but also to rid their societies of internal enemies.
At the end of World War I, Bayart explains, various instances of conservative revolution arose from the breakdown or decline of empires — whether Wilhelmine, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, or British. Beyond Germany and Italy, Turkish Kemalism, Chancellor Dollfuss’s Austrofascism, and, to some extent, Zionism, especially in the revisionist variant of Vladimir Jabotinsky, fit the conservative revolutionary model. After 1989, Bayart continues, disappointment with the outcome of the Cold war bred a new generation of conservative revolutionaries.
Such characterization applies to Vladimir Putin, whose project to reconstitute the “Russian World” took shape when the West refused his request to join NATO. It is also consistent with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s evolution, for the Turkish president turned his dream of a “New Turkey” into a conservative revolution when France and Germany signaled that his country was too Muslim to join the EU. A similar pattern can be found in Narendra Modi’s India, and more recently among the military regimes in the Sahel as well as in the new Senegalese government: in all these cases, social conservatism, ethno-religious nationalism, and the rollback of civil rights are wrapped in an anti-colonial pride that gives these regimes their revolutionary character.
In Iran, a country Bayart has studied extensively, the Islamic revolution became a conservative revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death: without abandoning the aim of resisting U.S. imperialism and Israeli expansionism, Tehran’s leaders largely gave up on their hopes to export their model throughout the Muslim world and focused instead on the exaltation of Iranian nationalism, including in its pre-Islamic dimension. Finally, the U.S. is both the latest and perhaps the oddest case. Though victorious at the fall of the Soviet empire and hegemonic in its aftermath, America has now shunned the liberal claims of the Cold war era and is experiencing a genuine conservative revolution: indeed, the Trump regime longs to restore the greatness that the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and contemporary “woke” culture have allegedly tarnished. Yet, consistent with the oxymoronic imaginary distinctive of conservative revolutions, MAGA combines the nostalgia of an imaginary past with a techno-futurist utopianism promoted by a circle of libertarian billionaires.
Jean-François Bayart concludes by noticing that similar resentments and fantasies among conservative revolutionaries do not always bring them together — as attested by the reckless war that Israel and the United States are waging today in Iran.
Our interview took place in Paris on March 13, 2026.