Henry de Lesquen

Born

1949-01-01

Birthplace

Port-Lyautey, French Protectorate of Morocco [now Kenitra, Morocco]

Biography

Henry de Lesquen (born 1 January 1949) is a French politician. A retired official and former radio host, de Lesquen has been the president of the Carrefour de l'Horloge, a national liberal think tank, since 1985. A blogger and YouTuber since the 2010s, he has participated in popularising the concept of "remigration" in France, as well as spreading racialist concepts built on anthropologist Carleton S. Coon's works. Henry Bertrand Marie Armand de Lesquen du Plessis-Casso was born on 1 January 1949 in Port-Lyautey, Morocco, then a French protectorate, the son of Pierre de Lesquen du Plessis-Casso, a general of the French Army and Anne-Marie Huon de Kermadec. Both his father and mother were from noble Breton families. De Lesquen's maternal grand-mother, Camille Medina, was born Guatemalan and naturalized French. De Lesquen entered Polytechnique in 1968, then earned a bachelor in economics and joined the École nationale d'administration (ENA) in 1974. With his friend from ENA Jean-Yves Le Gallou, de Lesquen founded the Club de l'Horloge in July 1974. Criticizing the meta-politics of Alain de Benoist's GRECE, the Club de l'Horloge aimed at concrete results, favoring entryism inside the French mainstream right-wing parties of the period: the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the Union for French Democracy. The book La Politique du vivant ("The Politics of living"), published in 1979 under the direction of de Lesquen, drew influence from GRECE theories on sociobiology, genetic determinism and social darwinism. The same year, he participated with Alain de Benoist in the French TV literary talk show Apostrophes about the Nouvelle Droite. Since the years 1979-80, the Club de l'Horloge has distanced itself from GRECE, promoting instead an "economic liberalism strongly tainted with nationalism." From 1974 to 1978, de Lesquen has been in charge of the program bureau for the French highways at the Ministry of Equipment. He became head of the bureau of energies, raw materials and chemistry at the Ministry of Finances from 1979 to 1983. De Lesquen has been also a lecturer in economics at Sciences Po from 1978 to 1987. In 1984, he became deputy director of finances for the city of Paris. In this position, he refused in December 1986 to observe a minute's silence after the death of Malik Oussekine and, according to witnesses, left the room during the ceremony. In 1987, he was nominated by mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac secretary-general of the Office Public d'Aménagement et de Construction (OPAC) and remained at this position until 1990; he had been accused of enacting unofficial ethnic quotas. In 2001, de Lesquen became a municipal councilor in Versailles, where he spoke out against the city's public housing projects. In 2007, he was elected president of right-wing radio station Radio Courtoisie, from which he was ousted in 2017 after the controversies surrounding his presidential campaign. ... Source: Article "Henry de Lesquen" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.