Alain Soral

Alain Bonnet, known as Alain Soral (; born 2 October 1958), is a far-right Franco-Swiss ideologue, essayist, filmmaker and actor. Having been a member of the French Communist Party in the 1990s, Soral worked for the National Front before leaving in 2009. In 2007 he founded his own political association, Égalité & Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation), with former GUD members. At the same time, he also launched a publishing company, KontreKulture, which he uses to publish contemporary controversial authors. In 2019, Soral received a prison sentence in France for using anti-semitic slurs to label the Pantheon in a video. incentive to racial hatred, apology of crime against humanity and Holocaust denial. In 2023, he received another prison sentence in Switzerland for defamation, discrimination, and incitement to hatred. Life and career Soral was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie and grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (department of Haute-Savoie), where he attended a local primary school. When Soral was about 12, his family moved to Meudon la Forêt so that he could go to a private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris. Soral spent two years doing small jobs before being accepted into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at 20, where he studied for two years. Soral was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enroll at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis. Following his studies, and working with Hector Obalk and Alexandre Pasche, Soral wrote a book on the sociology of trendiness, Les mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, as well as a fictionalised autobiography, Le Jour et la nuit ou la vie d'un vaurien. The latter work sold badly, and this led Soral to turn away from writing for a time.