The Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne ("Research and Study Group for European Civilization"), better known as GRECE, is a French ethnonationalist think tank founded in 1968 to promote the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite ("New Right").

[6][7]Following the electoral failure of the European Rally for Liberty (1966–1969), some of its members – among them de Benoist, helped by an informal group of FEN militants – decided to found a cultural association to promote their ideas.

Their theory was founded on a 'pan-racial' rather than ethnic or civic conception of nationalism: the nation-states had to be dissolved for the peoples of the "Occident"—or the "white race"—to unite within a common European empire, on the grounds that they are the inheritors of a single civilization.

[13] In May 1969, they circulated an internal document advising their members not to employ "outdated language" that might associate the group with fascism, and to socialize with Europe's most important decision-makers in order to influence their policies.

In 1969, Jean-Yves Le Gallou became a member of the Cercle Pareto, a students' club established in Sciences Po at the end of 1968 by Yvan Blot and closely linked to GRECE.

[18] Its members were focusing on the organization of conferences to influence the elites, with cercles de réflexion ("thinking groups") emerging in many cities of France and even abroad: the "Cercle Pareto" in Sciences Po Paris, "Galillée" in Lyon, "Critique Réaliste" in Nantes, "Jean Médecin" in Nice, "Bertrand Russel" in Toulon, "Pythéas" in Marseille, "Erwin-de-Steinbach" and "Wimpfeling" in Strasbourg, "Stamkunde" in Lilles, "Henry de Montherland" in Bordeaux, "Erasme" in Brussels, and "Villebois-Mareuil" in Johannesburg.

[34] Since the years 1979–1980, however, the Club de l'Horloge has distanced itself from GRECE's anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist positions, promoting instead an "integral neo-Darwinist" philosophy characterized by a form of economic liberalism strongly tainted with ethnic nationalism.

[35][21] GRECE and European New Right activists have criticized the Club de l'Horloge for simultaneously promoting economic neoliberalism and cultural conservatism, which are in their views contradictory positions.

[36] Prominent personalities have collaborated with GRECE, notably via the membership to the patronage committee of its journal Nouvelle École, including Raymond Abellio, Franz Altheim, Maurice Bardèche, Anthony Burgess, Jean Cau, C. D. Darlington, Pierre Debray-Ritzen, Jacques de Mahieu, Mircea Eliade, Hans Eysenck, Julien Freund, Robert Gayre, Jean Haudry, Arthur Koestler, Manfred Mayrhofer, Edgar Polomé, Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas, Marcel Le Glay, Konrad Lorenz, Thierry Maulnier, Armin Mohler, Louis Pauwels, Roger Pearson, Stefan Thomas Possony, or Louis Rougier.

[40][18][41] Although the extent of the relationship is debated by scholars, GRECE and the Nouvelle Droite, and its German counterpart the Neue Rechte,[42] have influenced the ideological and political structure of the European Identitarian Movement.

[45] The think tank initially borrowed several themes already present in Europe-Action : anti-Christianity and elitism, a pan-racial notion of European nationalism, and the seeds of a change from a biological to a cultural definition of alterity.

Between 1972 and 1987, under the influence of Armin Mohler and the Conservative Revolution, this discourse was progressively replaced with a cultural approach of alterity based upon a Nietzschean rejection of egalitarianism and a call for a European palingenesis (heroic rebirth) via a return to the ancestral "Indo-European values".

[51] Influenced by Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, GRECE aims at slowly infusing society with its ideas in the hope of achieving cultural hegemony,[49] sometimes called "right-wing Gramscism".

"[52] In 1974, GRECE members Jean Mabire, Maurice Rollet, Jean-Claude Valla and Pierre Vial founded the scouting organization Europe-Jeunesse to diffuse Nouvelle Droite ideas and values to the youth.

William H. Tucker and Bruce Lincoln have described Nouvelle École as the "French version of the Mankind Quarterly",[64][65] and historian James G. Shields as the equivalent of the German Neue Anthropologie.