Maurice Bardèche (1 October 1907 – 30 July 1998) was a French art critic and journalist, better known as one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism and Holocaust denial in post–World War II Europe.

His main works include The History of Motion Pictures (1935), an influential study on the nascent art of cinema co-written with Brasillach; literary studies on French writer Honoré de Balzac; and political works advocating fascism and Holocaust denial, following his brother-in-law's poetic fascism, and inspired by fascist figures like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

[12] After presenting his thesis on the works of novelist Honoré de Balzac in May 1940, Bardèche graduated with a doctorate in literature and was subsequently granted a temporary professorship at the Sorbonne University.

He instead focused on his career as a literary critic, and wrote only three articles on arts (Stendhal, Balzac and films) for the antisemitic and collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, in which Brasillach was the editor-in-chief until 1943.

"[12] While in prison in 1945, Bardèche began to develop his own definition of fascism, by cutting away police repression, antisemitism and expansionist imperialism, in an attempt to present the ideology as "a youthful celebration and rejoicing, a new anti-bourgeois life-style, and the existence of feverish activism", in the words of scholar Ian R. Barnes.

[3] Dismissed as the inventors of the Holocaust, Jews had allegedly designed a secret plan to "get revenge from Germany" and obtain international support for the creation of their nation state.

[2][12] As he realized the difficulty of diffusing his ideas in a post-fascist context, Bardèche decided to establish his own publishing house Les Sept Couleurs, a name inspired by the title of one of Brasillach's novels.

At the same time, Bardèche was recognized among academics as a leading expert of novelists Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal, and benefited in the public opinion from being the brother-in-law and spiritual inheritor of an "assassinated poet".

In December 1950, he visited Germany to deliver speeches, creating an "apology of collaboration" and denouncing the "fraud of the French Resistance" before an audience essentially composed of former Nazis.

He co-founded the Comité National Français, an umbrella organization for extremist groups to operate, but stepped away when the movement embarked on a violently antisemitic course under the leadership of René Binet.

In 1952, the two of them commenced the journal Défense de l'Occident, designed as an arena for young fascists to air their views and, according to Barnes, a "reborn and renamed Je suis partout".

[1] The context of the Algerian War, along with the political crisis it triggered in metropolitan France, made fascist ideas more acceptable for a short lapse of time in the wider society, which allowed Bardèche to publicly present himself as an advocate of fascism, a conviction which he had never openly admitted until then.

[26] In 1969, Bardèche published Sparte et les Sudistes (Sparta and the Southerners), in which he wrote that far-right thinkers should not begin with men from the lens of ideology, a mistake he sees in the "rational and abstract definition of man" of left-wing writings, but rather "as they find them, in the place where they have grown, in the unequal bunches that nature has formed.

"[27] Bardèche produced works on French novelists Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Léon Bloy, which are often cited in bibliographies.

[3] He claimed that democratic idealism had created a closed world similar to that achieved by Marxism, and that by proscribing the fascist consciousness, the Nuremberg trials had eroded individual autonomy.

[…] With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living.Bardèche started to develop his own interpretation of fascism, which he defined as a youthful and heroic rebellion against the established intellectual structures, and as a defence of Europe against the influence of both capitalist America and communist Russia.

"[36] Bardèche viewed the egalitarian concept of the Enlightenment as eroding distinct racial identities and vital differences, and as a means to "reduce humans in society to the status of ants".

"[37] Bardèche also believed that the time of the nation state had passed, and he developed instead the idea of a "military and politically strong European bloc", a third way between capitalist America and communist Russia.

Although drew inspiration from the dirigist socialism of the Spanish fascists, Bardèche essentially tried to develop a theory of fascism adapted to the post-war environment, built on its original socialist, national, and hierarchical idea.

According to him, the fascist society rests upon the idea that only a minority, "the physically saner, the morally purer, the most conscious of national interest", can represent best the community, and that this elite should be at the full service of the less gifted, in what he called a "feudal contract".

[3] As summarized by Barnes, Bardèche's definition of fascism was characterized by "a reformist authoritarian and hierarchical socialism; he denigrated liberalism for its pursuit of self-interest and attacked Marxism for stimulating class warfare.

These methods were later expanded and developed by other Holocaust deniers such as Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson, who, according to Barnes, "used textual notes and academic referencing, concentrated their denial effort on limited targets believing that to cause doubt over a minor historical point calls the larger picture into question.

[...] It had been a good fortune to discover in 1945 those concentration camps that no one had heard of until then, and which became precisely the proof we needed, the flagrante delicto in its purest form, the crime against humanity that justified everything.

[...] And the silence was such, the curtain was so skillfully, so abruptly revealed, that not a single voice dared to say that all this was too good to be perfectly true.To prove Germany innocent, Bardèche refuted the specificity of the Hitlerian crimes by drawing moral equivalence between the Soviet and the Nazi concentration systems.

Nazi extermination camps were likewise presented as a meticulous post-facto construction by Jewish "technicians" (portrayed as the architects of the "invention of the Holocaust"), and designed to dominate the world via a global secret plan of historical disguise.

[11][12] Bardèche described the Nazi policies on Jews as "moderate" and "reasonable", and believed that the Holocaust was nothing more than a "grouping" of the Jewish people in a "reserve" through a population transfer to Eastern Europe (alluding to the Nisko Plan, cancelled in 1940).

"[41] In his 1951 book L'Œuf de Christophe Colomb, Bardèche explained that the United States had "killed the wrong pig" during WWII, and that anti-fascism turned out to be only an artifice of Bolshevik domination over Europe.