Louis Rougier
Louis Auguste Paul Rougier (10 April 1889 – 14 October 1982) was a French philosopher.
He has been described as one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism.
In 1940, Philippe Pétain sent Rougier on a secret mission to the British government in London, where he met with Winston Churchill between 21-25 October. Rougier later claimed in several published works that these meetings resulted in an agreement between Vichy France and Churchill that he called the "Mission secrète à Londres : les Accords Pétain-Churchill", an allegation that the British government later denied in an official White Paper. Although these activities and publications eventually led to Rougier's dismissal in 1948 from his teaching position at the University of Besançon, Rougier continued to be active throughout the 1950s in organizations that defended Pétain. He also published works denouncing the épuration (the French equivalent of denazification that was carried out on formerly Vichy territory by the Allies after the war) as illegal and totalitarian. Finally, Rougier was active in an effort that petitioned the United Nations in 1951, stating that the Allies had committed human rights violations and war crimes in association with the liberation of France. See also French State.
During the 1970s, Rougier formed a second controversial political alliance with the Nouvelle Droite of the French writer Alain de Benoist. Rougier's long-standing opposition to Christianity, together with his conviction that the West possesses a "pragmatically superior mentalité" to those of other cultures, aligned closely with the views of this movement. Benoist reissued and wrote prefaces to several of Rougier's earlier works, and in 1974 GRECE published an entirely new book by Rougier: Le conflit du Christianisme primitif et de la civilisation antique.
