Franco Freda

Franco "Giorgio" Freda (Padua, Italy, 11 February 1941) was one of the leading neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist intellectuals of the post-war Italian far right. He founded a publishing house for neo-Nazi thought, and described himself as an admirer of Hitler. He was convicted but later acquitted for lack of evidence for involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing. He founded the Fronte Nazionale, which was disbanded by the Italian government in 2000 when Freda and forty-eight other members were found guilty of attempting to re-establish the National Fascist Party.

Freda began his political career as the leader of the FUAN-Caravella of Padua (the undergraduates association of the Italian Social Movement) when he was a law student.

In 1963 he founded the Group of Ar, based on the philosophy of Julius Evola, and managed a far-right library. Later, when the Group of Ar was disbanded, he founded the Edizioni di Ar (Ar Publishing), a publishing house that brought out books by traditionalist figures like Evola and René Guenon. Edizioni di Ar is still active today and continues to offer philosophical and political contemporary far-right essays, as well as reissuing books by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers like Arthur de Gobineau, Oswald Spengler, Friederich Nietzsche, and Alfred Baeumler.

In 1969 Freda published The Disintegration of the System, which became an important text for the Italian far right. In this book Freda broke the classical Anti Communist stance of the far right and proposed a strategic alliance between the far left and the far right to subvert capitalist society. He also began to criticise the MSI leadership, accusing it of compromising with the "agonizing democracy of the Republic". This position, along with the proposal of a hierarchical, collectivist State which found its roots explicitly in Plato, earned him the title of "Nazi Maoist". Freda's ideology influenced many 1970s far right Italian groups, such as the Lotta di Popolo and Terza Posizione.

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