Through Eribon’s defense, it has nevertheless been shown that Dumézil really did support the French Fascist organization Action française during the … - Stefan Arvidsson

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumézil supported Action française and wrote for its journals. It was also during this period that he began to develop his own theories about Indo-European mythology. Is it possible that Dumézil used the ancient Indo-Europeans in the same way that the Nazi scholars did (albeit with an entirely different level of scientific accuracy and methodological acuteness)—to give historical legitimacy to a Fascist movement? Did Action française perhaps receive a mythology of origin, a narrative that ascribes such a fundamental meaning to certain ideas and norms that they seem natural and eternal, through the work of Georges Dumézil?

Since this discipline (folklore) arose in what became Germany in 1871, this change (the rising importance of folklore rather than philology) meant that the Indo-Europeans began to look less and less like the Indians and the Iranians, and more and more like Germans. This meant, in turn, that they became less civilized and more primitive and barbaric. The image of the Indo-Europeans as a primitive tribe received an additional boost from the discipline of the Indo-Europeans of prehistoric archaeology. When archaeologists became involved in the debate about the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic's position was further strengthened within the comparative work, and the original home of the Indo-Europeans was moved from the noble and exotic Asia to the rustic European homeland (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 141-142, parentheses added).

The original population that the Indo-European Greeks had vanquished when they penetrated the south­ ern Balkan peninsula had, according to Curtius. not been a Negroid or Near Eastern population, like in South Asia, but rather a primitive Indo-European population fragment (“arisch-pelasgischen Volker“).505 The Hellenes, “the O c­ cidental Aryans,“ and the great culture they created were therefore the result of an adventurous conquest and at the same time, in contrast to the Indian culture, thoroughly Aryan.52