Alain Soral

Alain Gérard Robert Guy Bonnet (; born 2 October 1958, Aix-les-Bains), known professionally as Alain Soral , is a far-right French-Swiss author, publisher, ideologue, conspiracy theorist, activist and filmmaker.

From the 1990s, Soral gained fame in France for his essays and media interventions on seduction, relations between men and women and other social issues, though his antifeminist views and other provocative stances caused some controversy.

A self-professed Marxist, initially considered far-left, he evolved towards the far-right during the 2000s and eventually joined the National Front which he left after two years. Having created his own political movement, Égalité & Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation), he espoused openly antisemitic positions, associating himself with comedian-turned-activist Dieudonné.

Soral has been convicted multiple times of hate speech, both in France and in Switzerland, mostly for antisemitism but also for Holocaust denial and homophobia. In 2026 he relocated to Russia to avoid imprisonment in both countries.

Early life Alain Bonnet was born in Aix-les-Bains (Savoie). His father was a French-Swiss notary and legal advisor. He grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (Haute-Savoie), where he attended primary school. When Soral was in his early teens, his family moved to Meudon in the Paris area so that he could attend a private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris.

Soral later described his family as highly dysfunctional. In a 2004 interview, he said he had been "programmed to be a monster". His sister Agnès said that their father was a "narcissistic pervert" who mistreated his wife and beat his children.

He spent two years working odd jobs before being accepted, aged 20, into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, one of the few tertiary educational institutions he could attend without having the baccalauréat. He studied there for two years. He attempted for a time to become a painter, using the name "ABS". He was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enroll at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis.

The book's success gave Soral the opportunity to be employed at ESMOD, where he gave a course on "clothing sociology". He later appeared as a panelist on TV shows. According to his own account, he devoted much of his free time to be a pickup artist. which he described as a "Marxist analysis of seduction".

Soral then developed Confession d'un dragueur ("Confessions of a pickup artist"), his first feature film as a director, purportedly based on his own experiences. The film's producer said that he had only realized belatedly that the statements found in the script about male-female relations were serious rather than ironic. Soral later commented that the failure of his film had been caused by "Jews and faggots", though he claimed that it had since become a "cult film". Libération called him in 2002 a "left-wing reactionary".

Soral's 2002 book Jusqu'où va-t-on descendre? included a jibe at comedian Dieudonné, whom he found too biased against "common" French people. Dieudonné then sought to meet Soral: the two men eventually became friends, having found, according to Soral, a common ground on "anti-Zionism" and the "Jewish lobby".

During the 2000s, Soral, who presented himself as a sociologist, claimed to oppose communitarianism and stated that the "liberal-libertarian" ideology promoted by the French moderate left had imported anglo-saxon communitarianism into France, including its "feminist", "gay", and "regional" subdivisions. On the contrary, he commended the Muslim community for its ability to produce "men raised in values".

Before Soral's discourse began openly antisemitic, his analysis of communitarianism already included remarks about the Jews. He commented that in France, "all forms of growing communitarianism (gay, Islamic, etc.) form and strengthen through imitation of, hostility towards and opposition to Judeo-Zionist communitarianism, whose privileged status constitutes the communitarian jurisprudence by which their claims against the Republic are supported".

Far-right radicalization

In the course of the 2000s and 2010s, Soral's views and public persona became increasingly associated with antisemitism. In 2004, he was interviewed in a segment on the television newsmagazine Complément d'enquête devoted to Dieudonné's radicalization. While Dieudonné nodded in approval in the background, Soral said:

Following this interview, one of Soral's book signings was disrupted by Jewish activists, with several people being wounded in the resulting brawl.

Also in 2007, Soral founded his own political association, Égalité & Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation)., which aimed to attract working-class and disadvantaged voters. At the same time, he also launched a publishing company, Kontre Kulture, which he used to publish himself and other controversial authors. In November 2007, he became a member of the National Front's central committee. Soral and Dieudonné then headed an "anti-Zionist list" which included far-right, far-left, Shia Muslim and Holocaust denial activists and won 1,3% of the vote in Île-de-France. Soral later acknowledged that the list had been funded with the help of Iran.

During the following years, Soral built a network of structures and businesses dedicated to promote his ideas while also benefiting him financially. No longer invited by the French mainstream media after his move to the far-right, he turned to the Internet where he became particularly influential. He published countless viral videos of himself discussing various topics; his movement's website became one of the most popular French-language sources of "alternative" information. Soral's association with Dieudonné also helped him gain in influence. He called the 2012 Toulouse and Montauban shootings a "joint French-Israeli operation" aimed at discrediting Muslims, and a "low-budget version of 9/11".

In 2013, Soral started calling himself a "national-socialist", Soral also became a proponent of Holocaust denial: he and Dieudonné associated with denier Robert Faurisson and introduced his ideas to a new, younger audience. When Faurisson died in 2018, Soral paid tribute to him.

In 2014, Soral and Dieudonné announced their intention to create a new political party, "Réconciliation nationale" (National Reconciliation), but this did not materialize. In 2016, Equality and Reconciliation was reported to have about 4500 members Soral also developed his movement's activities in Switzerland, especially after he moved there in 2019.

In 2016, Soral was a guest speaker at an event about the rise of alternative media and subsequent decline of mainstream media, organized by Rossiya Segodnya in Moscow. While in Russia, he praised Vladimir Putin's government as a "model". His visit was endorsed by nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin.

In 2017, Soral and his movement were banned from Facebook for violating the platform's rules on racism and homophobia. In 2020, they were banned from YouTube for hate speech.

In 2019, it was reported that Soral's influence was waning in his political environment and that he was being criticized by younger conspiracy theorists, as his credibility had been damaged by his excesses and his tendency to profit financially from his political discourses.

In April 2026, after relocating to Russia, Soral granted an interview to TASS where he compared himself to general de Gaulle relocating to London during World War II, called France a "satellite" of Israel and the United States, and called for the "communautarist supremacist mafia" to be "defeated".

Legal issues Over the years, Soral has been sentenced multiple times for offences generally related to hate speech, including antisemitism, homophobia and Holocaust denial. On 10 February 2005, the Paris correctional court sentenced him to a €10,000 fine for racist insults against Jewish journalist Frédéric Haziza. In 2015, he was again found guilty of public insults against Haziza. In February 2016, he was again fined €10,000 for antisemitic insults, still against Haziza.

In May 2015, Soral was fined €10,000 for publishing a photo of himself making a "quenelle" (an offensive gesture popularized by Dieudonné) in front of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.

In November 2016, Soral was found guilty of threats against a model of African descent. After they flirted online and she turned him down, she was harassed by Soral's online community. He was fined €6000, plus €5000 of damages.

On 17 January 2019, Soral was sentenced to one year in prison for antisemitic hate speech, and for contempt of court after he had insulted the prosecutor during another trial. On 15 April, he was sentenced to another year in prison for Holocaust denial as a result of a cartoon published on Égalité et réconciliation's website. In June 2020, that sentence was reduced on appeal to a €5000 fine.

In October 2019, Soral received yet another one-year sentence for having called the Panthéon a "Kosher garbage site" following Simone Veil's burial there. Around that time, he moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, to avoid imprisonment in France.

In September 2020, he was fined €134,000 for inciting to racial hatred, after he had disregarded a previous court ruling regarding the publication of the 1892 book Salvation through the Jews, by Léon Bloy. In October 2020, he was fined €5400 for accusing the Jews of being behind 9/11. In May 2021, he was sentenced to four months in prison after he blamed them for the Notre-Dame fire.

In January 2022, he was fined €22,500 for posting another photo of himself making a "quenelle", this time in front of a courthouse.

In December 2022, Soral was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment by the regional attorney general for Lausanne for defamation, discrimination, and incitement to hatred for calling Cathy Macherel, a Swiss journalist who had reported on his movement, a "fat lesbian pro-migrants activist" and a "queer", which he said translated in French as "degenerate". Soral contested the sentence in court and was initially able to avoid jail time, but was convicted in court of defamation and ordered to pay 9000 francs. However, the Vaud public prosecutor's office lodged an appeal and in October 2023 Soral was convicted of discrimination and incitement to hatred and sentenced to 2 months imprisonment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Soral published numerous videos where he named French Jewish political figures as responsible for the situation, called the Jews "satanic parasitic predator perverts" and said people should "arm themselves" against "the enemy". He was charged in France for incitement to insurrection and racial hatred. In September 2025, he was sentenced to one year in prison over these statements.

In July 2025, an investigation was opened in France against Soral for incitement to terrorism and apology for terrorism after he had participated to a pro-Iran Telegram channel named after the Axis of Resistance, where he was said to have praised the October 7 attacks. Investigators suspected him of being involved in an Iranian operation aimed at destabilizing France.

In late February 2026, Soral relocated to Moscow to avoid imprisonment in France and Switzerland.

Personal life Soral married Maylis Bourdenx in 1996, though they later divorced.

According to his sister, Soral also became estranged from their mother during the 1990s, citing a need to "reconstruct himself". and boxing practitioner, Soral was also for a time a licensed boxing instructor.