Défense des Commerçants et Artisans

Labour did its most against poverty, ignorance, squalor, idleness, ill health and war when it was also a patriotic, socially conservative party with Marxist fringes (not unique to it, nor anywhere near as close to its top people as in the Conservative case) but in no sense controlled by the old student Communists and Trotskyists who went on to become New Labour.

Poujade, eh? The tendencies now expressing themselves as the popular, even if not the elite, bases of Gaullism, of the anti-Gaullist Right and of the anti-Marxist Left have their roots in Catholic, patriotic disaffection with the Jacobin Revolution of 1789 in the countryside and among the workers. That sense has still very far from gone away: France is still very far from fully reconciled to the Revolution’s claims of universal bourgeois liberalism, as much in economics as in anything else. If she had ever fully succumbed to the Revolution, then her economic arrangements would be the most “Anglo-Saxon” in the world.

René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings correctly identifies Orléanism as bourgeois and economically liberal, as the Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists. But the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the Front National and its electorate is not the only continuation of Legitimism. Although intégristes and their fellow-travelers may have been attracted to the Front, the victory of Marine Le Pen should have put paid to what was always that dangerous delusion, as indeed is intégrisme itself. But where to go? Philippe de Villiers shows increasing tendencies towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and managed to be the only person in the entire EU elected to the European Parliament under the banner of Declan Ganley’s Libertas, with its cry of “An EU, but not this EU”, as if any other were available.

Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet the popular followings for either and both were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside. Especially there, the anti-Gaullist Right is not entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing. Not for nothing did Philippe de Villiers withdraw from the Giscardien UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the Gaullist RPR. And where does the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first come from? Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon, but he certainly wanted to be one or the other. Deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won. When he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had endorsed him and who did so again.