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Poujadist

Poujadist was a right-wing bourgeois political movement in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. The Poujadist movement briefly threatened the foundation of the French Republic. By the mid-1950s, the Marshall Plan and postwar reconstruction had transformed France into a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing country. Many feared and resented the resulting social and economic changes.

Liberation in 1945 brought a deep political division between Gaullists and Catholics on the right and Communists and their fellow travelers on the left. The political center evaporated in the cold war. The French parliamentary system remained dysfunctional, lurching from crisis to crisis. Neither seemed interested in the interests of the man in the street. Faced with widespread public anxiety, the professional political class seemed indifferent.

At this juncture, Pierre Poujade (born Dec. 1, 1920, Saint-Céré, France — died Aug. 27, 2003, La Bastide-l'Évêque) appeared on the national political scene. A member of the Vichy youth organization, he had crossed to Algeria in 1942, joined the air force, and returned to France in 1945. A stationer in Saint-Céré, a small town in southwestern France, in 1953 Poujade mobilized a local shopkeepers' strike to protest high taxation and government tax inspectors. He found a ready audience in le petit commerçant squeezed between chain stores and the state bureaucracy.

Poujade focused swelling of popular resentment into his Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans [Union des Commercants et Artisans (UDCA)]. By the end of the 1953, he enrolled 800,000 members in his Union, which attracted discontented farmers and merchants across Frsnce.

Poujade amplified populist anxieties, and blamed France’s woes on an urbane and urban professional class that had “lost all contact with the real world.” In his autobiography, titled “I’ve Chosen to Fight,” Poujade positioned himself as a simple man of the people. The real France, he insisted, was found not in Paris, but in small towns and farms. The Poujadists believed in direct action by the people, and carried out a number of spectacular stunts to discredit the administration. With expanding membership came more radical rhetoric. Poujade denounced the corruptions of the political system, spoke for the French settlers in Algeria, and called for the summoning of an Estates General.

During the subsequent national elections in 1956, Poujade’s party won more than 10 percent of the votes, taking more than 50 seats in the National Assembly. By 1958, many Poujadists threw their support behind the most impressive opponent of the Fourth Republic, Charles de Gaulle.

When de Gaulle assumed power and held a referendum to replace the parliamentary system with a strong executive, Poujade’s adherents overwhelmingly voted yes. Poujade retreated to Saint Ceré and his attempts at a comeback were unsuccessful. The "Poujadism" became the generic term for the radical politics of social groups threatened by modernization.