Populism v. Democracy

France in the 1950s.

A postwar boom. The nation pulled into the modern world under the auspices of dirigisme (directed economic investment, encouragement of mergers in key sectors), a middle way between laissez-faire and communist central planning. Pressure against the small family business, the Mom and Pop store, the family farm. In A Man’s Place, Annie Ernaux describes how her parents’ neighborhood grocery fell victim to the new supermarket: “The first supermarket opened in Y—, attracting a working-class clientele from all parts of town. At last one could do one’s shopping without having to ask for everything” (Ernaux, p. 79).

This was the era of the political phenomenon that was Pierre Poujade. As James G. Shields has suggested, Poujadisme mobilized the “classic binary oppositions” of populism: “weak against strong, people against establishment, honest workers against financial power, simple against intellectual, provinces against capital, nation against hostile foreigner” ( Shields, p. 52).  This series of binaries can describe the rhetoric and position of populism in general and of the Gilets Jaunes in particular. The Poujadists also offer a clear lesson in how such movements can exhaust themselves, as we now see with the Gilets Jaunes.

In the 1956 elections of the Fourth Republic, the Poujadists went from nothing to a surprising 11.6% of the votes cast for the National Assembly. Among their 57 deputies (reduced to 41 for “electoral impropriet[ies]”) was young Jean-Marie Le Pen, age 27, making his first foray into politics (Shields, pp. 39-40). He was soon expelled from the party and went on to lead the National Front from its founding in 1972 to 2011, when his daughter Marine succeeded him.

Poujade drew huge crowds, as in this meeting, unlabeled but perhaps at the Porte de Versailles in Paris, January 1955, where he spoke before an estimated audience of 100,000 (Shields, p. 39) about the threats the ordinary people of France faced from the elites, the wealthy, the powerful. The video is virtually silent, but one can instead look at the intent faces, the size and seriousness of the almost all-male audience, who were buffeted by the changes of a modernizing France that they did not know how to navigate.

But there was something else added to the mix as well, the insider/outsider rhetoric that in Poujade’s case expressed itself in antisemitism. He found his target in the most (arguably the only) effective prime minister of the Fourth Republic, Pierre Mendès-France, who was Jewish. In the following video one has a sense of the speaking style of Poujade, and of his use of one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes in French cultural history: they come to France to enrich themselves, he says, to enjoy the benefits, to profit from French generosity; but they do not join the communauté, the community, of the French family. “You are the racists!” he accuses, because Jews remain enclosed in “their own sect.”

I often assign the Shields article to my classes; it has become ever more relevant as populism has taken on new life. This semester I was particularly struck by a passage listing the “three things” that the Poujadists put at the top of their priority list: “an end to tax audits [small businessmen survived by creative accounting, as did corporations, but only the former were being audited], reform of the tax system, and the calling of an Estates-General to determine ‘ce que veulent les Français [what the French want]’ and channel ‘la volonté démocratique [the democratic will]’. With its resonance of Rousseau, this [the Estates General] remained throughout the proposal that the Poujadists pressed hardest” (p. 38).

And shortly thereafter I saw this tweet from the Gilet Jaune spokesman of Rennes, who also listed three demands. He couched them within a fictional dream from which he had unfortunately awakened:

The annotated translation: “Macron has changed! He has just accepted our three propositions as a show of good faith in order to renew the dialogue:

• the reestablishment of the ISF [the wealth tax, the abolition of which provided a large tax cut for the very wealthy],
• CICE [a corporate tax credit to encourage investment and employment, granted to large corporations and multinationals] to be limited to small and medium enterprises (PMEs),
• and the initiation of the RIC!!! [the citizens referendum initiative, by which a popular petition with a number of signatures could be used to recall elected officials, to annul legislation, and to pass Brexit-like mandates; see “What is the RIC,” this blog, March, 2019]

And suddenly I awoke. . . . nothing has changed. It was only a dream.”

In other words, both Poujadists and the Gilets Jaunes named two easily justifiable issues of economic fairness, and then punted to something else–the Estates-General or the RIC–as a means to get there. The problem with both movements was not the setting of goals or the diagnosis of genuine economic problems, but rather the achieving of their objectives. Both movements also shared a hostility to the exercise of leadership, as if hoping that the answers would well up from the collective consciousness of the people. Pierre Poujade refused even to run for the National Assembly. The Gilets Jaunes have refused to establish leadership among themselves. That refusal has allowed the movement to be co-opted by various groups, notably the black blocs, who have brought discredit on them. And the attempt by the Gilets Jaunes to join the Climate March of September 21 merely had the effect of hampering the turnout for the climate march, creating a serious loss of focus for coverage and a likely loss in participation.

And both groups, the Poujadists and the Gilets Jaunes, have gone after scapegoats. The ugly antisemitism of the first group takes the form, in the Gilets Jaunes, of unbalanced rhetoric against elites, against the media, against the police–in both cases, the populist formula.

I was moved last week by a newspaper editorial in Mediapart, authored by Edwy Plenel, the journal’s founder, under the title, “France’s Frail and Fragile Democracy.” (See Mediapart, September 30, 2019, for the English version.) Mediapart is hostile to the Macron government and has been generally favorable to the Gilets Jaunes movement.  The column was written after a veritable orgy of mourning for Jacques Chirac (president from 1995-2007), correctly described by Plenel as “a media deluge” that crowded out everything else, most notably the coverage of a massive and toxic fire in Rouen.  But what had caused Plenel to despair for France was the evidence in the United states of “the vitality of a democratic culture against the abuses of executive power”:

“Imagine, in France” he said, “the revelation by Mediapart of the existence of a conversation between the president of the Republic with a foreign head of state that compromised the national interests of the country.  The result, as shown by the functioning of American democracy, is clearly unimaginable in France: [if France were like the US] not only would the National Assembly take it up immediately (though the “impeachment” procedure had no French equivalent until the constitutional law of 2014, in application of art. 68 of the Constitution) but, moreover, the Élysée would be automatically forced to make public this conversation, followed by the whistleblower report (but there is not, in France, any Freedom of Information Act as has existed in the US since 1966 and in Great Britain since 2000). A true Democracy is one where the executive power is constrained to submit itself to other powers, to the point of being forced to make public that which, potentially, will overwhelm it.  To the point of having to answer to the investigations of Parliament and questions of the Press. To the point of not being able to conceal. In our low intensity democracy, this is evidently unthinkable.  And the majority of the political world and the media milieu accommodate themselves willingly, at the risk of discrediting democracy itself” (”Mediapart, September 28, 2019).

The process of preserving the democracy has not been as smooth in the United States as it may appear from the outside, and many of us have been brought to despair; but there is at least a process, and it is continuing. Both France and the United States owe a great debt to their founders and constitution-writers, in 1789 (in the United States) and 1791 (France), who acted with great courage and created workable democracies.  The US constitution has lasted, even through civil war, despite the sin of legalized slavery that began it; France has suffered a turbulent history with many undemocratic interludes, and Plenel suggests that the habits and expectations of democracy are less ingrained in France than they are in the United States.

The French have often romanticized “la rue”–the street–as the ultimate solution, but it is merely a preliminary gesture, a demonstration of power. It has to be followed by serious discussions. The major trade union, the CFDT, offered early on in the Gilets Jaunes movement to be the go-between, and was rebuffed by both sides. The Macron administration has given the excuse that the Gilets Jaunes don’t trust the unions–which is true–but either the government or the Gilets Jaunes could have forced the hand of the other by partnering with the unions and business organizations (Libération, January 10, 2019).  The need for intermediaries between the street and the Élysée has never been so clear.

In the United States, the balance of powers (an inspiration from Montesquieu) is holding, so far; perhaps the democratic habits are indeed ingrained.

And France?

Pierre Poujade’s party was essentially gone by the elections of November 1958, destroyed by their own incoherence and ineffectiveness (Shields, p. 40). Sixty years later, Macron bet everything on exhaustion, and he may have won.

Over the past few weeks, the Gilets Jaunes on social media have kept up the pretense that a once important social movement is as strong as ever. But Acte 46 (September 28) put only 15, 947 demonstrators in the street throughout France.

Which is actually not very many, considering that the first Saturday, last November, had 287,000, according to the Ministry of Interior numbers. This figure, in contrast, was from the group that monitors the numbers because it distrusts the Ministry of Interior count.

If your only purpose is to turn out small crowds Saturday after Saturday, then this would be success. But I’m pretty sure it’s not. And Populism, with its scapegoats and caricatures, is most certainly not the path.

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Header image from Shutterstock.com

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Ernaux, Annie. A Man’s Place. Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1992 (original French edition 1983).

Shields, James G. “An Enigma Still: Poujadism Fifty Years On,” French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 36-56.