The Resurgence of the Radical Right in France
From Boulangisme to the Front National

Recounts the resurgence of significant political movements of the Radical Right in France since the end of the nineteenth century.

Gabriel Goodliffe (Author)

9781107006706, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 February 2012

374 pages, 4 b/w illus. 3 tables
23.4 x 2.2 x 15.6 cm, 0.7 kg

“a fascinating book…The argument is clear, the text well written, the sources carefully provided in an amazing display of footnotes – lengthier on some pages than the text itself, and full of treasures. The author has a thorough knowledge of France’s history, economy and politics over the past two centuries, and of the academic debates surrounding the contemporary radical rights. His “class-cultural” angle of attack stands out in the mass of books published about the Front National and his party family in Europe." - Nonna Mayer, the Centre d’études européennes at Sciences Po-CNRS, Counsel for European Studies

This book attempts to account for the resurgence of significant political movements of the Radical Right in France since the establishment of democracy in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. Taking to task historical treatments of the Radical Right for their failure to specify the conditions and dynamics attending its emergence, and faulting the historical myopia of contemporary electoral and party-centric accounts of the Front National, it tries to explain the Radical Right's continuing appeal by relating the socio-structural outcomes of the processes of industrialization and democratization in France to the persistence of economically and politically illiberal groups within French society. Specifically, the book argues that, as a result of the country's protracted and uneven experience of industrialization and urbanization, significant pre- or anti-modern social classes, which remained functionally ill-adapted and culturally ill-disposed to industrial capitalism and liberal democracy, subsisted late into its development.

1. Introduction
2. Defining the radical right in France, past and present
3. The class-cultural roots of the radical right: structures and expressions of indépendance
4. The age of contentment: petits indépendants during the belle époque
5. The fateful transition: petits indépendants in the interwar period
6. The eclipse of the petty producer republic: petits indépendants from Vichy through the Fourth Republic
7. The age of decline: petits indépendants under the Fifth Republic
8. Epilogue: French workers in crisis and the entrenchment of the front national
9. The radical right in France in comparative perspective
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]