Pierre Poujade

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Pierre Poujade ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 1 December 1920 – 27 August 2003) was a French right-wing populist politician after whom the Poujadist movement was named.<ref name="obit">Template:Cite news</ref>

BiographyEdit

Pierre Poujade was born in Saint-Céré (Le Lot), France, and studied at Collège Saint-Eugène d'Aurillac, a Roman Catholic private school. On the death of his father, an architect, in 1928, he was unable to afford the tuition and left school to work as a manual laborer. As a teenager, Poujade joined the Parti populaire français (PPF) of Jacques Doriot.<ref name="obit" />

From 1940 to 1942, Poujade supported the Révolution nationale of Philippe Pétain. After the invasion of the free zone by German forces, he joined the Free French Forces in Algiers, where he met his future wife, Yvette Seva, with whom he would have five children.<ref name="obit" />

PoujadismEdit

File:Epinglette de l'Union de Défense des Commerçants et des Artisans.jpg

Logo of the organisation

After the war, Poujade was the owner of a book and stationery store.<ref name="time">Template:Cite magazine Template:Subscription required</ref>

On 23 July 1953, with a group of about 20 persons, Poujade prevented inspectors of the tax board from verifying the income of another shopkeeper. This was the start of a tax protest movement by shopkeepers, first in the Lot department, then in the Aveyron department, and finally the whole south of the Massif Central.<ref name="time" />

On 29 November 1953, Pierre Poujade created the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans (UDCA; Defense Union of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen), to organize the tax protesters. This movement would soon be called "Poujadism" (French: Poujadisme).<ref name="time" /> Poujadism flourished most vigorously in the last years of the Fourth Republic, and articulated the economic interests and grievances of shopkeepers and other proprietor-managers of small businesses facing economic and social change. The main themes of Poujadism concerned the defense of the common man against the elites.<ref name="time" />

In addition to the protest against the income tax and the price control imposed by finance minister Antoine Pinay to limit inflation, Poujadism was opposed to industrialization, urbanization, and American-style modernization, which were perceived as a threat to the identity of rural France.<ref name=":0">Serieys, Jacques (23 July 2009). "23 juillet 1953 : Pierre Poujade lance le poujadisme sur le Lot, l'Aveyron puis la France rurale entière. Remarques sur le mouvement des commerçants et artisans". Parti de Gauche: Midi-Pyrénées, 23 July 2009. Retrieved from http://www.prs12.com/spip.php?article3648 Template:Webarchive.</ref>

The movement's "common man" populism led to antiparliamentarism (Poujade called the National Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris" and the deputies a "pile of rubbish" and "paederasts"), a strong anti-intellectualism (Poujade denounced the graduates from the École Polytechnique as the main culprits for the woes of 1950s France and boasted that he had no book learning), xenophobia, and antisemitism, particularly aimed against Jewish Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France, with Poujade claiming "Mendès is French only as the word added to his name". Mendès was perceived as being responsible for the loss of French Indochina.<ref name="video">Source Unknown (date unknown). Video of a speech of Poujade against Mendès-France. Uploaded to Dailymotion.com by MisteurCocktail on 2006-08-27. Retrieved from http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbzln_poujade Template:Webarchive.</ref> Poujadism also supported the cause of French Algeria.<ref name="nyt03">Template:Cite news</ref>

Political involvementEdit

In 1955, the UDCA was a strong political movement, with 400,000 members. Its adherents were encouraged to protest against taxes and withdraw their deposits from state-owned banks. The movement called for new Estates General to re-found the French political regime, and published the Fraternité Française newspaper.Template:Citation needed The UDCA secured 52 seats in the 1956 elections.<ref name="nyt03"/> "Experts said he might win six to eight seats", The Saturday Evening Post wrote. "A great many political leaders, including M. Faure two years ago, have promised to do something about [the tax system]. If they had made good, Poujadism would never have been born".<ref name="sep19560211">Template:Cite magazine</ref> The youngest member of parliament, elected on a UDCA list, was Jean-Marie Le Pen, then leader of the youth branch of UDCA. Poujade was critical of the decolonization of Algeria, and of the European Defence Community.<ref name="indie">Template:Cite news Template:Dead link Template:Cbignore</ref> To justify his support for the Algerian War, Poujade declared in 1956 to Time Magazine:

Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery, they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us...All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France. Already the Saar is gone, and soon the Italians will want Corsica...As for those who are against us, I need only say: let them go back to Jerusalem. We'll even be glad to pay their way."<ref name="time" />

After the Fifth Republic was established in 1958 under Charles de Gaulle's presidency, Poujade and his party largely faded from view.<ref name="lmobit">Weill, Nicolas (28 August 2003). La mort de Pierre Poujade, précurseur d'un nouveau populisme. Le Monde, 28 August 2003. Retrieved from http://www.droitconstitutionnel.net/PierrePoujade.htm Template:Webarchive.</ref>

Poujade ran for National Assembly again, but was defeated in 1962, after which he went on to found an organization that distributed Nazi political speeches and military songs.<ref name="nazi-speeches-german-military-songs">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 1965, Poujade supported Jean Lecanuet for president.<ref name="lmobit" />

In the 1981<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and 1988<ref name="lmobit" /> presidential elections, Poujade favored François Mitterrand, while in the 1995 election he voiced his support for Jacques Chirac.<ref name="lmobit" />

In 1984, Pierre Poujade was appointed to the Conseil économique et social by Mitterrand. Poujade used this position to promote biofuels.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Poujade distanced himself from Le Pen and declared in 2002 that he would have preferred to break his own leg than to make him a deputy.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

DeathEdit

Poujade died on 27 August 2003 in La Bastide-l'Évêque at the age of 82.<ref name=":0" /> His funeral was officiated in the Church of Saint John the Baptist in La Bastide-l'Eveque, on 30 August 2003.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

LegacyEdit

Although the UDCA has lost its influence, some of the ideas of Poujadism persist in modern French politics.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 1969, Gérard Nicoud started the CID-UNATI (Comité Interprofessionnel de Défense-Union Nationale des Travailleurs Indépendants), a tax protest movement similar to the one of Poujade. Examples of recent political groups with strong Poujadist leanings include Le Pen's own National Front (which has a strong anti-tax message), the Comité de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans of Christian Poucet (that encouraged French shopkeepers to declare their business in Britain in order to avoid paying the French Social Security taxes), and the Union des Contribuables Français. The magazine Le Cri du Contribuable owned by Nicolas Miguet also maintains the poujadist tradition.Template:Cn

In France, Poujadisme is often used pejoratively to characterize any kind of ideology that declares itself anti-establishment or strongly criticizes the current French political system or political class, even when the anti-tax or anti-intellectual aspects of the original Poujadism are absent.Template:Citation needed

For instance, Le Monde diplomatique was accused of poujado-marxisme in the 1990s.Template:Citation needed

In a 1990 pamphlet, reissued in 2012, Christopher Hitchens refers to a "... Poujadiste female with ideas above her station", presumably a reference to Margaret Thatcher and her humble origins as a Grantham grocer's daughter.<ref>Christopher Hitchens The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish published by Vintage Digital (29 May 2012).</ref>

In February 2010, The New York Times commentator Robert Zaretsky compared the American Tea Party movement with Poujadism.<ref name="zaretsky">Template:Cite news</ref>

In a May 2016 editorial, The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat identified Donald Trump as a Poujadist.<ref name="Douthat">Template:Cite news</ref>

British historian Timothy Garton Ash used Poujade in discussing the British vote to leave the European Union. In a piece published in The Guardian in June 2016, he wrote about some of those who voted for Brexit, saying that:

It is a mistake to disqualify such people as racist. Their concerns are widespread, genuine and not to be dismissed. Populist xenophobes such as Nigel Farage exploit these emotions, linking them to subterranean English nationalism and talking, as he did in the moment of victory, of the triumph of "real people, ordinary people, decent people". This is the language of Orwell hijacked for the purposes of a Poujade.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>