AN ENIGMA STILL Poujadism Fifty Years On

AN ENIGMA STILL Poujadism Fifty Years On James G. Shields University of Warwick, England The day began on a solemn note. The laying of a wreath at the war memorial and a minute’s silence for the fallen of Saint-Céré, victims of conflicts from the trenches to Algeria. Red, white and blue carnations, laid by Pierre Poujade and his wife, Yvette. Flanking them, two mayors in their Republican sashes, sons of early-day poujadistes. A picture of respectful, patriotic commemoration. A group of some 40 people had gathered at the corner of the main square in Saint-Céré, alongside the gently flowing Cère and under a July sun already fierce at 9:30 in the morning. They were here (in “le berceau du Poujadisme,” as the invitation proclaimed) to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans (UDCA), the movement launched by Poujade on 23 July 1953.1 A vin d’honneur in the town hall and a ceremony conferring on Poujade the freedom of Saint-Céré, then to the salle des fêtes for the main business of the day. There, in the auditorium, reflections on the history and meaning of “Poujadism” were offered by its eponymous founder and others, before proceedings were brought to a close with a buffet lunch courtesy of the Paris office of the UDCA. Aged 82 and looking to settle his account with posterity, Poujade was in spirited form. Speaking for over an hour without notes, he rehearsed the ori- gins and some of the high points of his movement before an audience of around a hundred invited guests, arguing the historical significance and con- temporaneity of le poujadisme. He described the UDCA as “un mouvement de légitime défense,” “civique et patriotique.” “Jamais nous n’avons mis la République ou le régime en question,” he insisted. “Nous nous sommes battus pour la nation.” As for his role in the downfall of the Fourth Republic, he was keen to absolve himself of base political ambition. He was, he declared, “fab- riqué” by those whom he had risen up to defend, and his rejection of a min- French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2004 “Poujadism Fifty Years On” but: An Enigma Still 37 isterial post under de Gaulle in 1958 attested his refusal to betray the purity of their cause by becoming a cog in “la mécanique de l’État.” This defensive reflex, this need to stress his own and his movement’s “pureté,” had nothing about it that was new. The term poujadisme carries still a sulfurous odor, even in this its old heartland, where some left-wing members of the council voiced indignation that the center-right mayor, Pierre Destic (UMP), should honor a movement commonly consigned to the extreme Right.2 As early as December 1955, François Mitterrand, who as Interior Min- ister had been a favored target of the Poujadists, found a tidy formula in clas- sifying the UDCA as “un fascisme d’arrière-boutique.”3 The caricature in L’Express of 9 January 1956 of its leader as “Poujadolf” hangs still over the movement five decades on.4 “S’unir ou disparaître” Yet at its inception, Poujadism had no political bias whatever. It was a movement of spontaneous resistance by small shopkeepers and artisans against government inspectors dispatched to eradicate tax fraud from the retail outlets of la France profonde. Since 1940, small shops had proliferated in France, such that by 1954 there were some 1.3 million employing 2.24 million people.5 In the immediate postwar years, shopkeepers had calculated their profit margins on the security of rationing, a healthy (for them) inflation rate, and the facility of fraud in an archaic and arcane tax system. By 1953, all of these advantages had been brought to an abrupt end. Derestriction and improvements in transport loosened the bond between local dealers and their clientele; the rampant inflation of the years 1945-52 was arrested; and the Pinay, Mayer and Laniel gov- ernments (1952-54) adopted a more draconian approach to tax fraud. Set up to offer protection against the “Gestapo fiscale,” the nascent Pou- jadist movement soon took on a more general mission of resistance to economic concentration and the effects of industrial expansion under the Fourth Republic. “Nous défendrons la structure traditionnelle de l’économie française,” it declared baldly. “Nous sommes contre la reconversion.”6 In this, Poujadism was the expression par excellence of the “stalemate society” that had character- ized France throughout its modern history and, as Stanley Hoffmann has argued, sought to preserve essentially preindustrial values and attitudes against the onset of industrialization.7 It brought together people of all political hues, allied in their socio-economic interests and their grievances against a remote state apparatus bent on economic modernization. The growth of towns and rural depopulation accentuated the perceived destruction of a traditional way of life and the livelihoods that depended on it. In 1946, the agricultural sector accommodated almost a third of the French workforce; by 1954, the proportion had dropped to just over a quarter.8 Pou- jadism united in common cause small farmers, peasants, winegrowers and 38 James G. Shields bouilleurs de cru with the shopkeepers, artisans, café owners, and small entre- preneurs who formed the core of the UDCA’s support. Poujade himself was a stationer who had won election the previous year to the municipal council of Saint-Céré on a Gaullist (RPF) ticket. A natural demagogue, he found himself at the head of a protest movement that spread rapidly from the Lot to other departments in the south (Corrèze, Cantal, Aveyron) and then other regions in the west and southeast (Pays de la Loire, Poitou-Charentes, Languedoc, Rhône- Alpes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur). It articulated fears over new modes of commercial distribution, in particular the threat to the small producer and vendor posed by larger units, of which the supermarket was the diabolic specter.9 In 1953, there was not a single supermarket in France; but in the changes that were already transforming retail in the United States, the Pou- jadists read the future.10 In apocalyptic language, Poujade called on petits com- merçants to “s’unir ou disparaître.” With the Gallic cock as its emblem, Poujadism styled itself the first antiglobalization movement in postwar France, defending “la France du ‘cocorico’” against “la France du ‘cocacola.’”11 It turned its hostility against “l’État vampire” and its agents, against high finance, big business, big industry, multinational corporations, banks, techno- crats, and politicians—or, as a Poujadist poster screamed, “les trusts apatrides,” “les trusts électoraux,” “le gang des exploiteurs,” “le gang des charognards,” “l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme.”12 The double use here of the terms “trust” and “gang,” while indicating something of the raw force of Poujadist rhetoric, summed up the essence of this revolt by small independents against the collectivity in all its menacing forms, against a Système poised to crush them. The earliest weapon in the Pou- jadists’ armory was the physical obstruction of tax inspectors, effected by the simple means of massing outside the designated premises and making it impossible for the auditors to gain access; their earliest demands were an end to tax audits, reform of the tax system, and the calling of an Estates-General to determine “ce que veulent les Français” and channel “la volonté démocra- tique.”13 With its resonance of Rousseau, this remained throughout the pro- posal that the Poujadists pressed hardest. Delegations from the town, canton and department would compile cahiers de doléances listing the grievances of society; these would be collated by a representative assembly that would pre- sent the government with a comprehensive synthesis of popular demands.14 To the extent that Poujadism had a “philosophy,” it was to be found here, in this rudimentary concept of direct democracy. Representing the three orders of nobility, clergy and Third Estate, the Estates-General in Old Regime France had not met since 1614 when it was convoked on the eve of the Rev- olution. For all its impracticability, the call for an Estates-General in the mid- 1950s evoked the defense of les petits against les gros, the provincial against the strong centralized state, and drew on a French popular mythology bound up with the Revolution of 1789. As a political institution, it was woefully inadequate; as a symbol, it carried a powerful emotive appeal to a “peuple “Poujadism Fifty Years On” but: An Enigma Still 39 souverain” invited by Poujade to breathe again the “souffle généreux, sacré, de ‘89.”15 “Sortez les Sortants!” Within two years of its launch, the UDCA had gained substantial representa- tion on professional bodies such as the Chambres de Commerce et d’Industrie and the Chambres des Métiers. It had organizational structures in most departments of France and in Algeria, had established a cadre school, claimed a membership of over 350,000, and ran newspapers (monthly, weekly, then daily) with subscriptions that would reportedly reach 435,000.16 The proceeds were used in part to buy back and return to tax offenders property confiscated and sold at auction. A series of rallies attracted huge crowds, most notably at the Porte de Versailles in Paris in January 1955, where over 100,000 support- ers from across France heard Poujade call for “l’égalité entre commerçants et artisans et les autres classes de la nation”—in concrete terms, an end to tax concessions for larger concerns, equal social security rights with the rising class of urban salariés, and an amnesty for those charged, under emergency legislation, with obstructing tax audits.

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