A cry of anger from the back of beyond

by Richard Pooley

Pierre Poujade

The death last month of Shaw Sheet, the magazine I used to write for, made me review some of the 89 articles I contributed to it. One that I have never forgotten is republished below. I was living in France at the time - 26 January 2017. The British had voted to leave the European Union seven months earlier. Donald Trump had become President of the USA six days before. In France, a relative unknown, Emmanuel Macron, had declared his candidacy for the French presidency two months earlier. On 7 May 2017 Macron easily defeated Marine Le Pen of the extreme right-wing National Front to become President of France.

Being a 'Centrist Dad' I am an avid listener to the UK podcast The Rest is Politics, presented by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart (and its US version, presented by Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci). I was recently surprised to hear one of them (probably Campbell) mention Poujadism, the French populist movement created by Pierre Poujade in the early 1950s. I thought it and he had been forgotten. Even by the French. Not so, as I have discovered while travelling with my wife over the past ten days along the Côte d'Azur and then inland to my house in the Lot . One of the French people we stayed with was the banker I mention in the article's first paragraph (she now lives in Nice). We met the farmer in that same paragraph at her stall in our village market only yesterday. And so, back to January 2017...

When my wife and I first arrived in France in 2013, we rented a house on the southern edge of Brive-la-Gaillarde for seven months.  Friends in other parts of France, let alone those in the UK, had difficulty locating Brive.  Some still do.  When we told a French banker living in Lille that Brive is a town of 47,000 people two and half hours on the motorway north of Toulouse and three hours east of Bordeaux, her instant response was “Mais, c’est au bout du monde.”  On our first trip with our Neighbourhood Association in Brive we visited une ferme en agriculture biologique on the northern edge of the upper Dordogne valley, 40 kilometres south-east of Brive.  As we wended our way down to the farm one of the Brivistes exclaimed with some alarm “Oh, là, là! C’est au bout du monde.”  In October of that year we moved into a house in a village only 8 kilometres from that farm. We continue to live happily at “the end of the world” or – a better translation – in the back of beyond (and, yes, the French do continue to say Oh,là, là!).

I was thus surprised to discover a few months ago that this rural area of slightly run-down yet still beautiful villages and small towns in the foothills of the Auvergne was the birthplace of a populist political movement whose name is still used to abuse modern-day politicians of the Right.  And not just in France. Poujadist was one of those political labels I heard in my youth but was too lazy to find out what it meant.  It was just another boo-word like fascist.  Denis Healey accused Margaret Thatcher of being a “piggy-bank Poujadist” but I doubt if many British people understood what he meant. I certainly didn’t. Nigel Farage has been similarly labelled a British Pierre Poujade, although even the slightest knowledge of the two men would dispel any idea that they have much in common. Here in France, Poujadisme is part of the political lexicon. A Poujadist is someone who hates big business, intellectuals, immigrants, big government, the Parisian political class and elites of any kind, and who regards the self-employed and the shopkeepers, tradespeople and peasants of rural and small-town France as the embodiments of French values. The word is undergoing a revival.  Marine Le Pen and her Front National party have long been labelled as essentially Poujadiste.  And French commentators are even comparing Trumpisme with Poujadisme.  Yet not one French person I have asked seems to know much about Poujade himself and he appears to have been forgotten even in his birthplace.

So, who was Pierre Poujade?  He was born in 1920 in St-Céré, a small market town on a tributary of the Dordogne River (and a twenty-minute drive from our village). For much of its existence St-Céré was a prosperous entrepôt between the mountains to the east and the lush valley to the west.  But in 1921 the population had dropped from over 5000 a century earlier to just 2900.  People had left for the cities and large industrial and mining areas in search of jobs.  The death of so many young men in World War One had also hastened the closure of local factories and workshops.  Poujade was the seventh child of an impoverished builder, who died when Pierre was seven.  He had hoped to continue his education at a religious college in nearby Aurillac but his mother could not afford the fees.  He did various jobs – working as an apprentice typesetter, a road mender, a docker and a grape picker.  It was at this time he showed where his political sympathies lay; he was a member of the nationalist Parti Populaire Français led by the fascist Jacques Doriot.  He joined the French air force in 1939 but was discharged because of illness.  After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, St-Céré was within the part of the country governed by Marshal Pétain, who Poujade supported.  But when the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942, he fled south, ending up in Algiers where he rejoined the French air force only to become ill again.  In 1944, he married a nurse he had met in hospital.  He ended the war in England where he had managed to join the Free French air force and stay healthy.

He returned to St-Céré, first working as a commercial traveller selling books before setting up his own book and stationery shop in 1948.  He became a Gaullist town councillor.  But then in 1952, in a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences, the French government offered a tax amnesty to those who had spirited their black-market money abroad.  Free of investigating this form of tax evasion, French tax inspectors concentrated their efforts on checking the tax returns of a much easier and larger target – shopkeepers, tradespeople and small farmers.  Half the French population was self-employed at this time, compared with 5% in the UK.  In St-Céré, for example, there was a shop for every three families.  Reports began to appear in newspapers of shops and small businesses across France closing down or going bankrupt, and even of people committing suicide.

On 21 July 1953 a Communist fellow councillor warned Poujade that two tax inspectors were due to arrive the next day.  An emergency meeting of shopkeepers was called.  They decided to refuse to be inspected, to complete any tax return or to pay any tax.  On 22 July, twenty-three shopkeepers barricaded their shops and eventually chased the two tax inspectors out of town.  Within weeks similar tax strikes were recorded in sixty French départements.   Poujade was behind many of them.   He founded the Union de Défense des Commerçants et des Artisans (UDCA) and toured southern France in his van talking to the contacts he had made as a travelling salesman.  He also recruited truck-drivers to spread his message across the country.  By 1955 the UDCA claimed it had 400,000 members, whose subscriptions financed both a daily and a weekly newspaper.  In January 1955 Poujade spoke to a rally of 100,000 people in Paris and threatened to launch a nation-wide tax strike.  He also set up a political party, Union et Fraternité Française (UFF)

What was Poujade’s message? This is from a UFF poster in the January 1956 general election, in which the UFF won 11.5% of the vote and 52 seats in the Assembly:

“If you are against being strangled by taxes, against the exploitation of man by man – Arise! against the monopolies, owing allegiance to no nation, who ruin you and reduce you to subjection.  Against the electoral monopolies who cheat you with your votes.  Against the gang of exploiters who live from your labour and your savings.  Rebel!  Like you, we want justice: fiscal justice for the taxpayers, social justice for the workers.”

But the language of his speeches and of a book he published were anti-semitic, ultra-nationalist and anti-democratic.  His movement was one of protest. He had few workable solutions.  He soon fell out with his party’s deputies, nearly all of whom were shopkeepers like himself (mostly grocers), tradespeople, farmers, wine-growers and hoteliers.  One of the first to break with him and go his own way was the youngest deputy in the Assembly, the 28 year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen, though he did not form the Front National until 1972.

Poujade became increasingly erratic in his behaviour.  He demanded (and got) an audience with the Pope and opposed the Franco-British-Israeli attempt to take back control of the Suez Canal on the grounds that it was a Jewish plot and designed “to help the Queen of England.”  He still called himself Le p’tit Pierre, defender of the “petits” and the “bonnes gens” but his detractors called him “Poujadolf”.  Soon he was giving his support to De Gaulle once more.  In 1961 he and his supporters got just 2.8% of the votes in Cantonal elections; he and his wife were defeated in St-Céré.  The Poujadist movement did not disappear.  He still spoke often in public and, thanks to his wife’s commercial skills, set up and ran a number of successful firms, many of them linked to his Poujadist network.  In 2000 he expressed approval of the riots in France against fuel taxes.  Shortly before he died in 2003 he campaigned for the development and use of a biofuel based on artichokes – a home-grown alternative to the products of the monopolistic “gros”.

There is an old postcard you can buy on e-bay of Poujade’s shop in St-Céré.  Next time I go I shall see if I can identify exactly where it was.  I know it was in the main street – rue de la République – a road still lined with independent shops, including the opticians we use and a saddler, who will also mend your shoes, cut you a new key and sell you a hat.  There are some empty shops along the street but the tourists who fill the town’s beautiful medieval square and alleyways in the summer keep most of the businesses alive.  Just.  Of Poujade there is no sign.  The history on the town’s website does not mention him.  There is no equivalent of the UK’s blue plaque.  Neither the existing stationer nor the bookshop next door acknowledge their predecessor.  I wonder why.  Is the town ashamed of him? In the brief period when he was a national, even international name, everyone knew where he had come from and who he spoke for.  He really did speak for the ‘left-behind’ and the ‘forgotten men and women’ of France.  Is it because he came from what the elites of France still sniffily call "au bout du monde" that so few remember him here?  The man may be forgotten but Poujadism won’t be.  Especially when any country’s elite decides it does not need to know what is happening to the people in its backs of beyond.