>Eventually, agricultural producers will link into communes across
>national boundaries (it's already happened) but under any economic regime,
>the small family farm is a thing of the past and rightly so. It's an
>unreasonably tough way to make a living in a modern world. There's nothing
>good about small-scale, low-tech farming.
Speaking of which, meant to post this when it first appeared. Is the connection between Poujade and Bove really like the obit writer says?
Doug
----
Financial Times - August 28, 2003
French defender of the underdog By Robert Graham
Pierre Poujade, who gave his name to a new brand of populism in France by defending the interests of the small shopkeeper, has died aged 82.
Although he had long vanished from the political scene, the legacy of poujadisme has continued to cast a long shadow in France. Poujadisme has come to define the attitudes of those who champion the often-forgotten rights of "the small man" against the dominance of the powerful.
It has found significant echoes in both the stance of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme rightwing National Front, and the support base for Jose Bové, the anti-globalisation activist and leader of the radical small farmers' organisation.
Even the political signature of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the premier, reaching out to la France en bas - the ordinary people in France whose lives the politicians so often ignore - incorporates the appeal of poujadisme.
Mr Poujade's successful resort to violent protest, rooted in France's revolutionary traditions, paved the way for others to follow suit, notably the farmers.
This has meant that even today the authorities retain an ambivalent attitude towards such actions, alternating tough repression with tolerance based on the fear of alienating well-organised interest groups.
Forced to take an assortment of jobs by the early death of his architect father, Mr Poujade rose to prominence in 1953 founding the UDCA (Union de Défense des Commercants et Artisans), a movement to protest against the taxes imposed on small shopkeepers.
From his rural home town in Saint-Céré in south-west France, his fiery rhetoric against the establishment and "the vampire state" carried a message that spread fast. Within a year the UDCA had 500,000 members.
In the 1956 parliamentary elections the UDCA gained 56 seats, one of which was won by the young Mr Le Pen. Though the two men quickly fell out, Mr Le Pen yesterday paid him a warm tribute.
Mr Poujade's movement thrived in the demoralised confusion of the Fourth Republic's final years as political leaders tried to cope with the humiliating loss of French Indochina and hold on to colonial Algeria.
But he was eclipsed by the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the installation of Charles de Gaulle's authoritarian regime, which he supported. Thereafter his political star waned with two unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the European parliament, the last in 1984.
To the end he claimed to be on the side of "the little people, the downtrodden, the exploited, the humiliated who live on thrice nothing".
Robert Graham