The French Right and the Working Classes

The European Right has of late been receiving renewed attention from historians. The simple stereotypes have given way to a more sophisticated analysis which attempts to provide a conceptual framework for rightist thought and action, and gives us a better understanding of the role of the Right in the growth of European mass politics and mass democracy in our own century. There is one aspect, however, of the European Right which has not yet received proper attention, namely the extent to which it struck roots among the population generally. Its social structure is usually discussed in terms of marginal farmers, small shopkeepers, self-employed artisans, under-employed professionals, white-collar workers, and underpaid civil servants. These are the classes said to be involved in the counter-revolution, while working class support is assigned only to those industries which depended on government subsidies and tariffs.1 Such an analysis ignores those nations in which the lower classes provided the principal support for what came to be the fascist Right in the twentieth century: the peasants of the Rumanian Iron Guard or the followers of the Hungarian Iron Cross, 41 per cent of whose membership consisted of industrial workers.2 But even in the more highly developed industrial countries of Western Europe the Right did attempt to establish relations with the labour movements, especially the more radical Right which can be called national socialist

Democracy · Economic history · Guard (computer science · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Subsidy · Working class · European Political History Analysis · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History · Law

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