René Rémond

Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques (JEC France in 1943) and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris (presently the International Secretariat of International Young Catholic Students). The author of books on French political, intellectual and religious history, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1998. He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Rémond is the originator of the famous division of French right-wing parties and movement into three different currents, each one of which appeared during a specific phase of French history: Legitimism (counter-revolutionaries), Orléanism, and Bonapartism. Boulangisme, for example, was according to him a type of Bonapartism, as was Gaullism. These he considers as being authoritarian, needing a leader with charisma, and presenting their movements as more "populist" than the others. Legitimism refers to the royalists who refused to accept the French Republic during the 19th century. (The Action Française royalist movement belongs to the Legitimists, who, being marginalized during the 20th century, managed however to take back some influence during the Vichy régime.) Similarly, he classes the National Front (Le Pen's party) in this group. Orléanists he identifies as economic liberals, which characterizes present-day conservative parties. This group presents itself as bourgeois rather than populist.

Rémond died in April 2007 in Paris at the age of 88.

Source: Article "René Rémond" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.