As a firm believer that
there's nothing new under the sun, I've been racking my brains to come up with
a historical parallel to the sudden rise of Sarah Palin, and I think I've got
one. Ever heard of Pierre Poujade? Few have today. but he was once famous enough
to appear on the cover of TIME magazine and be spoken of as a potential prime
minister of France.
The parallel, like all
such historical analogies, is far from exact, but it may be briefly illuminating.
Poujade was born in the small southern French town of Saint-Céré and had a
decent career in the air force before and during the second world war, when he
made his way via Algeria to London and joined De Gaulle's Free French. In 1953, Poujade,
by then a shopkeeper back in Saint-Céré, fulminated against central government
interference and excessive taxation and organized an anti-tax rally, and the Union
de Défense des Artisans et Commerçants (UDCA) was born. Depression and
discontent were widespread in France at the time, partly due to the draining
sacrifices of the long end of empire in IndoChina and Algeria, much of it left over from the humiliations
and horrors of the second world war, some of it just because of the spectacle of successive unstable governments spinning through a revolving door. The malcontents were
catalyzed by the elevation in 1954 of Pierre Mendès-France to the office of
prime minister: the fact that Mendès-France was Jewish, a liberal, and (especially)
a teetotaller made him utterly unacceptable to the Poujadists, who comprised
the same kind of right-wing marginalized underclass as do the Palinists today.
Harvesting the discontent with the status quo, they won 52 seats in the
National Assembly in the 1956 elections, routed Mendès-France, and overnight turned
Poujade into an leader of the
"petit français moyen"
(little average Frenchman). He railed against socialism, decadence, and
modernization, and sought an impossible return to the France of rural values,
small industries, religion, and agriculture: a nostalgia oddly similar to the vision of Marshal
Pétain...or ex-Governor Palin.
Poujade's bubble burst in
1958, with the return of Charles De Gaulle to French politics and a new dispensation,
under the Fifth Republic, that vested executive power in the office of the
presidency, stabilizing the government and enabling France to prosper. After a
series of ridiculous attempts at self-aggrandizement–seeking audiences with the
Pope, berating De Gaulle for not taking his advice–Poujade faded away, and by
1960 was a has-been. He lived until 2003, but was never heard from again,
except briefly, in 1979, when he ran for the European Parliament (tally: 1% of
the vote). His legacy was ambiguous: on the one hand, he accepted the Fifth
Republic and became more moderate, a genuine democrat, in his old age; on the
other, the upsurge of the UDCA in the '50s probably made it easier for an overt
fascist like Jean-Marie Le Pen to loom large in the political landscape of
France. But if Poujade is remembered for anything, it's for being a flash in
the pan.
Something similar, I think, will befall the beauteous and charming, but ill-informed
and shallow, Mrs. Palin. She came on the scene at a low ebb in the fortunes for
the Republican Party, which at the moment has no rival leader to offer. She embodies
the worries and frustrations of the white lower middle class, who now ascribe
to her the same qualities and charisma the Poujadistes did to Poujade; but when
he reached his zenith, his charisma faded away. He was exposed as the would-be
emperor with no clothes, an agitator from the provinces with no gravitas, tact,
or real leadership ability. Mrs. P. will finish the same way, with the
consolation of a TV or radio show of her own. Meanwhile, she could do worse
than read some recent French history.
