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should not be left in the coulisses. Accordingly it was one of the central political traditionsanalysed by Sudhir Hazareesingh in his excellent survey which still deserves to be read alongsidethe present collection.2

The weaknesses of Hewlett's work are fewer, but as Anne Stevens says on the dustjacket, 'itis good to have a distinctive voice propounding a consistent viewpoint around which debate anddiscussion can be structured.' I would offer three possible contributions to the debate. The firstconcerns the sharp caesura between conflictual politics before 1981 and consensual politicsthereafter. To support his analysis Hewlett quotes Serge Berstein's contention that there have onlybeen two periods of political consensus between 1789 and the present: 1905 to 1929, and 1975 tothe present. Against this it could be argued that the politicians of the Third and Forth Republicswere past masters in the art of coalition and compromise, that all Bonopartist regimes drifted fromauthoritarianism to liberalism (and on p. 128 Hewlett describes de Gaulle's rule as 'far more akinto modern liberal democracy than the regimes of either of the real Bonapartes in French history'),and that the French have been as good at stopping revolutions as at starting them, citing 1830,1848, 1906, 1936, 1944 and 1968. Second, Hewlett concedes that the exceptionalism of Frenchhistory, which seems obvious when compared to the liberal democracies of north-west Europe, isless clear when set alongside the turbulent democracies of southern Europe, characterised bypolitical instability, corruption, the presence of large communist parties and the retention of powerby socialist parties for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly, Hewlett is keen to highlight 1981 asthe key moment in consensus-building and the Socialist Party as the bearer of political consensusin France, while bemoaning that the social démocratisation of the PS now bodes ill for socialjustice. This leads to a reluctance to consider that it takes two to tango, and that fromChaban-Delmas and Giscard d'Estaing onward the Right had a part to play in the politics ofconsensus. It also leads Hewlett to reflect that after the 'U-turn' of the PS in 1982-1983 thesocialism that is moved by inequality, deprivation and minority rights will be fostered not bysocialist parties themselves, either in France or elsewhere, but by 'social movements and struggles'in which he has great confidence, telling us categorically that the working class is far from dead.Nick Hewlett is a critical and courageous thinker who is only two well aware that 'to write andspeak without excessive regard to hostile responses has always been at one and the same time aprivilege and a most uncomfortable experience' (p. 213). Provocation and debate there willcertainly be, but at least students of modern French politics will henceforth have to addressthemselves to 'the Hewlett thesis'.

Notes and references1. NORA, P., Les Lieux de mémoire (Gallimard, 1984-1992).2. HAZAREESINGH, S., Political Traditions in Modem France (Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 3.

La droite la plus bête du monde?ANDY KNAPPUniversity of Reading

Branca, E., Le Roman de la droite, 1974-1998: Chronique d'un échec (Lattès 1998), 393 pp.129F. ISBN 2 7096 1878 8.

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Hecht, E. and Mandonnet, E., Au Cœur du RPR: Enquête sue le parti du président (Flam-marion, 1998), 270 pp., 130F. ISBN 2 08 067384 X

Zemmour, E., Le Livre noir de la droite (Grasset, 1998), 303 pp., 128F. ISBN 2 246 56251 1

By July 1995, France's mainstream Right had achieved a degree of institutional dominancewithout precedent under the Fifth Republic. Not only did a Gaullist occupy the presidency, andpreside over a Gaullist-led government supported by a Gaullist-led majority coalition, as in thedays of the General himself, the Gaullists of the RPR and their allies of the UDF alsocontrolled the Senate, 20 out of 22 mainland French regions, three-quarters of the 96 mainlanddépartements, and most of France's big cities, including Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, andToulouse. Three years later, the parliamentary majority, and thus the Gaullist-led government,had been swept away after Chirac's ill-advised dissolution of 1997; six regional presidencieswere lost, and another four preserved only through shameful local alliances with the far-rightFront national (FN); the Right's control over Paris was threatened by City Hall scandals; theRPR was ravaged by the 1997 election defeat and the subsequent power struggles between thenew party president, Philippe Séguin, and the party's real but damaged leader Jacques Chirac;and the UDF had split apart over the question of relations with the FN.

For Branca and Zemmour, right-wing journalists both (Zemmour, who is author of a hostilestudy of Balladur, on Le Figaro, Branca on Valeurs actuelles), the causes of this disarray lie inthe mainstream Right's long-term betrayal of its ideals. The Right, they argue, has lost its ownvoters by raising taxes, by capitulating to the Left's cultural agenda, by failing to deliver on itspromises of a fiercer anti-crime policy, of effective immigration controls, or of a radical reformof the droit du sol, by accepting the loss of national sovereignty to Europe. To the injury ofthese policy betrayals was added the insult of a futile and destructive guerre des chefs. Hencethe rise of the FN, 'le fruit monstrueux des revirements et des abandons chiraquiens' (Zem-mour), which has condemned the mainstream Right to defeat in the past and may destroy it inthe future: for a political formation at the centre of what tends to be a bipolarised party systemis constantly vulnerable to being squeezed out of the system altogether.

Both Branca and Zemmour score some palpable hits. Both note the great drawback of theRPR-UDF alliance strategy: right-wing voters have neither a single broad-church party, nor achoice between competitors. Treated to continuous warfare between and within the RPR and thenon-Gaullist Right, they are denied the opportunity to choose between the two parties' candi-dates, and offered a single electoral platform amounting to a lowest common denominatorbetween Gaullist and centrist policy preferences. To this Zemmour adds that the RPR's behav-iour from 1981-1984 might have been calculated to promote the FN: a ferocious campaignagainst the victorious Union of the Left, incorporating the theme of immigration, and then, inthe name of right-wing unity, the dutiful adherence to an impeccably moderate list for the 1984European elections, led by the hard Right's bête noire Simone Veil. But both books are badlyflawed, in two ways. First, their view that France has 'never really had a right-wing govern-ment' since... 1974, or 1968, or even 1945, is merely an old song of the far Right and itsfriends: Millon today, Drieu la Rochelle ('cette vieille France de droite, tout usée par lalongue soumission au préjugés de gauche') in 1941. Indeed, while both authors claim to regretthe rise of the FN, it is hard to see why, given their detestation of the Left and most of themainstream Right. Second, both books too frequently substitute the identification of personalculprits for an analytical explanation of the Right's troubles: Giscard was too trendy, Balladurand Juppé too technocratic, Pasqua and Séguin too irresolute (notably during the Maastrichtreferendum campaign), Chirac too ready to sacrifice principle to expediency: the alliance withthe UDF after 1981, good relations with Kohl in 1992 or 1995. Neither author asks seriously

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whether the Thatcherite agenda they implicitly propose—'zero immigration', an authoritariansocial policy, the free market, plus a reversal of the process of European integration—wouldmake the mainstream Right any more electable than at present. Even in economically 'liberal',Eurosceptical Britain, the contradictions of that agenda ultimately cost Mrs Thatcher herjob.

While similar in general outlook, Branca and Zemmour offer rather different books.Branca's approach is broadly chronological, and he includes some basic election figures in anappendix; but the narrative is too frequently subjected to the claims of his tendentious argu-ment to be at all comprehensive. Zemmour, on the other hand, is more openly polemical. Hisrogues' gallery includes Pompidou, whose softness in May 1968 and preoccupation with econ-omic growth replaced De Gaulle's salutary 'national-asceticism' with the 'global hedonism' towhich France has been victim ever since. Zemmour includes a splendidly nasty portrait of theformer 'cadets de la droite' in general ('une génération qui refusa de vieillir, et même dedevenir adulte'), and of François Léotard in particular ('celui qui a vécu par l'image périra parl'image'). He adds, for good measure, a swipe at Poniatowski (whom he accuses of leakingdiscussions in the Conseil des ministres to the OAS in the early 1960s, when he was Gis-gard's directeur de cabinet), and at Mitterrand's relations with the far Right (and notably atthe funding of his early election campaigns by René Bousquet). In the end, Zemmour's morecorrosive pen produces the better book of the two.

Hecht and Mandonnet provide something more useful than either of the above: a detailedenquiry into the crisis in the RPR between 1995 and 1998. Unusually among such journalisticworks, Au Cœur du RPR is the product of research outside as well as inside the Parisianmicrocosm. This pays off. Nothing demonstrates the gulf between the party leadership and therank-and-file activists, and thence the demobilisation of the RPR, so well as a visit to a comitédépartemental meeting held after the 1997 defeat. The interconnectedness of the RPR'sdifficulties is illustrated by the case of an RPR candidate at the Vitrolles municipal by-election, expelled for calling for an FN vote at the run-off and now bitter that the expulsionorder had originated with one of the RPR's many 'affairistes de tout poil', Jean-FrançoisMancel, the secretary-general indicted for personal corruption in his département of the Oise.Mancel's own complex case is taken up later by Hecht and Mandonnet: his own expulsion bySéguin in March 1998 after he had himself called for local alliances with the FN, was precededby a period when he had unsuccessfully pleaded for a much more aggressive line against thefar Right. Hecht and Mandonnet are also good on the convergences between the RPR and theFN, noting how the FN had dug up and used elements of the RPR-UDF programme of 1986to justify its calls for 'national preference' in the attribution of family allowances. At the topof the party, they show how Chirac lost control of the RPR apparatus in the aftermath of the1997 defeat, and how he slowly began to regain it from the following autumn. Especiallyimportant for this come-back was the election as president of the parliamentary group ofJean-Louis Debré, a figure of fun outside the RPR but one enjoying widespread respect withinit. They also demonstrate how Chirac's efforts to 'mark', isolate, and immobilise Séguin, afterthe latter's elevation to the party leadership in June 1997, helped to restore Chirac's ownleadership on the Right, but at the cost of demobilising his party.

The attraction of these books, then, is in almost inverse proportion to their scope. Branca'sand Zemmour's work is of interest less as a reliable account of events (though there areenlightening parts in both books) than as an indication of the ambiguous attitude towards themainstream Right and the FN prevalent in certain Parisian salles de rédaction. Hecht and Man-donnet, on the other hand, transcend their limited field of enquiry. They have given us a top-to-bottom slice of life in the RPR that deserves to be read, and kept, by anyone interested not onlyin the current problems of the French Right, but in the workings of French parties in general.