Poujadism

Marine Le Pen's score of 17 per cent was in fact lower than the combined scores of her father and Bruno Megret in 2002, but it nevertheless constituted a triumph for a party which had begun to be dismissed in the 1980s as a political phenomenon that would evaporate as quickly as Poujadism had done in the 1950s.

These brief pieces of social criticism on current affairs, ranging from satirical commentaries on new commodities such as detergents or the fashionable Citroen DS, to more straightforward ideological issues such as his counterattack on the anti-intellectual Poujadism, all denounced the "mystification" of the petty-bourgeois ideology and its pervasive infiltration into the very fabric of the everyday collective unconscious.

Yet if this English poujadism was to enjoy no more than a few residual spasms, the political deployment of popular culture that is central to the book's argument was far from exhausted, to judge from other work in what is emerging as a newly conceived history of political cultures.