The huge and small historical past of the RPR, a celebration within the service of Jacques Chirac | EUROtoday

Book. It’s a bygone period. That of a celebration, the Rally for the Republic (RPR), able to bringing collectively almost 100,000 individuals on the Porte de Pantin (Paris nineteenth) in 1977, which had as much as 885,000 members in 1986 and even financed a thriller to its glory, The Night of Risk (Sergio Gobbi, 1986). In this “nanar” towards the backdrop of legislative elections, we meet in entrance of the digicam Bernard Pons (1926-2022), Jacques Toubon, Philippe Séguin (1943-2010) and even Charles Pasqua (1927-2015) in their very own roles.

All these names additionally run via Pierre Manenti’s e-book, The RPR. A sure concept of ​​the proper (Compound pasts, 416 pages, 24 euros), which traces the historical past of this social gathering from its creation, on December 5, 1976, to its dissolution within the UMP (Union for a Presidential Majority), on September 21, 2002. That day, in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), Jacques Chirac didn’t make the journey. The President of the Republic buries his social gathering with out flowers or wreaths, however with a easy video message. It is exactly the historical past of post-Gaullism, which merges with that of “Chiraquism”, that Pierre Manenti, former ministerial cupboard director, is now fascinated about, after having written two books on the barons of Gaullism and Charles Pasqua (already with Passés Composites).

From one chapter to a different, we see Jacques Chirac defending a “French workism”then took a liberal Thatcherite flip within the mid-Nineteen Eighties. The boss is rarely the proper reflection of the social gathering. The RPR has by no means been a monolithic block. A real Spanish inn, it sees the proponents of French-style liberalism (Edouard Balladur, Nicolas Sarkozy), the defenders of a social proper (Philippe Séguin) and self-proclaimed sovereignists, akin to Charles Pasqua, coexisting as finest they’ll.

Workers and bourgeois

Thanks to unpublished sources and greater than fifty interviews, the writer delivers an nearly day-to-day account of a celebration the place yesterday’s buddies are tomorrow’s enemies and vice versa. In the absence of a crucial evaluation of the RPR, this purely political chronicle reveals a Bonapartist proper (extra authoritarian) pressured to come back to phrases with the Orléanist wing (the UDF of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, extra liberal), but additionally being labored by an ideological porosity with the National Front. This is among the classes of the e-book: the query of an alliance with the far proper was already agitating the political places of work of the RPR. Cited right now as a bulwark towards this “union of the rights”, Jacques Chirac has in actual fact wavered on the topic.

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