Pierre Poujade and Margaret Thatcher

Poujadism was a movement of small businessmen founded to protest against sales tax in southern France. It began life in the summer of 1953 when Pierre Poujade founded the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans (UDCA) in the small town of St Cere, and by January 1956 it was sufficiently important to gain fifty-two seats in parliament. Few people now remember the precise details of Poujadism's history, but the word Poujadist enjoyed a second lease of life during the 1980s as a term of general political abuse. A journalist wrote a book on La France Poujadiste in which almost every disagreeable feature of French public life was described as a symptom of Poujadism. In England the word has been used repeatedly with reference to one politician: Margaret Thatcher. Denis Healey described the then prime minister as a 'piggy bank Poujadist' while the historian Ross Mckibbin described her as a 'neo-Poujadist'; Dr Mckibbin has apparently spent many hours in his study reflecting on the differences between Poujadism and neo-Poujadism.