At a moment when Emmanuel Macron uses the term “populist” to discredit his opponents from both the right and left, and when mainstream political analysis indiscriminately attacks the National Rally and France Unbowed under the same opprobrium, historian Marc Lazar proposes a French genealogy that radically shifts the debate. His work For the Love of the People reveals that far from being a democratic pathology, populism would be consubstantial with French representative democracy since the Boulangism of the late nineteenth century. This historical reading stands in direct opposition to the contemporary pathologization of the phenomenon.

The Author

Marc Lazar is professor emeritus of universities in history and political sociology at Sciences Po, where he chaired the Center for History and headed the history department. A specialist in the history of the left and Italian politics, he has devoted a significant part of his academic career to French and Italian communist parties, notably with a thesis on “PCF, Intellectuals and the Working Class: The Example of the Miner from Liberation to the Mid-Nineteen Fifties.” His trajectory as a researcher has naturally led him to question contemporary mutations in democracy: after co-writing Populocracy (2019) with Ilvo Diamanti, he has observed since the 1980s “the rise of populists that is inscribed in the long term and at the deepest level of our societies.”

The Central Thesis: Populism as DNA of French Representative Democracy

Lazar’s thesis cuts against dominant moralizing approaches. For Lazar, “populism, inherent to representative democracy, is a tendency, even a temptation, that affects all political leaders.” He categorically refuses “to judge populisms, to describe their contours as a ‘disease’ or to remain within a strictly theoretical approach.”

The historian formulates his central question thus: “Is populism in France inherent, let us dare say the word, consubstantial with representative democracy as different Republics have instituted it, or does it form its radical antithesis?” His answer is unequivocal: French populism is not the enemy of democracy; it constitutes one of its historical modalities of expression.

This conception shifts the debate from the moral terrain to that of historical analysis. Lazar writes that “populism is part of French political culture like stagnant magma on a volcano” and constitutes “a constant in the history of French democracy.” Far from being a recent accident, there have been historical moments, “bouts of fever,” such as Boulangism or Poujadism.

The French Laboratory: From Boulangism to Neo-populisms

The Boulangist Matrix (1887-1889)

Lazar locates the first manifestation of French populism with Boulangism at the end of the nineteenth century. Boulangism uses “populist rhetoric” with its slogans “Dissolution, revision, constituent assembly” and incessant appeals to the people. Boulanger denounces oligarchies, corruption, exalts popular sovereignty and national greatness.

This Boulangist matrix establishes the central and permanent element of populism: “the vision of a society that divides into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, the ‘pure’ people and the ‘corrupt’ elite, and which simultaneously affirms that politics should be the expression of the ‘general will.’” Marine Le Pen “inscribes herself in a Boulangist heritage, fusing people and nation in a renewed definition of national and popular sovereignty.”

The Analytical Framework: Three Cumulative Criteria

The historian proposes an operational definition of French populism around three dimensions. First element: “a form of ideology” that “revolves around an opposition that would exist between the people, virtuous, and a minority elite, corrupt and dominant.” Second element: “a form of strategy, which is precisely organized to seize or manage power.” Third element: “a form of social expression” that constitutes “a kind of insurrection of low culture against what would be high culture.”

The presence of two of these traits suffices to conclude an “integral populism”: “Boulangism, most of the Leagues of the nineteen-thirties, Dorgérism, Poujadism, the Maoists of the nineteen-sixties, the National Front, the National Rally, Éric Zemmour and France Unbowed.”

The Fifth Republic as “Populism Accelerator”

Lazar’s analysis reveals a striking institutional paradox. The Fifth Republic, “founded by Charles de Gaulle, had been designed as a response to persistent distrust of political representatives. The French Constitution encourages direct communication with the people, but this construction has also served as an accelerator for populism. ‘Everything gradually tipped starting from the nineteen-seventies-nineteen-eighties, up to the current situation where the Fifth Republic serves as an accelerator for populism.’”

This analysis illuminates the argument that “the representative system of the Fifth Republic widens the gap between executive power and the voice of the people.”

The Two Irreducible French Populisms

Right-wing Populism: The People-Nation

At the far right, “recourse to the people-one reclaims the archetypes of Boulangism and the leagues, adapting them to the contemporary. With Jean-Marie Le Pen, first, the denunciation of the establishment, of the ‘gang of four’ (PCF/PS/UDF/RPR), recurring antisemitism and xenophobia exalt an originary and immemorial people.”

Contemporary “right-wing populists” “present themselves as democrats, affirming respect above all for the ‘will of the people’; while supporting the existence of a People-One holding sovereignty, they maintain that it is ‘good by essence.’”

Left-wing Populism: The Multiethnic Social People

The historian sees in France Unbowed “the new flowering of left-wing populism.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, “following the analyses of Laclau and Mouffe, adapts Latin American experiences to the French situation” after a “turning point in 2012.”

From 2019 on, Mélenchon “addressed himself especially to populations living in the suburbs. He understands that there is a reservoir of votes in particular in parts of the peripheries, radicalized youth, very often of immigrant origin.” He draws inspiration from postcolonial research to defend a “conception of the people that is mixed, creolized, radicalized.”

This distinction reveals the central issue: “What is meant by ‘people’? A population linked by shared history and common destiny, understood in all its social diversity and plurality of opinions? The ‘real people,’ the silent majority, the proletariat, the rank-and-file, those at the bottom despised by those at the top who govern us?”

The Blind Spots of a Generous Analysis

While Lazar succeeds in historicizing French populism and breaking with the lazy equivalence between right-wing and left-wing populisms, his approach presents some analytical limitations.

First, his extensive definition of populism sometimes borders on conceptual inflation. Marc Lazar insists: it is “difficult to define,” at once “unitary and diversified, extremely difficult to pin down,” because there is “no pure populism.” It follows that “the search for a pure distillate of populism proves vain”: it is always “hybrid” and “mutating.” As the critic for La Vie des idées observes, “such a catalog leads one to question the heuristic pertinence of the concept” when it includes Maoists, Bernard Tapie, the Yellow Vests and even “the populist temptations” of Emmanuel Macron.

Next, the historian remains cautiously descriptive on the concrete effects of populism on democratic institutions. He notes that “in France, we have not yet had the experience of power management by populist formations,” unlike “in Hungary and Italy currently.” This absence of governmental experience limits the evaluation of real institutional risks.

Finally, Lazar perhaps too quickly sidesteps the question of the boundary between populism and fascism. Certainly, he carefully distinguishes fascism and populism “because of a strong racist ideology and the thesis of a ‘total State’ characteristic of fascism.” But does this theoretical distinction always hold up against the test of contemporary radicalisms? The analysis of Zemmour or the hardest fringes of the RN perhaps merits a tighter discussion.

Why Read It

This book is addressed to all those who want to move beyond current anathemas on populism. Historians, political scientists, journalists and citizens will find a sophisticated analytical framework to decipher contemporary democratic tensions.

Lazar’s principal contribution lies in his capacity to de-ideologize the analysis of French populism. Where other recent works merely content themselves with analyzing populism as a symptom of capitalism’s crisis, Lazar demonstrates that it constitutes a recurring modality of democratic expression in France for the past 150 years.

His genealogical approach makes it possible to understand why in the last presidential election of 2022, “the three candidates considered as belonging to this type of political formation, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Éric Zemmour, totaled 52% of the vote.” This performance is neither an accident nor a pathology: it reveals the contemporary expression of a tension constitutive of our representative democracy.

The book also offers valuable tools for distinguishing populisms from one another. Contrary to mainstream analyses that conflate the RN and LFI, Lazar reveals two irreducible conceptions of the people: the homogeneous people-nation on one side, the mixed social people on the other. This distinction illuminates contemporary geopolitical stakes, notably in the face of the rise of authoritarianisms in the world.

Bibliographic Information

  • Title: For the Love of the People: History of Populism in France, 19th-21st Century
  • Author: Marc Lazar
  • Publisher: Gallimard (NRF Essays collection)
  • Publication Date: October 30, 2025
  • Pages: 307 pages (some sources mention 320 pages)
  • ISBN: 9782070141975