Pierre Poujade Dies at 82; Rallied France's Rightists

Published: August 29, 2003

Pierre Poujade, a French shopkeeper whose antigovernment protest movement in the 1950's opened a political career for the rightist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, died on Wednesday at his home in La Bastide-l'Évêque, in southwest France. He was 82.

His movement, which became known as Poujadisme, began in 1953 as a shopkeepers' revolt against taxes, but it grew rapidly, claiming as many as 800,000 members by the 1956 elections, when it won more than 2.5 million votes and 52 of 595 seats in the National Assembly. One of its deputies was Mr. Le Pen, now the leader of the National Front, who was just 28 at the time.

After Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, Poujadisme faded and Mr. Poujade himself largely disappeared from public life. Yet to this day, the term Poujadisme is used here to represent a kind of middle-class provincial nationalism with undertones of anti-Semitism.

Mr. Le Pen, who later fell out with Mr. Poujade, was among few public figures to pay homage to his former mentor today. ''With Pierre Poujade, we lose a leader who embodied the struggle of the middle classes against bureaucracy and taxes and, more generally, against the decadence of France represented by the crumbling Fourth Republic,'' he said in a statement.

Mr. Poujade, who was born Dec. 1, 1920, in St.-Céré, in southwest France, escaped occupied France in 1942 for North Africa, where he married Yvette Seva, with whom he had five children. The next year he reached Britain and joined the Royal Air Force. After the war, he returned to St.-Céré and opened a book-and-stationery store. It was there that he first led local shopkeepers' in a protest against taxes.

The movement, officially called the Union for the Defense of Tradesmen and Artisans, won tax concessions from the government, but it soon also campaigned vociferously against Algeria's demand for independence, which was eventually granted by France in 1962. Among his critics, Mr. Poujade's undisguised dislike of French Jewish politicians earned him the nickname of ''Poujadolf,'' in reference to Adolf Hitler. His own campaign slogan was: ''I Have Chosen Combat.''

After his movement lost all its parliamentary seats in 1958, Mr. Poujade remained a municipal councillor in St.-Céré. Later in life he led a national confederation of nonunionized workers, and in 1979 and 1984 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the European Parliament. In 1984, President François Mitterrand named him to the government's Economic and Social Council, where he focused on promoting agricultural sources of fuel.

His own political views also moderated. From 1965, when he backed de Gaulle, to 1995, when he supported Jacques Chirac, he said, he voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election. Significantly, he said, he never voted for Mr. Le Pen.