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Pierre Poujade's instrument is not reason but resentment, not plans but protest. It is the resentment of the provincial against sophisticated Paris, of poverty against the prosperous, of nationalism against the crumbling of empire, of common man against politicians. He raised the ancient French rallying cry, "We are betrayed." He called the Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris." called the Deputies "piles of ordure," "pederasts" and "phonies." "The empire is destroyed," he cried, and demanded hanging for the "traitors" who were responsible.
The Ordinary Frenchman. Pierre Poujade looks like a peasant and makes the most of it. He avoids ties in favor of turtleneck sweaters or open-throat shirts. His shoes are often unshined, his pants unpressed, his nails dirty, his light beard unshaven. He prefers his country red wine to champagne, the kitchen to the living room, and he drinks his soup from his plate. He boasts that he has no book learning. "Why should I study books? I know more already than the people who wrote them." He tells crowds: "I'm just le petit Poujade, an ordinary Frenchman like you."
On the platform he mocks politicians with a peasant's shrewdness, mocks Paris with a provincial's scorn, mocks himself with rough humor. "We have been too long on all fours." he shouts. "That way we were perfectly placed to get kicked." He brags. Puffing up a paper bag, he bursts it with a bang, and explains: "If I did that in the Assembly, six or seven Deputies would be trampled to death in the stampede for safety." Once, returning from Paris lugging two huge suitcases, he quipped: "It's nothing much—just a couple of Cabinet ministers cut up in little pieces."
The Nondescript. If Pierre Poujade belongs in the category of demagogues or dictators, he is a strange specimen. He exudes none of the magniloquence of a Mussolini, the cold power of a Stalin, the megalomania of a Hitler. Instead, there is an engaging air of café table simplicity about him. Even his features are nondescript and the despair of caricaturists. "Look me in the eyes, and you will see yourself," he cries to his listeners.
It is true, and it is a big truth. But Poujade speaks for a France which is not the tourist France, the country of the arts and graces and gaiety, the France that was once the world's greatest power. Poujade's France is the France of the baked-dirt squares where men play boules on summer evenings, the France of old ladies in black sitting in overstuffed rooms shuttered against the summer sun, of peasants in faded blue work clothes, of the little stores tended by the middleaged women shuffling out of the backrooms. It is a France which distrusts Paris and its frivolities and its politicians and its intellectuals and its big modern businesses.
It is the bourgeois' France, which won its birthright in the Revolution and has been hanging on to it grimly ever since. It is the France which widened the streets of Paris to discourage new revolutions, set up guilds to prevent overproduction, equated smallness with self-sufficiency, and self-sufficiency with independence. Generations of French children were brought up on the adage: my glass is small, but it is my own.