to “go down to the people,” as they put it. They saw the traditions of agrarian communities and village assemblies as possible starting points for building a new society. The idea was that, in Russia, the peasantry would be the force for renewal, fulfilling the role the proletariat was expected to play in the West. This approach, which could be called “top-down populism,” never mobilized the popular masses themselves. Nevertheless, it left a significant legacy, for some of the great figures in Russian anarchism and Marxism took their first steps as militants in that movement.
A decade later, it was in America that a People’s Party, whose supporters were commonly labeled populists, saw the light of day. This movement for the most part mobilized the world of small farmers on the Great Plains who were on the warpath against the big railroad companies and the big banks to which they had become indebted. The movement met with a certain degree of success in the early 1890s, but it never managed to reach a national audience, despite its resonant denunciation of corruption in politics and its call for a more direct democracy. (These themes were beginning to emerge everywhere in the country; they eventually gave rise to the Progressive Movement, which succeeded in developing a whole set of political reforms – the organization of primaries, the possibility of recalling elected officials, the recourse to referendums by popular initiative – that would be implemented in the Western states.) The People’s Party was an authentic popular movement, but it remained confined to a geographically circumscribed agricultural world; it failed to extend its appeal to working-class voters. None of the American populists appears to have been aware, moreover, of the earlier use of the term in Russia.
The word made its third appearance in France in 1929, in an entirely different and completely unrelated context. The “Manifesto of the Populist Novel” published that year was a strictly literary event: in the tradition of the naturalist movement, the manifesto urged French novelists to focus more on depicting popular milieus. Forerunners such as Émile Zola and contemporaries such as Marcel Pagnol and Eugène Dabit were evoked in support of this literary populism. There were no interactions at all between this third “populist” movement and either of its predecessors, nor did any of the three prefigure contemporary uses of the term populism, contrary to what ill-informed references sometimes suggest.
A second type of history allows us to advance in a more suggestive manner in the comprehension of contemporary populism: this is the history of moments or regimes that, without having invoked the label, resonate with our concerns today and make it easier to understand the dynamics of the essential components of populism. I have focused on three of these. First, France’s Second Empire, an exemplary illustration of the way in which the cult of universal suffrage and of referendums (called “plebiscites” at the time) could be linked to the construction of an authoritarian, immediate, and polarized democracy, one that would be qualified as “illiberal” today. What is of interest in the context of the current study is that this regime theorized its project, spelling out the reasons why it viewed the democracy it was establishing as more authentic than the liberal parliamentary model. Next, the Latin American laboratory of the mid-twentieth century, illustrated initially by Colombia’s Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and Argentina’s Juan Perón: these regimes bring clearly to light the conditions for expressing and enacting embodied representation, as well as the mobilizing capacity of the opposition between an oligarchy and the people in societies that were not based on European-style class structures. Finally, going back to the prewar period 1890–1914, we find a good vantage point for observing the rise of populist themes at the point of the first globalization, most notably in France and in the United States: what took place during this period sheds light on the conditions under which political divisions beyond the traditional right/left opposition were redefined. And it also helps us see how the populist wave of the period was brought to a halt. In effect, we are invited to consider a future that did not materialize. While the present always remains to be written, and while it is important to be skeptical of analogies that downplay this fact, the three periods I have evoked nevertheless offer food for thought.
A comprehensive global history of populism defines a third approach, one that might be called inseparably social and conceptual. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the present by considering the past as a repertoire of aborted possibilities, a laboratory of experiments that invite us to reflect on incompletions, reversals, and gropings in the dark. Here we are dealing with a long history of the problematic character of democracy. It is not the history of an ideal model whose germination we would study, thinking that it might one day be fully and completely realized. There is nothing linear about the history of democracy: it is constituted rather by continuous intellectual conflicts over its definition as much as it is marked by intense social struggles around the establishment of certain of its principal institutions (yesterday’s conquest of universal suffrage or today’s recognition of minority rights come to mind). It is a history of unkept promises and mangled ideals in which we remain completely immersed, as is obvious from the intensity of the contemporary disenchantment with democracy and the difficulty of finding the conditions that would allow us to institute an authentic society of equals. This tumultuous history is inseparable from the structural indeterminacy of adequate forms for democracies, given that the appropriate modalities for the exercise of collective sovereignty, the establishment of norms of justice that would allow the construction of a world of equals, and the very definition of “the people” all remain subject to controversy. At the same time, impatience on the part of some and fear on the part of others have led to a constant radicalization of the processes by which both the breaks with the past to be achieved and the gains to be preserved are perceived. In this context, I shall describe populism as a limit case of the democratic project, alongside two other limit cases: those of minimal democracies (democracies reduced to the rights of man and the election of leaders) and essentialist democracies (defined by the institution of a societal authority in charge of building public welfare). Each of the latter two forms, by virtue of its structure and its history, is threatened by a specific mode of degradation: a slide toward elective oligarchies in the case of minimal democracies and a totalitarian turn of power against society in the case of essentialist democracies. When the populist form of democracy that I have characterized as polarized is the basis for a regime, it runs the risk, for its part, of sliding toward democratorship6 – that is, toward an authoritarian power that nevertheless retains a (variable) potential for being overturned.
On critiques of populism
The most common political critique of populism charges it with illiberalism, that is, with a tendency to make the (“societal”) extension of individual rights secondary to the affirmation of collective sovereignty, and a simultaneous tendency to challenge the intermediary bodies accused of thwarting the action of the elected authorities. I myself spoke, some twenty years ago, of “illiberal democracy” with regard to the Second Empire,7 and I have used the term more recently with respect to populist regimes. The term still seems appropriate to me in almost all cases in which it is used to characterize an observable tendency. But I no longer believe that it can serve as an axis around which to build an effective critique (that is, a critique that advances arguments capable of modifying an opposing opinion), for the simple reason that the leading voices of populism explicitly denounce liberal democracy for curtailing and hijacking authentic democracy. Vladimir Putin, a propagandist for a democracy labeled “sovereign,” has asserted forcefully that liberalism has become “obsolete,”8 while Viktor Orbán, for his part, has insisted that “a democracy is not necessarily liberal.”9 Thus it is on the grounds of a democratic critique of populism that the new champions of this ideal need to be interrogated and contested.
Political life is a graveyard of critiques and warnings that have been powerless to change the course of events. I encountered this phenomenon while studying the history of the nineteenth century in France, when I saw, for example, the inability of the republican opposition to Napoleon III to get its arguments across to the French populace as a whole. The French rose up against a regime that they rightly denounced for quashing freedom, but at the same time they were incapable of seeing through the regime’s claim that its recourse to plebiscites served to honor the sovereignty of the people more than its predecessors had.10 In other words, their intelligence
