René Rémond

Biography

His grandfather, Émile Rémond, was a stationmaster and employee of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway company. . His father, Paul Rémond, born in 1893 in Corgoloin, died in 1973 in Paris, was an industrial draftsman who became an engineer and then a business owner. He was exempted from military service during the First World War due to tuberculosis. In 1917, he married Cécile Godbillion, a music teacher, in Paris.

Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques (JEC France in 1943) and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris (presently the International Secretariat of International Young Catholic Students). The author of books on French political, intellectual and religious history, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1998. He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Rémond is the originator of the famous division of French right-wing parties and movement into three different currents, each one of which appeared at a specific phase of French history: Legitimism (counter-revolutionaries), Orléanism, and Bonapartism. Boulangisme, for example, was according to him a type of the Bonapartism, as was the Gaullism. These he considers as being a authoritarian, needing a leader with charisma, and presenting their movements as more "populist" than the others. Legitimism refers to the royalists who refused to accept the legitimacy of the French Republic during the 19th century. (The Action Française royalist movement belongs to the Legitimists, who, being marginalized during the 20th century, managed however to take back some influence during the Vichy régime.) Similarly, he classed the National Front (Le Pen's party) in this group. Orléanists he identifies as economic liberals, which characterizes present-day conservative parties. This group presents itself as bourgeois rather than populist.

Rémond died in April 2007 in Paris at the age of 88.