Conservation, revolution and protest: A case study in the political cultures of the French National Front's members and sympathizers

Abstract

This paper deals with the political cultures of the National Front's grassroots sympathizers and members in the Département of Isère. The qualitative and quantitative data analysis shows several lines of organisation in far-right sympathizers' symbolical systems and brings coherent sets of representations to light. Three main registers of ideological adhesion are drawn out of the corpus. They may be identified with the themes of ‘social conservation’, ‘protest’ and ‘revolution’ and reveal the heterogeneity of National Front sympathizers and members' ideological profiles. Furthermore, the detailed study differentiates six specific cultural types with their own characteristics: ‘protesting heterodoxy’, ‘radicalized popular right-wing’, ‘familial-centrism’, ‘radical extreme right-wing’, ‘classical neovichysm’ and ‘neovichysm impregnated by fascism’. The study of far-right subjects' social representations allow us to outline some symbolical universes common to all interviewees. This general view transcends the main patterns emphasized above and covers three major areas: the denial of the whole ‘political class’; the questions linked to immigration; and all the insecurity concerns with a call for a more energetic repression of delinquency. The topics related to these salient issues correspond to the well-known dimensions of the far-right electorate's authoritarianism and ethnocentrism and are centred on Le Pen's main campaign themes.