Fighting Populism : Rhetorical Strategies Against the So-Called Populist Movements in France, Spain and the United States at the End of the 19th century Combattre le populisme : stratégies rhétoriques antipopulistes contre les mouvements dits populistes de la fin du XIXème siècle (France, Espagne, Etats-Unis) En Fr

Résumé En

At the end of the 19th century, mass movements emerged in France, Spain and in the United States - here in Kansas - (boulangism, blasquism and People’s Party respectively), which are called « populists » by the historiography of this concept, especially in political science. They advocated the restoration of « popular sovereignty » against an « oligarchy », which was supposed to control the economic and political powers, an opposition featured by a discourse based on this antagonism. In response, French republicans in power (both « opportunists » and « radicals »), Grand Old Party leaders in Kansas and dynastic politicians in Spain seized this « polarisation » to build a rhetorical strategy against their new opponents. In this paper, I want to explore the representations built by this antipopulist rhetoric which sets up an agonistic public space as much as the populist one. These representations are based on old scarecrows found in the political past and new ones, based on current political perils (especially anarchist terrorism). This rhetoric shows the will of the polical elite to demonize these new movements in the purpose of mobilizing voters thanks to their « space of experience » (Koselleck). It also highlights their difficulties to understand them. Hence, they mostly considered them as a misguideness of the universal suffrage and as confusions caused by mass democracy, justifying infrigements on democracy to defend the regime. Designing a distorting mirror of populism, antipopulism finally appears as a reflection of populism on their equivocal relation with democracy.