René Rémond

René Rémond (; 30 September 1918 – 14 April 2007) was a French historian, political scientist and political economist.

Biography 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.