Background
The early high points of liberalism in France were:
- the period from approximately 1790 to 1792 when the politics of the liberal Girondists and Feuillants dominated the early portion of the French Revolution.
- the Revolution of 1848.
In France, as in much of Southern Europe, the word liberal was used during the 19th century either to refer to the traditional liberal anti-clericalism or to economic liberalism. Political liberalism in France was long associated more with the Orleanists and with Republicans in general, then with the Radical Party, leading to the use of the term radicals to refer to the political liberal tradition, and the centre-right Democratic Republican Alliance.
The French Radicals tended to be more statist than most European liberals, but shared the liberal values on other issues, in particular a strong support for individual liberty and secularism, while Republicans were more keen to economic liberalism and less enthusiastic for secularism.
After World War II, the Republicans gathered in the liberal-conservative National Center of Independents and Peasants, from which the conservative-liberal Independent Republicans was formed in 1962. The original centre-left Radical Party was a declining force in French politics until 1972 when it joined the centre-right, causing the split of the left-wing faction and the foundation of the Radical Party of the Left, closely associated to the Socialist Party. The former is now associated with the Union for a Popular Movement.
In 1978 both the Republican Party (successor of the Independent Republicans) and the Radical Party were founding components, alongside the Christian-democratic Democratic Centre, of the Union for French Democracy, an alliance of liberal, Christian democratic, and non-Gaullist centre-right forces.
The Republican Party, re-founded as Liberal Democracy and re-shaped as a free-market libertarian party, left the UDF in 1998 to form a separate party. It merged into the conservative Union for a Popular Movement, of which it represents the libertarian wing. In addition, the Radical Party left the UDF in 2002 in order to join the UMP, of which it is the main social-liberal component, as an associate party. In some ways, the Republican and the Radical traditions are now re-composed in the UMP, which embraces a soft form of neo-liberalism.
Read more about this topic: Liberalism And Radicalism In France
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