6,068 words
Introduction here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
“To be on the Right is to be afraid for what exists,” said Jules Romains. A nice definition. We find it again in many authors. “The Right,” wrote Amédée d’Yvignac in 1931, “is that group of politicians who think the permanent is the substance of things, and not change.”[1] “The traditional Right,” observed Alain-Gérard Slama more recently, “has always been characterized by a distrust of man’s power over the world and a fundamental respect regarding the order of things.”[2] Let us pass over ambiguities connected with that tendency to affirm a fact without wanting to qualify it. Traditionally, the Right has always been, if not the camp of conservatism, at least that of conservation.
The...