by Remzi Çağatay Çakırlar
The Radical Party (Parti radical), the oldest extant political party in France, was founded in Paris at its first Congress in Rue Tiquetonne in June 1901. The original factors behind the decision to create the Radical Party were largely concerns about increasing nationalist agitation with the Dreyfus Affair, Ultramontane Catholicism, and the alarm of a monarchist coup d’état that could topple the republican regime. In their declaration, founding presidents Léon Bourgeois and Camille Pelletan indicated their motivation as “to bring together all the sons of French Revolution, whatever their differences are, against the danger of Counterrevolution.”1 The Radical Party laid a milestone in the history of the separation of church and state in France and the conceptual history of “laïcité” in the country.2 Today, despite the debates on the precision of the time period, there is something of a consensus among historians that the Radical Party...
Remzi Çağatay Çakırlar “‘Radical’: The Age of Revolution’s Atlantic Context and the Genesis of a Political Concept in France" Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2022; 16 (1): 29–52.