René Rémond (French: [ʁəne ʁemɔ̃]; 30 September 1918 – 14 April 2007) was a French historian, political scientist and political economist.
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.
Rémond died in April 2007 in Paris at the age of 88.
Lamennais et la démocratie (1948)
La Droite en France de 1815 à nos jours (1954)
Histoire des États-Unis (1959)
Les Catholiques, le communisme et les crises (1929–1939) (1960)
Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française (1815–1852), 2 volumes (1962)
Les Deux Congrès ecclésiastiques de Reims et Bourges (1896–1900) (1964)
La Vie politique en France, tome 1 : 1789-1848 (1964)
Forces religieuses et attitudes politiques dans la France depuis 1945 (contributing editor; 1965)
Atlas historique de la France contemporaine (contributing editor; 1966)
Léon Blum, chef de gouvernement (contributing editor; 1967)
La droite en France, De la Première Restauration à la Ve République, 2 volumes (1968)
La Vie politique en France, tome 2 : 1848-1879 (1969)
Le Gouvernement de Vichy et la Révolution nationale (contributing editor; 1972)
Introduction à l’histoire de notre temps, 3 volumes (1974)