POLITICS: THE WORLD OF THE PEOPLE AND THE MOVE TO THE RIGHT Words and identities States and parties

Historians concerned with the political orientation of Europe's shopkeepers and master artisans have tended to focus on their shift to the right. A route is traced from involvement in popular radicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, through liberalism and on to conservatism by the First World War, ending in the embrace of fascism during the inter-war years.1