ABSTRACT
The shopkeeper movement drifted out of the radical republican orbit in the 1890s and passed into the camp of the far right. As the structure of political alternatives evolved in the 1890s, the shopkeeper issue was pushed to the margins. The unhappy fate of patente reform and more generally of the question of commercial defense explains in part the shopkeeper movement's virage a droite. Anti-Semitism and Christian Democracy made serious overtures to the shopkeeper movement. The Ligue syndicale became the focus of the far right's solicitations, and shopkeepers welcomed the attention, reciprocating with a show of gratitude and friendship. The frustration of the shopkeeper movement's political aspirations, however, had roots deeper still than the entrenched power of big business. The shopkeeper movement in the nineties was overshadowed by the rise of labor. The shopkeeper movement's adamant opposition to cooperatives was unacceptable to Catholics like Garnier, for example, who were sensitive to peasant and working-class interests.
