[The European Conservative] Les Droites en Amérique

Continetti’s capacious history of the first 100 years of the American right holds lessons for the next 100.

“Independence (Squire Jack Porter)” (1858), an oil on paperboard by Frank Blackwell Mayer, located in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As a self-sufficient landholder and businessman, ​“Squire Jack” embodied an independent and enduring spirit that, by the 1850s, had become an American ideal, celebrated by painters and writers alike.

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. By Matthew Continetti. Basic Books; 496 pages; $18.99.

Sometime towards 1954, a little-known French historian suddenly rose to scholarly fame not yet two years since clinching his doctorate. René Rémond — then only 36 — had spent the better part of his life in Christian youth groups, resisting the Nazi occupation, and surveying the ideological make-up of the French right since 1815. That year, the post-revolutionary European empire that Napoleon had styled as heir to the Enlightenment ideals of 1789 bites the dust at Waterloo, opening the way for fifteen years of constitutional monarchy under the so-called Second Restoration.

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