[1] Pierre Poujade was born in Saint-Céré (Le Lot), France, and studied at Collège Saint-Eugène d'Aurillac, a Roman Catholic private school.

On the death of his father, an architect, in 1928, he was unable to afford the tuition and left school to work as a manual laborer.

[2] In addition to the protest against the income tax and the price control imposed by finance minister Antoine Pinay to limit inflation, Poujadism was opposed to industrialization, urbanization, and American-style modernization, which were perceived as a threat to the identity of rural France.

The movement's "common man" populism led to antiparliamentarism (Poujade called the National Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris" and the deputies a "pile of rubbish" and "paederasts"), a strong anti-intellectualism (Poujade denounced the graduates from the École Polytechnique as the main culprits for the woes of 1950s France and boasted that he had no book learning), xenophobia, and antisemitism, particularly aimed against Jewish Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France, with Poujade claiming "Mendès is French only as the word added to his name".

The movement called for new Estates General to re-found the French political regime, and published the Fraternité Française newspaper.

[7] To justify his support for the Algerian War, Poujade declared in 1956 to Time Magazine: Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery, they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us...All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France.

[8] Poujade ran for National Assembly again, but was defeated in 1962, after which he went on to found an organization that distributed Nazi political speeches and military songs.

[14] In 1969, Gérard Nicoud started the CID-UNATI (Comité Interprofessionnel de Défense-Union Nationale des Travailleurs Indépendants), a tax protest movement similar to the one of Poujade.

Examples of recent political groups with strong Poujadist leanings include Le Pen's own National Front (which has a strong anti-tax message), the Comité de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans of Christian Poucet (that encouraged French shopkeepers to declare their business in Britain in order to avoid paying the French Social Security taxes), and the Union des Contribuables Français.

[15] In February 2010, The New York Times commentator Robert Zaretsky compared the American Tea Party movement with Poujadism.