Left and right according to Olivier Meuwly

Are the political labels «left» and «right» relevant? Do they really mean anything? Shouldn't they be used more sparingly, as our editor-in-chief advocated in his editorial of October 2015? Historian Oliver Meuwly believes that these two categories have been inseparable from political thought since the French Revolution, and that they enable us to pinpoint the trends that characterize our political landscape. In his book La droite et la gauche (2016), the liberal-radical from Vaud recalls the history of these two terms while analyzing their profound and current meaning.

Olivier Meuwly: Bipolarity was created as part of the French Revolution and the distribution of different groups in the National Assembly. The tradition will’