A Comparison between the Extreme Right in Contemporary France and Britain

Existing literature on the contemporary extreme right tends to follow a 'country-specific' approach. The primary intention of this article is to move beyond this approach and provide a comparative study of the contemporary extreme right in France and Britain. It transcends country-specific accounts in order to answer a specific research question: why has the French National Front achieved a level of political success which the British National Front has demonstrably failed to achieve? This comparison provides for the formulation of a conjunctural model of extreme-right political success which could be seen as an important theoretical innovation in the field of extreme right studies.