No French party defended abstract justice over class interests.

Evidence

Even Clemenceau was not immune from the temptation to identify the mob with the people. What made him especially prone to this error was the consistently ambiguous attitude of the Labor party toward the question of “abstract” justice. No party, including the socialists, was ready to make an issue of justice per se, “to stand, come what may, for justice, the sole unbreakable bond of union between civilized men.” The socialists stood for the interests of the workers, the opportunists for those of the liberal bourgeoisie, the coalitionists for those of the Catholic higher classes, and the radicals for those of the anticlerical petty bourgeoisie. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 320

Categorization

• XREF: The class-interest vs abstract-universal-justice opposition maps onto the toolkit’s representation-and-the-construction-of-the-Other theme and later critiques of identitarian versus universalist politics.