A perennial challenge when trying to report on the interior life of Britain’s Conservative Party is the question of how to identify and label its competing factions and tendencies. A simplistic division into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ transmits a basic truth, but elides a lot of detail. Paying excessive attention to the mayfly procession of groupings swiftly becomes impenetrable to all but the most committed scholar of modern Toryism.

More than once, as on so many issues, it might be better if arrangements were a little more French. For any would-be scholar of the French Right can avail themselves of a quirky but surprisingly useful model set out in the 1950s by the historian René Rémond.

In his 1954 classic Le Droit en France (available in English translation as The Right in France), Rémond traced the intellectual and political history of the French Right since the Revolution and argued that it could be divided into three broad strands, which he called tendencies – each of which, conveniently, mapped onto one of the three royal or imperial dynasties that had ruled France in that period: the Legitimists, the Orléanists, and the Bonapartists.

At first glance, such an elegant and historically informed classification system is probably too tidy to be plausible. But the basic idea isn’t as outlandish as it appears. The French Right in the 19th Century was both overwhelmingly monarchist and extremely divided between supporters of the three competing dynasties (to the point where those divisions at least once kept a Republican government in office).

Such deep divisions were never likely to be entirely arbitrary; each dynasty’s claim appealed more to some groups than others, to those from certain regions, and to those of certain values. Thus, Rémond found his golden thread. Broadly, he classified each strand of the French Right in the following terms:

The Legitimists were the supporters of the senior line of the House of Bourbon, which had furnished France with its pre-revolutionary ancien régime and ruled again after the Napoleonic Wars until the overthrow of Charles X in 1830. The Legitimist tendency on the Right is perhaps closest to what in Britain might be described as right-wing High Toryism: rural, traditional, parochial, often explicitly reactionary and – significant in avowedly-secular France – explicitly religious.

Next, we have the Orléanists, originally the liberal (in 19th-century terms) supporters of the constitutional July Monarchy, which ruled France from 1830 to 1848. The Orléanist tendency manifests in the template of the Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron: economically liberal and up for the slaughter of sacred cows, but also possessing a strong belief in hierarchy and order and wary of outright populism.

Finally, the Bonapartists. Bonapartism is a strange beast even in its formal, monarchical definition: whereas both the Bourbon and Orléans monarchies were in different ways repudiations of the revolution, Bonapartism cast itself as its apotheosis. Both Napoleon I and Napoleon III established their thrones by referendum and presented themselves as personal embodiments of the popular will – vox imperator, vox populi.

The defining feature of the Bonapartist tendency is this populist and plebiscitary character, as well as the strongest tendency of the three to favour a strong, centralised government.

It is by no means a perfect system, and historical wrinkles abound. For example, Action Française – a far-right organisation founded in 1899 – would seem a clear-cut case of a philosophically Legitimist outfit – but formally supports the claim of the House of Orléans, albeit while explicitly rejecting economic liberalism.

The system is undoubtedly highly subjective and, in modern terms, draws heavily on ‘vibes’. Different writers applying Rémond’s framework can and do put the same individuals and parties in different tendencies. Is the self-consciously Jupiterian Emmanuel Macron a modern Bonapartist, or an economically-liberal Orléanist? Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is an outside force trying to rally the people against the elite (Bonapartist), but also deeply conservative and, especially in Marion Mareschal, publicly religious (Legitimist).

But politics is always an inexact science. To insist that a system of broad political classification has strict and coherent ideological criteria is to ignore the fact that most people, even those actively engaged in political life, are not nearly so exacting when forming their views or choosing their parties – especially on the Right, with its comparative aversion to formal theory and grand intellectual schema.

Two well-informed observers of French politics might well sort the same collection of politicians differently into the three baskets offered by Rémond’s thesis. But then I and another unhappy observer of the British Conservative Party would almost certainly do the same if asked to divide a similar list of its politicians into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. In political science, what is observed depends a lot on where one is standing. Moreover, the fact that generations of observers have found those categories useful, even if their definitions differ, strongly suggests that they speak to some underlying truth.

Even allowing for its deficiencies, however, there is one feature of Rémond’s framework which is novel from a British perspective: his analysis of the French Right as a prolonged struggle for the balance of power between three consistent, if evolving, tendencies. Certainly, these are probably defined, over such a long span of time, more by temperament and outlook than by ideology. But then ideologies come and go much faster than dispositions, so such a system of classification is by no means unhelpful.

No equivalent of it really exists in scholarship of the British Right. Instead, and perhaps a little ironically, its history tends to be described as a series of revolutions, with the rising tendency overthrowing the previous order and establishing a new one, which is eventually overthrown in turn.

This suggests, at least in part, a shortness of perspective. An historically informed writer might note the parallels between the internal Tory divisions over Brexit, or Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms, and the divisions over tariffs in the 1920s or the Corn Laws a century before that; few, if any, attempt to identify in these threads coherent and continuous strains of political thought and action.

Perhaps that also reflects a real difference in the politics of Britain and France. In the latter, parties come and go so swiftly (especially on the Right) that it would be extremely difficult for any longstanding political tradition to grow up around a single one; as such other organisations, including the above-mentioned Action Française, help to define such traditions outside the party system.

In Britain, by contrast, almost the entire representational history of the Right was until very recently compassed by the Conservative Party and its affiliates and satellites (the Unionists, National Liberals, et al), and few of its internal groupings tend to last more than one or two political generations; the European Research Group was a notably long-lasting and well-organised exception, though it was founded only in 1993.

It would not be possible to usefully categorise right-wing thought in Britain into historically-continuous tendencies on the Rémond model. That in itself says something fascinating – and probably damning – about its intellectual condition.