‘Français d’abord!’ The Rise and Rise of the Front National

Abstract

For over a decade before 1983, France’s far Right could be written off as a spent force: an ageing and irrelevant collection of reactionaries and monarchists, racists and fascists, nostalgic for Vichy, Algérie française, or even the ancien régime, plus a handful of young hotheads periodically drafted in as strong-armed stewards for Giscard’s electoral meetings. In its incarnation as Pierre Poujade’s small shopkeepers’ movement, the far Right had given the political establishment a modest shake by winning 11.6 per cent of the vote in the 1956 elections; but the Poujadist movement fell apart almost immediately. As the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a part of the far Right had sown terror on both sides of the Mediterranean, as well as bungling ten attempts to assassinate de ‘Gaulle, in the closing years of the Algerian war; but within months of Algerian independence (which, ironically, they hastened), the OAS leaders were behind bars or in impotent exile in Franco’s Spain. Electoral activity under the Fifth Republic had proved no more successful. The only significant result for the far Right had been the 5.3 per cent of the vote at the 1965 presidential election achieved by Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, the OAS’s chief lawyer, mostly among the pieds-noirs, former white settlers in Algeria (Tixier’s anti-Gaullism was such that he had rallied to Mitterrand at the second ballot).