Building a Base for the National Front
Keyword(s):
This chapter traces the origins and development of the far right under the Fifth Republic. Without discounting older roots in the interwar Ligues, the followers of Marshall Pétain, and the anti-tax movement of Pierre Poujade, it brings out the importance of the political battle for French Algeria. Uniting anti-communists and anti-Gaullists, it revitalized the French far right and paved the way for the creation of the National Front in 1972. After tracing the far right’s reaction to May ’68 and to the success of the neo-fascists in Italy in the early 1970s, the chapter reviews the early history of the National Front, and (against economic patterns) provides an alternative explanation for its electoral breakthrough in the 1980s.