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Jean-Marie Le Pen called the early years in the life of the National Front as a far
right political party a period of “crossing the desert” (DeClair 1999, 42). With this
reference he indicated the difficulty encountered in constructing a viable far right party in
France and the experience of his party from its founding in 1972 until its initial signs of
stability and growth in the early 1980s. Radical right-wing parties had long languished in
France for nearly four decades following World War II. After the collapse of Marshall
Petain’s Vichy regime and the reinstatement of democracy under the Fourth Republic,
only loose groupings of nationalists, authoritarians, and ethnocentrists remained. They
existed largely on the periphery of the political system and exerted negligible influence.
It was not until the early 1980s that fortunes began to be reversed for French
parties of the radical right-wing as they started to have localized success in gaining public
office at that time. Since then the radical right-wing in France, and in particular the
National Front party, has steadily gained ground. With the most recent presidential
election results showing a radical-right wing politician receiving the second highest
percentage of the popular vote on the first ballot, the question of strategy and formula for
success must be asked. This paper investigates the rise of radical right-wing party
politics in France. It traces the process of overcoming institutional constraints in order to
transform an inefficient grouping of ideologues into a professional party machine over a
period of roughly two decades.
Research Objective
To isolate the factors responsible for the rise of the National Front in France, this
paper will examine the chronology of events leading up to initial electoral success in the
1980s and then continued stability and heightened presence in the decades following. A
Convention