ABSTRACT
To compensate for their loss of power the Gaullists then attempted to build a mass party. To do this, Chirac drew on the support of Charles Pasqua, a leading member of the Service d’Action Civique, a shady organisation whose ostensible purpose was to keep order at party meetings (the SAC was dissolved in 1982 after several of its members had been involved in a multiple murder case). Pasqua’s organising talents, learnt as sales manager for the Pernod-Ricard drinks company, were given full rein in a grandiose relaunch of the party as the RPR in December 1976. Chirac was elected, with Soviet-style ease (96.5 per cent of the votes), to the new post of party president. Membership was claimed to exceed 550,000 at the end of 1977 and 750,000 (with 776 workplace sections) a year later; if the true figure was probably nearer the 160,000 recorded after May 1968, this still brought the party back to its best levels of the Fifth Republic. Party élites were renewed. Chirac’s election as the first twentieth-century mayor of Paris in March 1977 (after a law of 1975 had relaxed the former tight central government control over the capital) equipped him with a powerful logistical base, better in many ways than the premiership, or than a mass party organisation. In March 1978, with 22.8 per cent of the votes cast and 154 Deputies elected, Chirac could still – just – claim to head France’s largest party. Survival was no longer in serious doubt – as it clearly had been in 1974.
