ABSTRACT
The FN was conceived as the solution to this endemic problem. Its originality lay in its new orientation, its ambition to be a modern, forward-looking parliamentary party with a respectable public face and a message calculated to appeal to a wide audience. It brought together in its first phase Ordre Nouveau, Le Pen’s nationalist coterie, Roger Holeindre’s Parti de l’Unité Française, those grouped around the periodical Militant under Pierre Bousquet and Pierre Pauty, some monarchists, Georges Bidault’s Justice et Liberté movement, and others. The new party – officially the Front National pour l’Unité Française (National Front for French Unity, FNUF) – was formally launched in Paris on 5 October 1972. Within a week, it suffered its first split as Bidault withdrew his movement, seeing the ‘tough nuts’ of Ordre Nouveau as an obstacle to nurturing a genuinely electoralist vocation.3
