ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the continuity of a distinct tradition and construes the French Right as split by lasting divisions into different species. It discusses whether the extreme Right, the extra-parliamentary Right, the right-wing opposition or the extreme extra-parliamentary right-wing opposition. Throughout the history of the Fifth Republic until the 1981 presidential election, the extreme Right has been consistently anti-Gaullist. In the 1950s the extreme Right moved from the conventional authoritarian nationalism of nostalgic Pétainists to a more sophisticated version of neo-fascism, which emphasised the need to protect Western European civilisation against the twin threats of Marxism and liberalism. The expresses the main themes of the Nouvelle Droite condemnation of the traditional Right for lack of brains and lack of guts, denunciation of its total failure. As the new Right waned, the extremist right-wing opposition adopted a more conventional stance, pursuing electoral strategies, which in the case of Le Pen's Front National proved strikingly successful in the mid-1980s.
