ABSTRACT
In the 1970s the National Front (NF) was a heterogeneous coalition of extreme right groups. By the 1990s, however, the National Front had become a party-army: a highly disciplined, efficient, and authoritarian organization with ninety-five departmental federations and approximately fifty thousand members. The impressive efficiency of the Front's party machine owes a great deal to the skill and energy of Jean-Pierre Stirbois, the party's secretary general after 1980. Party secretary general Jean-Pierre Stirbois was the very model of an NF militant. His whole life had been spent working with the most violent extreme right groups of the 1960s and 1970s: Mouvement Jeune Révolution, Mouvement Solidariste, and Groupe Action Jeunesse. Party discipline extends to the local level, where section secretaries perform mainly administrative and recruitment tasks. On numerous occasions this policy has led local party militants to complain about high-profile candidates being parachuted into their areas by the national party.
