National Popular Rally
국민인민연합
A fascist and collaborationist party founded in occupied Paris in February 1941 by Marcel Déat, a neosocialist who had been expelled from the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). With the French Popular Party it was one of the main collaborationist parties of the Vichy period, advocating antisemitic and racist policies and admiring Nazi Germany. Its activity ended when Déat fled to Germany in August 1944.
In depth
Déat proposed a single state party in the summer of 1940, immediately after the Vichy regime was proclaimed. Briefly arrested by the French police on 13 December 1940, he founded the party in February 1941; it recruited mainly among former members of the French Left, notably neosocialist former SFIO members. The German authorities at once imposed a fusion with Eugène Deloncle's far-right Social Revolutionary Movement (MSR), which kept de facto autonomy inside the party and formed its security service. After Paul Collette shot at Pierre Laval and Déat on 27 August 1941, Déat accused the MSR of trying to eliminate him, and the MSR was expelled in October 1941.
The party's ideology was clearly fascist, but unlike the French Popular Party it upheld universal suffrage, public education and anti-clericalism and kept the busts of Marianne in town halls. This brought it into constant conflict with the reactionary elements of Vichy trained in Action Française. It supported Laval, and Déat kept close links with the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz. In November 1942 it gathered the main collaborationist groups, apart from the French Popular Party, into the National Revolutionary Front in an attempt to form a single collaborationist party, but the front failed.
The party claimed at most 30,000 members, though the historian Robert Soucy puts the figure at only 2,638, of whom 12.8 percent were industrial workers. Its mouthpiece was Le National Populaire, and Déat's daily L'Œuvre also supported it. After Déat became Vichy's Minister of Labour and National Solidarity in March 1944 he concentrated on his ministry rather than the party, and on 17 August 1944 he took refuge in Germany almost alone.