The 2017 French presidential and legislative elections constituted a crisis point for the mainstream right. Since the mid-1980s, the mainstream right had proved remarkably adept at exploiting the political opportunity structure of the French political system, balancing the centripetal forces of the silent revolution with the centrifugal pull of the silent counter-revolution. This chapter analyses how the conservative Gaullists and their centre-right liberal coalition partners constituted competing but stable bloc components within France’s two-round majoritarian electoral system, while pursuing weak accommodative strategies vis-à-vis the FN. The absence of an effective competitor ensured that the Gaullists’ increasing encroachment upon the centre-right’s support, culminating in the formation of the UMP in 2002, did not threaten the bloc’s stability. Conversely, from 2007 onwards, a more conservative mainstream right faced challenges from both the populist radical right, reviving silent counter-revolution values which were again salient in the wake of the economic crisis, and renewed centrist formations which were largely accepting of progressive silent revolution cultural values.

By 1958, Charles de Gaulle was back on the scene, President of a brand-new Republic, France’s Fifth. He meant to make the Resistance, with the deportation story wrapped up in it, a rallying point for the nation, and he had a monument of his own constructed, the Mémorial de la France Combattante, located at the fort of Mont-Valérien (where the Germans had taken résistants and hostages for execution) in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. The monument and the commemorative activities associated with it told the story of France’s thirty-year war against Germany. This was a story with de Gaulle and the Resistance cast in the starring role and with the Left, communist and non-communist alike, shunted to the margins. What is remarkable is how powerful this narrative turned out to be, organizations of deportees like UNADIF (but not FNDIRP) lining up under the Gaullist standard.