Résumé
The French far right has historically been characterised by its fragmentation into small groups. This fragmentation is so structural that even the Vichy regime had the peculiar distinction of not being a single-party system and offering up to 88 different far-right political parties and organisations for voters to choose from. 1 This fragmentation tends to create the illusion that, because each far-right group outside the Front National/Rassemblement National (FN/RN) is small, even the sum of their parts would be laughable. However, when La Manif Pour Tous (LMPT: Demonstration for All) called to continue mass demonstrations against the legalisation of homosexual marriage in 2013, the extreme right (outside the FN) could line up 17,000 people under multiple banners in Paris for the "Day of Anger" demonstration on 26 January 2014, demanding the resignation of President François Hollande. The intelligence services estimated in 2019 that far-right radical groups represented 3,000 people, including 1,000 who were potentially dangerous. 2 A first National Front (not related to the contemporary one) was created in 1934 precisely to counter this fragmentation: it was about achieving a unitary "nationalist consensus" between all the far-right organisations. This principle was the one constantly cited by Jean-Marie Le Pen between the foundation of the FN in 1972 and the great split experienced by the party in 1999 when half of its executives and elected officials left with Bruno Mégret and founded the Mouvement National Républicain (MNR: National Republican Movement). Since then, the FN gradually deepened its electoral impact under the presidency of Marine Le Pen -who renamed it Rassemblement National (RN: National Rally) in 2018, to symbolise its desire to repair the split and show a united front. However, in 2021, Marine Le Pen saw her leadership contested by the presidential campaign of polemicist Éric Zemmour, confirming once again that fragmentation remains a key feature of the French radical right. In this chapter we explore the extreme-right landscape (we use "extreme right" to define those groups situated to the right of the National Front/Rally), look at those minor parties which remain politically active, those which have been dissolved by the authorities since 2017, and investigate the growing number of cases in which activists opt for violence, terrorism, or the dream of a coup.