Just as the Democratic Republican Alliance, it was a party composed of notables, which rested upon local electoral committee, which merged in the National Assembly in one or several parliamentary groups.
These changes were reflected in the handover of power from the Belle Époque industrialist and conservative leader Auguste Isaac to the younger militant and academic Louis Marin in 1925.
After the 6 February 1934 riots which toppled the second Cartel des gauches, the majority of the party chose this right-wing strategy, taking the side of the opponents to the Republic accused of being anti-patriotic.
Although this Freedom Front was theorized by Louis Marin and the other leaders of the party as a tactic against the growing influence of Colonel François de La Rocque's French Social Party—one of the first right-wing French mass party—this union also corresponded with the ideology of the leading classes outside Paris (such as Victor Perret in the Rhône region) and of the activists opposed both to the lefts and to the centre-right parties such as the Democratic Alliance or the Popular Democrats.
The Republican Federation acted as the nexus between parliamentary conservatives and the anti-Republican nationalist right organized in the various far-right paramilitaries and in the ultramonarchist Action française.
Party members such as Philippe Henriot or Xavier Vallat (both future collaborationists) thus served as intermediaries between the leaders of the Republican Federation and the extra-parliamentary right.