His parents were General Raymond de La Rocque, commander of the artillery defending the Lorient Naval Base, and Anne Sollier.

Despite the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, La Roque remained there until 1916 as officer of native affairs, when he was gravely wounded and repatriated to France.

After the First World War ended in 1918, he was assigned to the interallied staff of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, but in 1921 he went to Poland with the French Military Mission under General Maxime Weygand.

La Rocque came from the patriotic and social Catholic movement created by Félicité Robert de Lamennais in the late 19th century.

That was overall a vague program, and La Rocque stopped short of giving it the clearly antirepublican and fascist aspect that some National Volunteers demanded of him.

La Rocque concentrated on organizing military parades and was very proud of having taken over the Interior Ministry by two Croix-de-Feu columns on the eve of the 6 February 1934 riots.

[7] H. R. Knickerbocker wrote in 1941 that the Petit Journal with La Rocque as editor "assumed a more courageously anti-German attitude after the armistice than did most other papers published under the control of the Vichy government".

[9] La Rocque approved the repeal of the Crémieux decrees, which had given French citizenship to Jews in Algeria, but he did not follow the Vichy regime in its racist radicalization.

La Rocque rejected the laws on the STO, which forced young Frenchmen to work in Germany, and he also threatened to expel any member of the PSF who joined Joseph Darnand's Milice or the LVF.

He was arrested in Clermont-Ferrand on 9 March 1943 by the SIPO-SD German police, along with 152 high ranking PSF members in Paris, allegedly because he had been trying to convince Pétain to go to North Africa.