A secret society dedicated to affirming Malagasy cultural identity was formed in 1913, calling itself Iron and Stone Ramification (Vy Vato Sakelika, VVS).

Although the VVS was brutally suppressed, its actions eventually led French authorities to provide the Malagasy with their first representative voice in government.

A number of veterans who remained in France were exposed to French political thought, most notably the anti-colonial and pro-independence platforms of socialist parties.

In the autumn of 1945, separate French and Malagasy electoral colleges voted to elect representatives from Madagascar to the Constituent Assembly of the Fourth Republic in Paris.

[citation needed] Raseta and Ravoahangy, together with Jacques Rabemananjara, a writer long resident in Paris, organised the Democratic Movement for Malagasy Restoration (MDRM), the foremost among several political parties formed in Madagascar by early 1946.

Although Protestant Merina was well represented in MDRM's higher echelons, the party's 300,000 members were drawn from a broad political base reaching across the entire island and crosscutting ethnic and social divisions.

But the assimilationist policy inherent in its framework was incongruent with the MDRM goal of full independence for Madagascar, so Ravoahangy and Raseta abstained from voting.

Economic and social concerns, including food shortages, black-market scandals, labour conscription, renewed ethnic tensions, and the return of soldiers from France, strained an already volatile situation.

The French Army experimented with "psychological warfare": suspects were thrown alive from planes in order to terrorise villagers in the areas of operation.

[citation needed] According to a source, 90,000 Malagasy people died during the uprising, which was brutally shut down by the French colonial regime.

[8] In 1956, France's socialist government renewed the French commitment to greater autonomy in Madagascar and other colonial possessions by enacting the Loi Cadre (Enabling Law).

In the case of Madagascar, the law established executive councils to function alongside provincial and national assemblies, and dissolved the separate electoral colleges for the French and Malagasy groups.

The provision for universal suffrage had significant implications in Madagascar because of the basic ethno-political split between the Merina and the côtiers, reinforced by the divisions between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

The Merina were heavily represented in the Malagasy component of the small elite to whom suffrage had been restricted in the earlier years of French rule.

The PSD was led by Philibert Tsiranana, a well-educated Tsimihety from the northern coastal region who was one of three Malagasy deputies elected in 1956 to the National Assembly in Paris.

The PSD built upon Tsiranana's traditional political stronghold of Mahajanga in northwest Madagascar and rapidly extended its sources of support by absorbing most of the smaller parties that had been organised by the côtiers.