La Rocque envisioned the PSF as the more explicitly-political successor of the Croix-de-Feu, the World War I veterans' organization that had been founded in 1927 and, by the early 1930s, had emerged as the largest[2] and one of the most influential of interwar France's numerous far-right leagues.

[3] The party's programme would further develop the same themes by advocating "the association of capital and labour", a traditional platitude of French conservatism, and the reform of France's political institutions along presidential lines to bolster the stability and authority of the state.

Politicians of the centre-right and left alike opposed La Rocque because of the perceived threat of his success in mobilising a mass base within their traditional particularly working-class constituencies.

After the victory of the Popular Front, which had included in its electoral programme a promise to dissolve the right-wing leagues in the parliamentary elections of May 1936, the government issued a decree banning the Croix-de-Feu, along with the Mouvement social français, on 18 June.

That demographic had historically been one of the primary bastions of the Radical-Socialist Party, and its falling under the influence of the "fascist" right was viewed by Popular Front leaders as a serious threat to the stability of the republic.

Thus, although the two parties were in fact in agreement on many questions of ideology, notably their defense of the far-right leagues, the PSF was viewed by the long-established Federation as a rival "to its own electoral fortunes".

[15] His insistence on the PSF's independence got La Rocque attacked violently by other figures on the right, including former Croix-de-Feu members who had abandoned the more moderate Social Party.

As stated, he continued to affirm his loyalty to Pétain and was amenable to certain of the more moderate aspects of Vichy's reactionary program, the Révolution Nationale, notably its corporatism and social policies.

However, La Rocque was hostile to Vichy's enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and forbade PSF members from participating in Vichy-sponsored organisations such as the Service d'Ordre Légionnaire, the Milice and the Legion of French Volunteers.

Although former PSF deputy Jean Ybarnegaray, for instance, served in the first Vichy government under Pétain as Minister for Veterans and the Family, he resigned his post in 1940 and was in 1943 arrested and deported because of his efforts in helping Resistance members to cross the Pyrenees into Spain.

Though the PRSRF had effectively disappeared by 1956, with the schism that year of the RGR into centre-left and centre-right groups, some of its members would later continue their political careers within the conservative National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP).

Despite the postwar insignificance of the party itself, elements of the PSF's and La Rocque's ideology strongly influenced the political formations of right and the centre during the Fourth Republic.

Rémond, in his La Droite en France, identifies the PSF instead as an offshoot of the Bonapartist tradition in French right-wing politics, populist and anti-parliamentarian but hardly fascist.

[31] Secondly, the PSF's condemnation of parliamentarism, which was considered synonymous with French republicanism by most leftist and centrist politicians, marked it as inherently anti-republican and thus "fascist" in the period's political discourse in their opinions.

[32] That minority view is partially shared by Robert Soucy,[33] William D. Irvine, and Michel Dobry,[34] who argue that the Croix-de-Feu and the PSF were partially-realized manifestations of a distinctively-French fascism, their political potential but not their tactics of organization and mobilisation, which was destroyed by the German invasion and thus permanently discredited.

Sternhell, pointing to the democratic path to power followed by the Nazi Party, also made the argument that La Rocque's apparent respect for republican legality is not enough to disqualify his movement as fascist.