During the 1920s its members had largely sat in parliament among the Republican Federation deputies, but found it to have become too right-wing, French-nationalist and centralist for their tastes.
It contained between six and ten deputies, and was essentially the parliamentary expression of the Christian democratic deputies from the former German provinces: the Alsatian Popular Republican Union and its Lorrain counterpart, the Lorraine Republican Union.
The Independents of Popular Action (French: Indépendants d'action populaire, IAP) was the successor to the Republicans of the Centre in the 16th legislature of the Third Republic (1936 to 1940).
The group was again predominantly made up of the deputies of the Alsatian Popular Republican Union and Lorrain Republican Union, but they were now joined by other Alsatian regionalists from other ideological traditions, such as the federalist Radical, Camille Dahlet .
After the Second World War, the successors of the group merged with the more centrist Popular Democratic Party to form the Fourth Republic's major centre-right party, the Christian-democratic Popular Republican Movement.