After a military court declared Tixier-Vignancour ineligible to hold public office for ten years for his early WWII activities, he joined the nationalist group Jeune Nation but left in 1954, opposed to their use of violence.
[9] Enlisted in the army in 1939, he took part in fights near Beuvraignes during the Battle of France in 1940,[4] before voting for the law that gave full powers (pleins pouvoirs) to Philippe Pétain on July, 10 of the same year.
[10] On 6 October 1940, in charge of "applying the instructions of the armistice commission", he confirmed the banning of movies like The Great Illusion or Entente cordiale, accused of "incitement to hatred against Germany".
[4] After his liberation, Tixier-Vignancour joined the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy as a lieutenant but was recalled to Tunis in January 1944 and placed under house arrest by senior offices suspicious of his previous activities in the Vichy government.
Released in April he joined an Anglo-French unit before being arrested again on account of his collaborationist past and eventually being imprisoned in Paris by the French Committee of National Liberation before being cleared of the worst charges of collaboration in October 1945 but being declared ineligible to hold public office for ten years on 4 December 1945.
He helped Maurice Bardèche establish the magazine Défense de l'Occident (an important arena for the discussion of right-wing ideas and Holocaust denial text) and the neo-fascist coalition European Social Movement in 1951-52.
[19][20] Following the May 1958 crisis and the return of Charles de Gaulle to power, he refused to vote a law that would temporarily authorize the president to revise the constitution until a referendum occurs on a new one.
[4] After the dissolution of Jeune Nation by official decree earlier that year, he wrote articles for the group's magazine, launched on 5 July 1958 as an attempt to revive the banned movement.
were set up throughout France and the Comité Jeunes ("Youth Committee"), directed by Roger Holeindre and supported by the group Occident, quickly attracted several hundred members.
After a disagreement between Le Pen and Occident's founder Pierre Sidos, the movement was replaced with Dominique Venner's Europe-Action volunteers, despite their own initial skepticism regarding Tixier-Vignancour’s candidacy.
[25] Despite his conservative stance, the then president Charles de Gaulle embodied in their eyes "‘the loss of Algeria, the end of the Empire, the weakening of the army, and closer ties with the communist world."
He abandoned his radical far-right rhetoric to court the moderate right, his campaign managers labeling him the "national and liberal opposition" against the extremist Charles de Gaulle.
[19] Despite this calculated attempts at moderating his positions, commentators portrayed Tixier-Vignancour as "the alliance of Algérie française, Poujadism and the spirit of Vichy", and he was only endorsed in the media by the radical right-wing press: Rivarol, Europe-Action, Aspects de la France and Minute.
[1][9] Strongly anti-communist, he endorsed during his 1965 campaign the NATO military and nuclear alliance with the United States, to defend the "humanist and Christian West" against "communism and its Trojan horse, Gaullism".
He argued for "strict and rigorously selected quotas" for Algerian immigrants to "avoid the invasion of France by a multitude of starving mouths, undesirables and invalids with no technical or social education".