Inspired by Fascist Italy and Vichy France, the group attracted support from many young nationalists during the Algerian war (1954–62), especially in the French colonial army.
Promoting street violence and extra-parliamentarian insurrection against the Fourth Republic, members hoped the turmoils of the wars of decolonization would lead to a coup d'état followed by the establishment of a nationalist regime.
[3] Discredited by earlier European far-right experiences, French nationalist parties scored poorly in elections from the fall of fascism in 1945 until the rise of the Front National in the 1980s.
[4] Neo-fascists groups nonetheless saw in the immediate post-war new reasons to swing into action, mainly the fight against communist expansion and the defense of the French empire's survival against the growing decolonization movement.
On 11 November 1954, ten days after the beginning of the Algerian War, Pierre Sidos announced the official birth of the movement "Jeune Nation" under its final name.
Dismissing mass parties, Sidos aimed at creating a small and faithful army, with a revolutionary general staff ready to seize power and rule as a military junta when their moment has come.
On 9–10 October 1954, a commando led by Sidos carjacked a van transporting issues of the communist newspaper L’Humanité Dimanche, then destroyed them and assaulted the driver who died a few months later as a result of his injuries.
[12] Hoping to calm down the situation, Sidos sent a letter to the newspaper Le Monde a few days later to "formally disapprove of the individual violence committed in recent times".
[14] During demonstrations organized held on 8 November 1956 to denounce the Soviet military intervention in the Hungarian Uprising, Jeune Nation stormed and partly set to fire the headquarters of the Communist Party in Paris.
[9][1] The association was regardless declared again under a new name to the Police Prefecture on 7 October 1958, and publicly relaunched as "Parti Nationaliste" by Pierre Sidos and Dominique Venner during a congress attended by around 600 people on 6–8 February 1959.
The periodical, which violently attacked Charles de Gaulle as far as publicly calling for his assassination, had turned into a monthly magazine in January after financial and readership difficulties.
[9] Jeune Nation defended anti-parliamentarianism, corporatism, the French army and the colonial empire, racism, antisemitism, and advocated violent actions to overthrow the regime.
[7] Their political agenda was the establishment of an "authoritarian and popular, national and social State,"[7][1] similar to the Révolution nationale of Vichy France: a new army to "educate the youth", the expropriation of housings formerly possessed by "expelled métèques [wogs] deemed undesirable", an Italian fascist-like corporatist unionism, the "elimination of stateless capitalism and effortless incomes" and the founding of a state led by a "selected and politically educated" elite.
[23] Jeune Nation formed the most significant part of civil members in the pro-colonial paramilitary group Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), founded in 1961.
Venner also abandoned the myth of the coup de force ("power grab") and asserted that a political revolution would not be able to happen before a cultural one, which could be reached only via the public promotion of nationalist ideas until they achieve majority approval.