Created in February 1941 by former members of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) of the neosocialist tendency and led by Marcel Déat, the party was heavily influenced by Fascism and saw the circumstances of the occupation as an opportunity to revolutionize France.

Marcel Déat, a neosocialist expelled from the SFIO in November 1933 and former Minister, first proposed to create a single state party during the 1940 summer, immediately following the proclamation of the Vichy regime.

Immediately, the German authorities imposed a fusion between Marcel Déat's RNP and the far-right Social Revolutionary Movement (MSR) of Eugène Deloncle, an inheritor of the Cagoule terrorist group.

Despite this, it differed from Jacques Doriot's French Popular Party (PPF) in that it maintained the principle of universal suffrage, public education, anti-clericalism or the conservation of sculptures of Marianne, a republican symbol, in the townhalls.

[3] Those ideas created constant conflicts between the RNP and more reactionary elements of Vichy who also supported the Révolution nationale ("National Revolution") and had been trained in the Action française monarchist movement.

After Laval's return to government in April 1942 and the Nazi occupation of the Southern Zone in November 1942, Déat focused all his efforts on creating a single party of the Collaboration which would permit him to impose himself as its sole leader.