As a member of the Radical Party, he headed a government supported by a coalition of Gaullists (RPF), moderate socialists (UDSR), Christian democrats (MRP) and liberal-conservatives (CNIP).

[1] At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Mendès France negotiated a deal that gave the Viet Minh control of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, and allowed him to pull out all French forces.

[3] In 1936 he came within 700 votes of losing to Modeste Legouez, the president of the radical agrarian group the Comités de défense paysanne in what he said was his hardest electoral fight.

[3] In October 1940, France was put on trial by the Vichy regime at the courthouse in Clermont-Ferrand for desertion after he boarded the liner SS Massilia for Casablanca in Morocco to continue the fight against the Nazis.

[3] During the latter years of the war, Mendès France served in the Free French Air Forces and flew in a dozen bombing raids.

[3] Mendès France supported state regulation of wages and prices to control inflation, while Pleven favoured generally laissez-faire policies.

[3] Nonetheless, de Gaulle valued Mendès France's abilities, and appointed him as a director of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and as French representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

He also favoured concessions to the nationalists in Algeria; but the presence of a million Pied-noirs there left the colonial power no easy way to extricate itself from that situation.

The future mercenary Bob Denard was convicted in 1954 and sentenced to fourteen months in prison for an assassination attempt against Mendès France.

[9] In 1967 he returned to the Assembly as a PSU member for the Isère, but again lost his seat in the 1968 landslide election victory of the Gaullist party UDR.

Mendès France and the PSU expressed sympathy for the sentiments and actions of the student rioters during the events of May 1968,[3] a position unusual for a politician of his age and status.