During the later decades of the Third Republic, the majority of French voters and deputies belonged to the spectrum of numerous small liberal and republican parties of the centre-left and centre-right.
Periodically, however, the parties of the broad centre attempted to form an alliance amongst themselves to lock out socialists and the religious liberal right from power: the policy of creating a government of 'third force' through the tactic of 'republican concentration'.
The May 1947 crisis can be summarized as: "The Communists' refusal to continue support for the French colonial reconquest of Vietnam on one hand and a wage-freeze during a period of hyperinflation on the other were the immediate triggers to the dismissal of Thorez and his colleagues from the ruling coalition in May 1947".
Although it kept its majority after the 1951 legislative election, in part due to the change of voting system, it split over economic policies, laïcité and the financing of denominational schools.
Presidents Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and François Mitterrand later unsuccessfully tried to revive the Third Force, the latter doing so in a sense by pursuing a policy of "ouverture" toward the Union for French Democracy after the failure of Mitterrand's Socialist Party and its allies to gain an outright majority in the 1988 legislative election.