Democratic Republican Alliance

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The Democratic Republican Alliance (Alliance démocratique, AD, or Alliance républicaine démocratique, ARD) was a French political party (1901-1978) created in 1901 by followers of Léon Gambetta, such as Raymond Poincaré who would be president of the Council in the 1920s. The party was at first conceived by members of the Radical-Socialist Party tied to the business world who united themselves in May 1901, along with many moderates, as gathering center-left liberals and Republicans "opportunists" (Gambetta, etc.). However, after World War I and the parliamentary disappearance of monarchists and Bonapartists, it quickly became the main center-right party of the Third Republic. It was part of the National Bloc right-wing coalition which won the elections after the end of the war. The ARD successively took the name Parti Républicain Démocratique (Democratic Republican Party, PRD)) then Parti Républicain Démocratique et Social ("Social and Republican Democratic Party"), before becoming again the AD.

The ARD was completely discredited after Vichy's collaborationist regime, an option strongly supported by its major leader Pierre-Etienne Flandin and other members such as Joseph Barthélémy. The center-right party tried to reform itself under the direction of Joseph Laignel, who had taken part in the Resistance. It temporarily joined the RGR (Rassemblement des gauches républicaines), before merging into the Centre national des indépendants et paysans (CNI, National Center of Independents and Peasants). The AD, which in contrast to the SFIO or the French Communist Party (PCF) never became a mass political party founded on voting discipline (in these left-wing parties, deputies usually vote in agreement with the party's consensus), turned at that time in little more than an intellectual circle, whose members met during suppers. However, it was dissolved in only 1978, long after its effective disappearance from the political scene.

Under the Third Republic, the majority of the AD's deputies sat in the "Left-wing Republicans" group, the main center-right parliamentary formation (due to a particularity called "sinistrisme," French right-wing politicians have for a very long time refused to admit belonging to the right-wing, as the Republic was traditionally associated with the left-wing and the right-wing with monarchists such as the Legitimists or the Orleanists).

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[edit] Bibliography

  • Rosemonde Samson, L'Alliance républicaine démocratique, une formation de centre, Presses universitaires de Rennes, coll. « Carnot », 2003