# National Rally The **National Rally** (Rassemblement National, RN; founded 1972 as the Front National, renamed in 2018) is France's radical-right party and the European case study in **de-demonization** (*dédiabolisation*) — the strategy of scrubbing a party's extremist origins to make it electable without changing its core demand structure. Founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen with a cadre that included former Waffen-SS members, Vichy nostalgists, and OAS veterans, the FN spent its first decades as the pariah vehicle of open Pétainism and Holocaust minimization (Le Pen's serial "detail of history" convictions). [[Marine Le Pen]]'s makeover after 2011 — renaming the party, expelling her father, professionalizing the cadre, fronting Jordan Bardella as the post-toxic generation — converted it into a perennial second-round presidential force and, at points in the mid-2020s, the largest single party in the National Assembly, while her 2025 embezzlement conviction and ineligibility ruling turned the succession question live. The KB tracks the RN on three files: **the de-demonization template** itself, now the standard playbook of the European radical right (the test being whether the [[Philippe Pétain]] / [[Vichy France]] questions ever get answered differently in substance, not just tone — Le Pen's 2017 Vél d'Hiv denial suggested the ceiling); **the normalization ratchet**, in which mainstream parties absorb RN framings on immigration and *laïcité*-as-weapon while the RN absorbs respectability — the cordon sanitaire eroding from both sides; and **the transnational web** — Putin-orbit financing history (the 2014 Russian loan), the [[Viktor Orbán]] alliance, kinship with [[Vox (Spain)]] and the broader [[National Conservatism]] circuit, and the American right's increasingly open embrace. It is the European party the American files cite most when modeling how yesterday's pariah becomes tomorrow's governing option. ## See Also - [[French History Hub]] — the fifty-year arc, and the ideas the party inherited - [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] — the founder, and the man expelled to make the rebrand credible - [[Jordan Bardella]] — the post-toxic generation - [[Algerian War]] — the war the party was founded out of - [[Laïcité]] — the vocabulary the de-demonization runs on - [[Marine Le Pen]] — the de-demonizer - [[Philippe Pétain]] / [[Vichy France]] — the origins question that never closes - [[Vox (Spain)]] / [[Viktor Orbán]] / [[National Conservatism]] — the family