The Mouvement Républicaine Populaire was an important but relatively short-lived French political party. It was, in essence, a Catholic-based Christian socialist party, built on the Catholic part of the Resistance movement in the Second World War, and was electorally very popular throughout the Fourth Republic. This was particularly significant because the preceding Third Republic had not entirely accepted Roman Catholics as having a legitimate place in politics, and it was in part the Resistance activity of Catholic groups that made them legitimate, just as happened to the communist parties in France and Italy.
The MRP represented a moderate social democratic position which at the same time tried to deny the significance of class factors, and stressed Christian duty to others and traditional moral values, as in protection of family life. As France modernized and urbanized its social structure during the 1950s this position became less attractive, and once de Gaulle took power and created the Fifth Republic the party all but vanished, though it had been a major coalition partner during most of the Fourth Republic. MRP voters moved, on the whole, to the Gaullist parties, the chief representative of which is now the Rassemblement pour la République, and what religious voting still exists in France has continued to benefit either these parties or the Independent Republicans, now part of the Union pour la Démocratie Française (see French party system).
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