campaigning for office through political parties. History Following the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Vichy regime, the French extreme-right was driven underground. It resurfaced as a force able to contest elections in the mid-1950s, when some far-right activists successfully returned to the public arena through the Poujadist movement. In the following two decades, the country's extreme-right movement then rallied around the cause of the French Empire, opposing the decolonisation movements that were gaining strength in Indochina and Algeria. A number of far-right paramilitary groups were formed in this environment, including the Secret Army Organisation (Organisation armée secrète - OAS) and the Revolutionary Army (Armée Révolutionnaire - AR). Adopting another approach, a number of extreme-right intellectuals decided that they would try to make many of their ideas more socially respectable through the creation of the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation (GRECE). The acronym means "Greece" in French, and the organization has emphasized the pagan values of Ancient Greece. 1968–1974: Establishing GRECE GRECE was founded in the southern French city of Nice in January 1968, shortly before the May 1968 events in France. It initially had forty members, among the most prominent of whom were Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vial, Jean-Claude Valla, Dominique Venner, Jacques Bruyas and Jean-Jacques Mourreau. The political scientist Tamir Bar-On has stated that "the intellectual evolution of both GRECE and leading ND intellectuals is definitely situated within the revolutionary Right milieu". GRECE has been described as a "logical alternative" for those "young French nationalist militants" to join, given the 1958 dissolution of the Jeune Nation group, the 1962 collapse of the OAS, and the defeat of the European Rally for Liberty in the 1967 legislative election. These young radicals were ultra-nationalists and anti-communists, and centred their beliefs around a defence of Western society, scientific racism, and eugenics. They were opposed to the migration of non-white peoples from former French colonies into France itself, and this led them to adopt anti-colonial and anti-imperialist perspectives. De Benoist came to be regarded as the "undisputed leader" of the Nouvelle Droite, and its "most authoritative spokesman". He had previously been a member of the ultra-nationalist Fédération des Étudiants Nationalistes and involved with the racialist Europe-Action journal, both of which have been characterised as reflecting ND ideas in their "embryonic form". GRECE inherited a number of key themes from Europe-Action, among them "the anti-Christian stance,