coalition partner in any government dominated by the bourgeois republican left; Renaudel's faction of thirty reformist socialists sought to enter government, and had been expelled from the SFIO for recurrently supporting centre-left republican cabinets, setting up a dissident social-democratic party to the right of the SFIO and left of the Socialist Republicans. History These splinters meant that by 1935 the French Chamber of Deputies contained a diffuse array of about sixty parliamentarians situated between the SFIO and the PRRS, broadly sharing a tradition of non-Marxist reformist socialism and Radical republicanism. After Renaudel's death in the spring of 1935 the PSDF leader Marcel Déat opened negotiations with the two Socialist Republican parties to coordinate the three groups' activities in parliament. This led first to their establishing an 'inter-group' (combined parliamentary party) in the summer of 1935, and subsequently to the creation of a formal political party in November 1935. The USR was joined by other left-wing independents who were not members of the three original groups, including the dissident socialist Ludovic Frossard and the dissident republican Eugène Frot. In the elections of 1936 the USR aspired to act as a midpoint between traditional Radicalism and orthodox Marxian socialism, expecting that the political crisis since 1933 had weakened voters' satisfaction with the traditional left parties: the Socialists for their rigid refusal to enter a reformist government that could mitigate the effects of the Great Depression; the Radical-Socialists for their ostensible lack of principle for having switched from an alliance with the Socialists to one with the conservatives midway through the legislature. The USR hoped that by offering French voters a synthesis of both main parties, a centre-left republican party committed to a systematic programme of economic state intervention, it could offer a major political alternative. However the formation of the Popular Front made this offer redundant. The SFIO now accepted participation in a coalition government dedicated to socio-economic reforms, while the PRRRS had now publicly positioned itself as a party of anti-fascism and thereby pledged to remain faithful to the electoral alliance of the left. The USR thus failed to achieve the electoral breakthrough it had anticipated. Before the election its merged parliamentary party had contained 47 deputies; after, it had been reduced to a mere 27, fewer than the PSR and PSF had achieved on their own in 1932. The Neo-Socialist wing of the party was the hardest hit - their