electoral setback prompted Bergery to look to other like-minded allies. However, while the Communist, Socialist and Radical-Socialist Parties all had factions with similar ideas, none would quit their party over the issue. This led Bergery to turn to the small Catholic-socialist group Troisième Voie (Third Way). Troisième Voie had begun as a reflection circle linked with Esprit, a progressive Catholic journal concerned with discovering a solution to the economic crisis, via a 'third way' between socialism and laissez-faire liberalism. Georges Izard, a Catholic intellectual and former ministerial undersecretary, disagreed with the prevailing tendency within Esprit to pursue this third way through a modernised social-Catholicism. In 1933 he left to found Troisième Force. The Social Front In November 1934 Bergery's Common Front and Izard's Troisième Voie held an assembly and merged into a unified party. This was initially named the Social Front, as the Socialist and Communist parties had formed an alliance also labelled the term 'Common Front' had recently begun to be largely associated with the recent alliance of the Marxist PCF, PUP and SFIO parties. In July 1935 an alliance of anti-fascist parties and civil society organisations was founded, known as the Popular Front. The Social Front was one of the original signatories. In early1936, to avoid confusion between the Popular Front and Social Front, the latter renamed itself as the more distinctive Frontist Party. The Frontist Party and the Popular Front By mid-1935 all of the three major left-wing parties had converged onto an agreement on the need to cooperate on a programme of anti-fascism, state-intervention and the defence of liberal parliamentary institutions. The existence of the Popular Front, therefore, undercut the Frontist Party's very raison d'etre. In the elections of 1936, the Frontist Party had little success. Its two co-founders, Bergery and Izard, were both elected to Parliament, but two deputies was too few to form a distinct parliamentary group and thus during the 1936-1940 legislature had to sit among the other left-leaning independents and minor parties, in the Independent Left technical group. The fact that the Frontist Party had just two deputies, each of them a co-founder of the party and each originally from a distinct political tradition, Radicalism and social-Catholicism, meant that the party was permanently split in two. The Troisième Force wing of the party concluded that the weak showing in the elections of 1936 signalled the failure of the Frontist Party's political goals,