to sit in a separate parliamentary grouping from the main party (such as the Popular Democratic group, the Alsatian Popular Action group, or Pernot's Social Action group). These changes were reflected in the handover of power from the Belle Époque industrialist and conservative leader Auguste Isaac to the younger militant and academic Louis Marin in 1925. Under Marin's leadership, the Republican Federation slowly transitioned from a confederation of local political bosses into a more streamlined political party on the model created by the Republican Left at the turn of the century, becoming more hierarchisesd with the creation of youth sections while ordinary members were given more weight. Although several members participated to the Doumergue, Flandin and Laval governments of 1934–1935, most of the party opposed itself to this cooperation with the republican centre, which seemed to vindicate the "rallying of the center" (concentration républicaine) strategy advocated by the centre-right Democratic Republican Alliance. Following the experience of the Bloc National first and then of the Cartel des gauches (Left-Wing Cartel) in 1924, many voices inside the party argued in favor of a strategy enforcing the unity of the right-wings instead of a centrist strategy. After the 6 February 1934 riots which toppled the second Cartel des gauches, the majority of the party chose this right-wing strategy, taking the side of the opponents to the Republic accused of being anti-patriotic. The Republican Federation thus formed in 1937 during the Popular Front a Front de la liberté (Freedom Front) along with Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti populaire français (French Popular Party) and the small Parti républicain national et social and French Agrarian and Peasant Party (Fleurant Agricola). Although this Freedom Front was theorized by Louis Marin and the other leaders of the party as a tactic against the growing influence of Colonel François de La Rocque's French Social Party—one of the first right-wing French mass party—this union also corresponded with the ideology of the leading classes outside Paris (such as Victor Perret in the Rhône region) and of the activists opposed both to the lefts and to the centre-right parties such as the Democratic Alliance or the Popular Democrats. This shift to the right of the party during the 1930s explain how several important pre-war figures of the party (such as Laurent Bonnevay) left it. The Republican Federation acted as the nexus between parliamentary conservatives and the anti-Republican nationalist right organized in the various