All of them, except Simon, were former National Front (FN) members who had split off from the party in 1980 after dismissing it as becoming "too conservative" and "too Zionist" following the death of François Duprat in 1978.Their aim was to "organize French nationalists and legally diffuse their doctrine", but the racist ideology of a "white Europe from Brest to Vladivostok" failed to convince the public.[7][8] Two years after the foundation of the Nationalist Party in June 1985, a group of radicals split off the PNF to create the French and European Nationalist Party (PNFE),[3] whose members were involved in several terrorists attacks in the late 1980s, and which replaced the PNF as the main neo-Nazi group in France until its own dissolution in 1999.[9] After the dissolution of L'Œuvre Française in 2013, its president Yvan Benedetti, along with André Gandillon, the redactor-in-chief of Militant, reactivated the French Nationalist Party as a new outset for the banned association.[14][15] As of 2016, the party was headed by a 15-member presidium, which included Jean-François Simon (president), André Gandillon (secretary general), Éric Leroy (treasurer), and Yvan Benedetti (spokesman).