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Rally the Centrists

French political association

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2025
Entity authorityQ7287108 ↗
Source-derived summary

Rally the Centrists (French: Rassembler les centristes) is a French political association founded on July 16, 2008 by Jean Arthuis, a centrist Senator of Mayenne. The association unites elected officials and activists of centrist political ideology, most of which used to be members of the Union for French Democracy (UDF). The association's goal is to prepare the creation of a new centrist political party which would unite all the centrist forces, currently divided between parties such as the Democratic Movement, New Centre, Radical Party, Civic Alliance for Democracy in Europe.

Creation

Upon the dissolution of the UDF into the MoDem in 2007, a number of UDF officials, including Arthuis, were skeptical about the new party. However, they at first joined the MoDem, participating in the Villepinte Congress, but they later distanced themselves from the independent strategy of the MoDem's President François Bayrou. This came to a climax following the MoDem's poor showing in the municipal and cantonal elections in March 2008.

On May 21, 2008, Arthuis and Thierry Cornillet (MoDem MEP who has since joined the Radical Party) published a petition signed by 17 Centrist Union Senators, one deputy and four MEPs.

Members

Since the organization is not a political party, signatories may opt to remain members of their respective parties.

Senators: Nicolas About (MoDem), Jean Arthuis, Claude Biwer (NC), Jean Boyer (NC), Marcel Deneux, Yves Détraigne (MoDem), Muguette Dini, Françoise Férat (MoDem), Christian Gaudin, Adrien Giraud (MoDem), Joseph Kergueris, Jean-Claude Merceron, Catherine Morin-Desailly (NC), Philippe Nogrix (former Senator), Anne-Marie Payet, André Vallet (former Senator), François Zocchetto

Deputies: Thierry Benoit

MEPs: Thierry Cornillet (ex-MoDem-Radical); Jean-Marie Cavada, Claire Gibault, Janelly Fourtou (ACDE)

Michel Mercier, former President of the Centrist Union group and now Minister of Agriculture, was also a signatory. According to Laurent de Boissieu, a political journalist, as of April 16, 2009, the organization included 16 Senators; of which 6 were members of the MoDem, 4 of the NC and 6 were members of neither of these parties.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rally the Centrists” as french political association. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2008, 2007, 2009—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Rally, Centrists and French can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as french political association. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7287108. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2007 and 2009.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Rally the Centrists”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Rally the Centrists primary sources, Rally the Centrists archive and Rally research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rally the Centrists”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Rally the Centrists” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.