Well-established academic tradition indicates that practicing Catholics in France are about twenty times more likely to vote for candidates of the conservative party, the UMP, than non-Catholics. Yet this same trend does not hold for the largest far-right party, the Front National (FN). In fact, practicing Catholics vote less frequently for the FN, and the FN electorate is as secular as any other political party's. After reviewing the existing literature on far-right voting and the Catholic vote in France, I developed two likely hypotheses: the underrepresentation of practicing Catholics in demographic groups most likely to vote for the FN, and a fundamental clash of important values. I tested these hypotheses using voting data for the former, and both survey responses and articles in the Catholic press for the latter.
