The Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP) was set up at the beginning of 1951 to preside over an electoral alliance between two parliamentary groups: the Centre National des Indépendants (CNI) and the Centre Républicain d'Action Paysanne et Sociale. It was a loose grouping that only really functioned at election time. Candidates presented by the CNIP decided which of its constituent groups in parliament they would join after their election.

Roger Duchet, who initiated the Centre and became its secretary general, was a self-consciously machiavellian senator from Burgundy. Like many Independents he had been a Radical before the war, and he had become mayor of Beaune at the unusually early age of 26. The functions of the CNIP were ill defined. Duchet was not a politician of great national prominence and he presented a modest view of his role. He suggested that the CNIP was merely a clearing house for electoral alliances. However, this apparently humble position provided Duchet with considerable power. This was reflected in the allegation that leaders of the CNIP were a hidden and self-selecting oligarchy. It was also reflected in the resentment that more established politicians, notably Paul Reynaud, came to feel towards him: in March 1951, a terse circular reminded Independents that the CNIP was just an administrative body ‘the titular secretary general of which has no power to lay down the policy of the Républicans Indépendants’.