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Heirs of the environmental movement of the 1970s, France’s Greens (Les Verts), founded in 1984, originally refused to position themselves on the left-right axis. They viewed this axis as obsolete, despite the political background of a large number of environmental leaders, who had been members of leftist organizations, especially the PSU, in the previous decade. Nevertheless, despite their stated intention to bridge the left-right divide, and perhaps precisely because of the political trajectory of many of them, in their first years of existence the Greens attempted to establish a dialogue with the alternative left. Moreover, they imagined themselves as leading a burgeoning alternative camp, without relinquishing their political identity, or the idea that environmentalism was a new political paradigm, beyond socialism and liberalism. From that point onward, an ambiguous relationship was established between the ecologists and the alternative left: although such an alliance could have brought benefits to each side, especially in elections, mutual distrust, such as the environmentalists’ fear of infiltration by the far left, made convergence difficult. After 1986 and the emergence within the Greens’ leadership of a “green-green” majority, the rapprochement with the alternative left was no longer the objective of the party as a whole, but only that of Green activists furthest to the left, who continued to believe in a great “red-green” convergence. Faced with the candidacy of the ex-communist Pierre Juquin in 1988, these activists sometimes found it difficult to state their position between Juquin and the Green candidate, Antoine Waechter. By the end of the decade, the convergence appeared to be a failure. It nevertheless allowed the French Greens to claim a second political heritage, through former far left activists, including Trotskyites and Maoists, who continued their engagement with environmentalism. Some of them were among the main proponents of an alliance with the Socialist Party in the following decade.