popular front

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Broad collaboration between left-wing and bourgeois parties. Espoused, in a policy turnabout, at the Seventh Congress of Comintern 1935 which focused upon the anti-fascist struggle. Other important examples were the Popular Front Governments in France and Spain (1936-8).

— Geraldine Lievesley

Popular Front (Front Populaire). Name given both to the anti-fascist alliance of left-wing organizations and individuals in 1934-6 and to the resulting government, led by Léon Blum in 1936-7. Historically it has been seen both as a high-point of left-wing achievement and as a glorious failure. Blum later said that the Popular Front was an ‘instinctive defence reflex’ against two dangers: the threat to the republic from the right-wing paramilitary ligues, and the depression which hit the economy during the early 1930s. The alliance was inspired by the violent anti-parliamentarian demonstration on 6 February 1934 by several ligues in the wake of the Stavisky affair. Police fired, killing demonstrators, and the new prime minister, Edouard Daladier, resigned. The prospect of fascism in France, with Hitler newly in power in Germany, stimulated a counter-protest and strike by left-wing groupings including the Socialists and the Communists. Once fratricidal enemies, the two parties embarked on a rapprochement, and the call for a Rassemblement Populaire (the name found interchangeably with Front Populaire at the time) resulted in a massive demonstration of unity on 14 July 1935, at which participants took an oath to defend democratic liberties and to call for bread, work, and peace.

‘Populaire’ means ‘of the people’, usually with an emphasis on the working class, but the Front aimed for a wider appeal. The moderate Radical Party joined in 1935; and the French Communist Party surprised its allies by extending the hand of comradeship (la main tendue) to Catholics, farmers, and the petite bourgeoisie in the interests of the cause. Apart from the ligues, the Front's enemies were defined as the ‘200 familles’, a reference to the governors of the Banque de France. A common programme was drafted for the election of April 1936, in which the Front Populaire parties won a majority of 376 to 222 seats and Blum formed a government. The victory had sparked off an unprecedented strike-wave in May-June, with factory occupations, and the cabinet's first task was to offer the workers a revolutionary package, the Accords Matignon, including paid holidays, a 40-hour week, and collective bargaining. In the popular imagination, the strikes and reforms, especially les congés payés, were the most lasting memory of the Front, explaining why it was both venerated by the Left and execrated by the Right.

Blum's government intended to innovate. It contained no Communists, who declined to join, but included three women junior ministers, at a time when Frenchwomen still could not vote, and a junior minister for leisure. In the short year of its existence it banned the ligues and passed further progressive legislation, including raising the school-leaving age to 14. But it was forced onto the defensive over the economy (flight of capital, devaluation, productivity problems) and the international situation (especially the Spanish Civil War, over which Blum stuck to a policy of non-intervention). Neither the Radicals nor the Communists maintained their support unwaveringly, and Blum resigned in June 1937 when the Senate refused to grant him special powers over finance.

The Popular Front was accompanied by a number of sympathetic intellectual and cultural activities, including the founding of journals like Vendredi, the forming of the Intellectuals' Committee Against Fascism, and of Ciné-Liberté, the body behind the production of Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise, a film which can be read as the French Revolution revisited through the Popular Front. It is associated in many minds with the outdoor movement, the vogue for youth hostels and youth organizations. The opposition it provoked, one component of which was antisemitism, was reflected in the conflict between Vichy and Resistance during the war [see Occupation And Resistance]: Pétain explicitly associated the Popular Front with the esprit de jouissance as opposed to the esprit de sacrifice, blaming it for the defeat of 1940, although modern historians acknowledge its role in belatedly boosting French arms production, and most of them view its social pro-worker measures as long overdue in 1936. It is evoked in many memoirs and novels, including Queneau's Le Dimanche de la vie, and is frequently referred to as one of the moments privilégiés of the history of the Left: ‘everyone was 20 years old in 1936’ (J.-P. Le Chanois).

[Sian Reynolds]

Bibliography

• B. Cacérès, Allons au-devant de la vie (1981)
• J. Kergoat, La France du Front populaire (1986)
• J. Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy 1934-38 (1988)