Front Populaire

I

Introduction

Front Populaire, name given to coalitions of left-wing and centre parties that formed governments in France and Spain in the late 1930s. The parties were united by the need to face down the threat posed by the far right. In France the Front Populaire governed between June 1936 and October 1938, when disagreements over the Munich Pact brought it to an end. In Spain, the Frente Popular came to power in February 1936, sparking an increase in tensions between left and right that culminated in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

II

The Formation of the Front Populaire

The Front Populaire was born during the Third Republic from a common reaction against the extreme right by the parties of the left. Demonstrations by right-wing groups such as Action Française on February 6, 1934, sparked by the Stavisky Affair (a scandal involving a financier of Russian-Jewish origin that compromised the Radical Party government) revealed the fragility of the republic. The parties of the left responded by staging a demonstration on February 12. The initially separate processions of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF; French Communist Party) and the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO; French Section of the Workers’ International, or Socialists) spontaneously joined together. Other demonstrations of anti-fascist feeling took place elsewhere in France. The PCF, led by Maurice Thorez, received orders from the Soviet-sponsored international communist organization (the Comintern) to abandon the strategy of “class against class”, and established contacts with reformist left-wing groups, until then regarded as “social traitors”. On July 14, 1935, a huge anti-fascist demonstration united communists, socialists, supporters of the centrist Radical Party, and members of France’s biggest trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT; General Labour Confederation). This successful display of common purpose presaged the forging of an electoral pact for the 1936 legislative elections. The coalition agreed on a moderate political platform.

The elections took place on April 26 and May 3, 1936. Compared with the elections of 1932 the advances made by the left were moderate. However, the political equilibrium was transformed by the formation of the Front Populaire. The Radical Party lost support, and its number of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies fell from 160 to 106; the Socialist vote remained stagnant (around 60,000 votes); the Communists doubled their vote, and increased their number of representatives from 11 to 72. Overall, the Front Populaire dominated the Chamber, with its 376 deputies facing 248 deputies of the right.

III

The Front Populaire In Power

The victory was stunning. After some hesitation, the Socialist leader Léon Blum was named prime minister by President Albert Lebrun and Blum’s government was formed on June 4, 1936. The government did not include any Communists, who had chosen a policy of “support without participation”. The 35 government portfolios were distributed among the Socialists and the Radicals. Édouard Daladier, the leader of the Radical Party, was deputy prime minister and minister for defence. Roger Salengro was minister for the interior, and Vincent Auriol became the minister for finance. Three women were appointed to the government, at a time when women were still not entitled to vote in general elections in France.

The government took office in an atmosphere of crisis. A series of strikes had started in May 11 in Le Havre. In May and June, perhaps 2 million had joined the strike, threatening the stability of the state. The right alleged that it was part of a Jewish-Soviet plot. In fact, the strike movement was largely spontaneous, and saw the emergence of new forms of industrial action. The strikes were not planned, and workers occupied factories in a spirit of celebration and revenge.

Employers appealed to Blum to resolve the situation. He opened negotiations with the employers and the unions, which resulted in the Matignon Accords, providing an average rise in salaries of 12 per cent, introducing a 40-hour week and two weeks’ paid holiday, and guaranteeing trade unions legal recognition. As a result of the agreement the PCF called on workers to return to work. The process of reform continued, with the extension of compulsory schooling to 14 years of age, the nationalization of armaments industries and the Bank of France, and, from June, the dissolution of extreme right-wing groups.

The euphoria that greeted the creation of the Front Populaire government was genuine and unprecedented in the history of the French Republic. A distinctive Front Populaire culture developed, represented by the poem “La Fete” by Jacques Prévert, the films La Belle Équipe, directed by Julien Duvivier and La Marseillaise, directed by Jean Renoir (and financed by a national subscription organized by the CGT), and the song “Y’a d’la joie” (“There is joy”) by Charles Trenet.

IV

The Fall of the Front Populaire

However, during the same summer of 1936 the Front Populaire experienced its first rupture, over the question of the Spanish Civil War. Against the advice of the PCF, the Blum government refused official aid to the Spanish Republicans to assist their fight against the armies of General Franco. Blum was anxious not to offend the pacifism of the veterans’ associations, and the majority of the Radical and Socialist voters, and in August made an agreement with the United Kingdom that neither country would intervene in Spain. On December 4, the Communists refused to back the Blum government’s foreign policy.

The second crisis to strike the Blum government was the Salengro Affair. Roger Salengro, the minister of the interior, was accused by the extreme right-wing press of having deserted from the army during World War I. The scandal was huge, and even though the allegations were without foundation the campaign organized by the anti-Semitic press against Salengro led to his suicide in November 1936. His successor, Marx Dormoy, took action to uproot the right-wing terrorist movement La Cagoule, which had coordinated the attack on Salengro.

The third, and fatal, crisis for the Popular Front was economic. The Front Populaire had triumphed in the context of a deep world economic crisis from which France had struggled to escape. Blum and his colleagues, inspired by the example of the New Deal in the United States, followed an interventionist economic policy inspired by Keynesianism. However, very quickly the cost of these policies caused a fall in the value of the franc. The budget deficit continued to grow and Blum announced a “pause” in the economic reforms in February 1937.

Blum found himself attacked by the Radicals for following policies that hurt the middle classes, and was criticized for the “pause” by the Communists and the trade unionists. The government also came under attack from the left when workers participating in a demonstration against the nationalist Croix-de-Fer organization were killed by the police in May 1937. Shortly after, on June 21, Blum resigned, to be succeeded by the Radical Camille Chautemps. The new government continued some elements of the reform programme, for example nationalizing France’s railways, but was otherwise marked by a shift to the right.

The left retained its majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but efforts to relaunch the Front Populaire government (Blum returned as its leader between March and April 1938) failed. Meanwhile, the government remained blind to the emerging threat of Nazi Germany. The coming to office of Édouard Daladier as leader of the government in April 1938 marked the end of the Front Populaire. The signing of the Munich Agreement in September undermined the anti-fascism that had rallied popular support, and new laws set back some of the gains won at Matignon, arousing the hostility of the CGT. A national strike was called for November 30, 1938, though it was a relative failure.

The total achievements of the Front Populaire were rather limited. However, the outburst of joy at its election, its unprecedented character as a national movement, its inclusion of women ministers, and the union of left-wing parties that sustained it in office contributed to a myth that fascinated the French left for the rest of the century.