Popular Front

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POPULAR FRONT.

In France, the name Popular Front (Front Populaire) refers to three different things: a political strategy, a mass movement, and an experiment in government. Owing to the unprecedented links among them, these elements generated a new political culture that had a lasting influence.

In July 1934 the French Communist Party (PCF; Parti Communiste Français) and the French Socialist Party (SFIO; Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière) ratified a pact of unity of action to combat fascism. In October, Maurice Thorez, secretary-general of the PCF, became worried about the Right's advances and the "fascist threat" and proposed extending this pact to the Radicals, in the form of a "popular front for freedom, labor, and peace." The Socialists and the Radicals were initially reluctant but agreed to the pact after the municipal elections of May 1935. A national committee of the Rassemblement Populaire (Popular Assembly; this official title never supplanted the earlier name) was constituted just after a powerful mass demonstration on 14 July 1935. The Socialists, Communists, and Radicals agreed on the principle of reciprocal withdrawals from the upcoming legislative elections. These withdrawals were conditional upon a common program, which was also ratified by the labor unions (reunited in March as the Confédération Générale du Travail, or CGT) and numerous associations (the Human Rights League, the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals, and so on). This was in all respects a first. The Comintern, initially hostile, upheld this strategy as a model during its Seventh Congress (July 1935)—although this did not bring about its widespread acceptance. In fact, this strategy was only viable in combination with the mass movement that had preceded it and that it helped amplify and modify.

That movement was embodied in the antifascist reaction to the antiparliamentarian offensive of 6 February 1934. It then grew in response to the crisis (demonstrations against government decrees) and the paramilitary leagues and changed in nature with the demonstration of 14 July 1935, in which "the folds of the red flag and the tricolor, the strains of La Marseillaise and the Internationale" were mingled all over France. This description was not gratuitous. At work was a symbiosis among antifascist, republican, and class cultures that allowed for the emergence of a completely new kind of political and popular culture. This nascent culture was also expressed in the working-class municipalities that were gained or preserved in 1935, which became laboratories of the avant-garde in the cultural, political, and social order. Their modern management style was an argument in favor of the accession of the Popular Front to head the country.

This dynamic obviously influenced the results of the legislative elections on 26 April 1936, as the economic crisis raged on. During the first ballot, a slight leftward shift of votes from the Right resulted in victory for the Popular Front. The Socialists outpaced the Radicals, strengthening their status as France's foremost party. The French Communist Party, ranked third within the coalition, made the most progress of all. In the second ballot the electoral system magnified the victory. The Popular Front won with a gain of some forty seats: 149 Socialists, 111 Radicals, and 72 Communists were elected. This shift in the balance of power, both unprecedented and unexpected, put Léon Blum, leader of the majority party within the victorious coalition, at the head of the government, although his party, since after World War I, had objected to the principle of "participation" in a bourgeois government. Because the Communists had opted for support without participation, the government was made up of Socialists and Radicals. Twenty-five of its members had never held positions of ministerial responsibility, and some were very young. For the first time, three undersecretariats were given to women (although the Popular Front's program had not retained the idea of giving them the right to vote). A Ministry of the National Economy was created to allow for the state to intervene more effectively in "all problems of an economic nature." The state further extended its sphere of influence by creating an undersecretariat for Sports and Leisure (prohibited, however, from any reductive subjugation of culture to politics). All of these were instruments of a new government culture. However, it soon became necessary to make compromises in light of an unprecedented situation.

The popular movement that had hastened the victory and helped delineate the new balance of power, far from disappearing with the victory, instead expanded and changed in nature. Léon Blum, immediately charged with constituting the new government, chose to wait for the expiration of the mandate of the Chamber of Deputies on 2 June to obtain his investiture in parliament. An unprecedented "social explosion" occurred in the interim. Between the two electoral ballots, employers fired workers for participating in a work shutdown on 1 May. Immediately after the victory, strikes broke out demanding that the workers be rehired. The strikes began on 11 May in the Breguet aeronautics factories in Le Havre, and from 14 to 20 May spread to various other aeronautics and metallurgical companies, with workers demanding salary increases, the institution of worker delegates, and protection of the right to strike. On 26 May the traditional homage to fallen Communards swelled to unprecedented proportions and became a catalyst. The strikes spread to other industries until only the public sector and the banks were spared—all without any directive from the labor unions beforehand.

On the eve of his parliamentary investiture Blum had obtained assurances that employers were prepared to make significant concessions to end the conflict. On 4 June he was invested by 384 votes against 209. On 7 June he brought representatives of the employers' federation, the Confédération GénéraledelaProduction Française (CGPF), and the CGT together at Matignon. The agreement that was ratified represented a first in the history of social relations in France. It guaranteed a significant increase in salaries, union freedoms, and the institution of shop delegates in establishments with more than ten workers. Collective agreements by branch were to be established. A few days later the parliament adopted the law mandating the forty-hour work week and paid vacation time. It extended compulsory education by one year. But the strikes went on, spreading to additional companies, many of which had no union members, and peaking on 11 June.

The theory of Communist "double dealing" has fizzled out. But the fact that the labor unions were not necessarily behind each of the strikes, and that there was only a weak correlation between unionization and the decision to strike—the railway workers, 22 percent of them unionized, did not strike, while metalworkers, 4 percent of them unionized, spearheaded the strike and made up the largest contingent of strikers—is not enough to prove the opposite hypothesis of the strikes' "spontaneity." The postwar Taylorization of French industry and the resulting de-skilling and intensified pace of production were no doubt the root cause of the strikes, as is evident from their epicenter: the big, rationalized factories that were the anchor points of the general workers' union, the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), and which had felt the effects of the union's initiatives in the major conflicts of the 1920s. Employers' response to the crisis, in the form of increased production and, as a corollary, a rise in fatal accidents, intensified the malaise but did not generate a reaction. The electoral victory, and the hopes that it raised and the fears that it dissipated (relating to intervention of the forces of law and order) were the necessary detonator. The working class, fearful of being deprived of the fruits of the victory, did not wait. The strikes, experienced as a kind of liberation, became an affirmation of restored dignity. They ended only with the signing of collective agreements, some of which came in July or early August. This brought the risk of conflicts of interest with the middle classes involved in the alliance.

Léon Blum's economic choices were inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. His intent was to "prime the pump" by boosting consumer spending and implementing a program of large-scale public works. The strikes, which forced him to act quickly and under pressure, at least led to the adoption of measures consistent with his initial aims in that they generated a tangible rise in purchasing power (the bankruptcy rate soon took a downturn). The few structural reforms included in the program were adopted along with the other measures: reform of the status of the Bank of France for increased state control, a National Wheat Office guaranteeing farm revenues, and nationalization of the armaments industry to bring it out from under the control of the arms dealers. The electrification of rural areas and the construction of roads, schools, and stadiums were supposed to expand the market, respond to new social needs, and modernize the economy. The essential part of the program was carried out in eighty days. Devaluation of the franc, although not included in the program, was meant to boost exports.

The beginnings of a recovery in the autumn were soon quelled by a counteroffensive on the part of employers. Small-scale employers, repudiating their negotiators, put on a show of strength around the question of the forty-hour work week. Further conflicts ensued, and tensions increased. The law on conciliation and arbitration, passed in 1937, was not enough to reverse the trend.

In July 1936 General Francisco Franco's military rebellion and the Spanish civil war increased the tensions: antifascism and pacifism, which had previously seemed to reinforce or be identified with one another, entered into a conflict of interests. Partisans and opponents of nonintervention clashed. On the nonintervention side were the Radicals, on the other the Communists, and between them was a line of demarcation sundering the CGT and the SFIO. Blum, worried about cutting off the country from Great Britain, decided in favor of nonintervention. This did not prevent the Radical senators from repudiating his government, which fell in June 1937. The Popular Front for a time tried to outlast Blum, then disappeared in April 1938 with the constitution of É douard Daladier's government, which expanded toward the Right and took up the offensive against the forty-hour week, a symbol of the "ray of sunshine." The failure of the strike of November 1938 led to the liquidation of the remaining social gains, except for paid holidays. Just a few months later, Marshall Philippe Pétain blamed the defeat on the "spirit of enjoyment" to which the Popular Front had given free rein.

According to some studies, there was truth to this accusation. The victory of the Popular Front, perceived at the time as putting a brake on the rise of fascism in Europe, eventually created the conditions for a reaction. Young people, women, and immigrants, excluded from universal suffrage but transformed during these months into actors in a new mode of political life, and the world of labor, strong in its restored dignity, were the pivotal elements in the Resistance against the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupation in World War II.

What is more, the Popular Front occasioned a cultural revolution that profoundly transformed ways of experiencing and participating in French society. In this sense it was far more than a "ray of sunshine." In the political order, it meant that the French Left thereafter defined itself in relation to a twofold heritage of class and democracy, in the sometimes complex but henceforth indissociable relations between them. The ongoing interrelationship between collective mobilization and parliamentary action redefined politics. Individualism in politics declined. Organizations of all kinds, parties of the Left and the Right, unions and associations, all grew larger. The idea that "it pays to fight" became permanently entrenched in the collective consciousness and helped strengthen this culture of struggle.

In the cultural order, an active "cultural policy" in advance of its time allowed for democratic access to culture, which in all its forms—scientific and artistic, popular and scholarly, classic and avant-garde—received government support. The relationships that intellectuals and artists established with the world of labor generated renewed forms of expression, mainly in mass culture, with photography, song, and cinema at the forefront. These forms were neither proletarian nor official but popular, in the image of the experience that gave rise to them.

But "culture" must also be understood in a broader sense. Here, change was expressed in the dignity that was restored to work and, by extension, to the body, its former appendage, through access to free time and the new forms of socialization in this freed time. Workers' relationship to history and to national (and international) consciousness was transformed. The experience permanently marked the collective consciousness. It enabled the union of the Left to maintain a vista of expectations until 1981, and it shaped an image that long served to perpetuate the view of the general strike as the ultimate expression of positive collective action.

See alsoCommunism; Labor Movements; Socialism; Strikes; Trade Unions.