What I Am Reading: "The Popular Front in France" by Julian Jackson

This academic history brought me a lot of clarity on the Popular Front era. It was clinical and compartmentalized, a necessary counterpart to the more personal Blum biography I just read. Léon Blum was the main Popular Front PM, but the Popular Front was not just his administration. This book recounts the Popular Front (PF) as a government, as a political coalition, and as a mass movement.

Jackson starts and ends the book the way I think all histories should be framed: through historiography. The PF is viewed by some leftist historians as a betrayal of “the revolution,” viewed favorably by many institutional socialists, and for the communists a source of pride in their own heroism. The memory was invoked often during the Fourth Republic; the Communists praised it while seeking to align themselves with the Socialist parties and condemned it in the opposing scenario. By the time of the book’s writing in the late 80s, the PF had largely disappeared from contemporary discourse, and was only a historical curio. The institutional set-up of the Fifth Republic meant that the Mitterand government had to stick it out in power and live the slow drift to the center, whereas Blum’s government fifty years earlier had been permitted to go out in a blaze of glory.

The PF began in 1934, with an official political agreement was signed between the Communist, Socialist, and Radical parties, and ended with the ascent of the Daladier government in 1938; which relied on a different electoral coalition, despite drawing from the same parliament. Speaking of that parliament, this book contains a much appreciated table of election results. The book compartmentalizes the PF’s social, economic, foreign, and cultural policies, as well as the response to the era from groups opposed to the PF. Of primary consideration is the fact that the PF was backed by a mass movement in a way that other governments of the era had not been: various social classes (laborers, peasants, government functionaries) had been able to overcome their political differences to band together against encroaching fascism. This resulted in a the era’s politics placing a large cultural footprint, helped along by the fact that the institution of the 40-hour workweek brought a considerable number of workers into the world of leisure, and new institutions needed to be created to accommodate them.

It was this cultural segment that I found the most interesting, as the political and economic histories are easy to find and sometimes even easy to digest. The PF government was less concerned with the content of culture and more concerned with the democratization of cultural institutions, the museums and theater and such to the masses. Similarly, the intellectual elements (an important part of post-Dreyfus French politics) of the PF were less concerned with propagandizing leftism and more concerned with placing the left with the broader French republican tradition, identifying themselves as the true heirs of the national character. It can be surprising to hear Stalin-era communists push this line, whom I always think of as hardliners working an angle. But, in this case the angle they were working was an effort to effectively counter fascism, so they were allowed some pragmatism and assimilation.

The PF appointed an undersecretary of sport, Leo Lagrange, and he was largely responsible for organizing the infrastructure to accommodate working-class vacationing (side-note, some other undersecretaries, the result of Blum’s cabinet reorganization, were the first women to serve in this capacity). Some historians have argued that new hostel and beach and hiking clubs and other such organizations were in fact too apolitical, and that the PF missed a golden opportunity to inculcate Republican teachings and sentiments in the newly empowered working class. In any case, the new weekends and two weeks of paid vacation were the major domestic accomplishment of the PF, and are its primary legacy to this day.

The book shed additional light on the PF’s foreign and economic policies. The government had a difficult time in the grips of the depression, forced into monetary devaluation that they had initially pledged not to make and hamstrung by the ceiling to productivity that the 40-hour week produced. After initial reforms (which were strongly incentivized by the spontaneous occupation of factories undertaken by workers after the PF’s electoral victory), Blum’s government enacted a “pause” in reform, which was intended to bring about economic stability to stop the flight of capital, and allow the country’s economic life to acclimate itself to the new paradigm. Blum’s first (and main) government was brought down in 1937 by the Senate’s defeat of an economic bill intended to give the government the power to make decrees – I was glad that Jackson explained this in a forthright manner, because the Blum biography didn’t hammer this home for me, a non-Frenchman. The decree power was intended to be used moderately, and in continuance of the “pause” policies, but the conservative Radicals in the Senate finally had the opportunity to defeat a government that they opposed, despite their party’s presence in its coalition (the Radicals were a left, pro-Republican bourgeoise party). Blum could have intimidated the Senate into supporting his bill through mass action, but did not, for disputed reasons, theorized by some historians as being because of his stalemate on foreign policy. In any case, this was the fall of the main and most successful Popular Front administration. A government by Camille Chautemps, later (if I am not mistaken?) a traitor, failed to resolve the economic stalemate as well, so Blum was brought back in a brief, doomed government for a month in 1938. Here he pursued a harder line on Spain and on rearmament but also inevitably failed to get his economic policies enacted, and resigned. I understand all of this much better now (again, not that the Blum biography was bad, but it was a fundamentally different book). After Blum’s fall, Daladier, the leftish Radical leader, ran a different, centrist coalition.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy, Blum did better in his brief second government (March-April 1938), ending the Chautemps paralysis over the Anschluss, beefing up rearmament, and allowing Pierre Cot to secretly send planes to Spain. The second Blum government’s Spanish policy, “too little, too late,” reminds me of a book I read last year, FDR and the Spanish Civil War by Dominic Tierney, that has a similar progression of neutrality to sympathy to covert action on behalf of the Spanish Republicans. However, Blum’s first government (1936-7), as is well known, was backed into a non-interventionist corner over Spain by their Radical members and British allies, and this is the government that could have better taken decisive action. I think the main foreign policy issue of the PF era is that nobody was willing to take decisive action, understandably unwilling to set off a possible powder keg, especially since Britain and France didn’t have much capacity to fight Germany at this time. France had a system of Central European alliances, but it was a bit ramshackle (the Poles wouldn’t let the Soviets through their territory to help Czechoslovakia, for example). Blum wouldn’t get too close to the Soviets for fear of setting Hitler off, he didn’t make much effort to crowbar the Italians away from Hitler because Spain was too big a price to pay, he wouldn’t antagonize the skittish British because they might not back him in a fight. It all ended badly.

The book paid a lot of attentions to the trade union syndicates that helped influence policy from outside of the government, namely the CGT and its leader, Leon Jouhaux. This org had its own internal battles between those who wished the syndicates to remain aloof from politics as they had historically, and those who urged involvement. It also dedicates a chapter to the reaction on the Right, covering how there weren’t any organizes fascist movements in France worthy of the name, just a coalition of establishment right-wingers in the institutions. This includes notes on how industrialists stuck back against union factory occupations by maneuvering the working class against itself, and using their economic power to hinder the government. It also covers the failure of Communist outreach to Catholics, and the toothlessness of Catholic “Third Power” advocates who wished to reach common ground with the leftists on some issues (and thus indirectly helped me better understand the Catholic Center Party in the Weimar Republic, but that’s a whole different rise-of-fascism story).

This was a good book, it plugged a lot of the holes in the Blum biography. It assumes some basic familiarity with the era, and doesn’t always help with the insufferable French references to dates as a metonym for historical events (“we will never allow another 14 February! [or whatever]”), but it was a good second book on my France v. Fascism reading pile.

PIERRE COT

Cot mostly appears in the same capacities as in the Blum bio: supporting Spain, sending Spain planes, purges of the Air Force command (one of the more successful purges in removing right-wing officers). He also worked to create flying clubs, as part of the recreation initiative. It was also theorized by some historians that efforts to reach out to the Soviet Union to form a stronger defensive alliance were intended to forestall pro-soviet actions by Cot. He came to life a little more in the previous book. We bide our time.

As an additional addendum, I was brought back at one point of Laurent Binet’s musings on Franco-Czechoslovakian relations in HHhH, where he notes (and I fortuitously quoted) Daladier’s use of the specter of fascism to roll back the 40 hour workweek. This in fact comes up again here, after the end of the Popular Front. Daladier had a tough reputation, owing to his status as a Radical Party disciplinarian (thank you to Jackson for a chapter providing a biographic outline of the dramatis personae). However, he was in fact quite indecisive, and a pragmatist at heart. Thus, with his new centrist coalition, he rolled back some of Blum’s economic reforms, dispensing with the price control mechanisms meant to finance them in favor of economic liberalization. This book notes explicitly that the popularity gained from Munich gave Daladier the political capital to be able to undertake this effort (p.187).