The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6

Summary

‘With an unprecedented violence and rapidity the events of these past few days place us brutally in the presence of immediate fascist danger’ read an appeal issued on 10 February 1934 by thirty-two French writers, artists, and other left-wing intellectuals aroused by the stormy events of 6 February – the émeutes fascistes – and their aftermath. Citing the ‘terrible experience’ of Germany as ‘a lesson’, the statement described working-class unity as indispensable to ‘bar the route to fascism’ and asked the old fratricidal enemies, the Socialists (SFIO) and Communists (PCF), to draw together in ‘a spirit of conciliation’. Here was the Popular Front in embryo, built first on working-class unity of action and then broadened into a wider alliance of the political parties of the left, organized labour and intellectuals against the threat of fascism. One of the most striking political phenomena to emerge from the social politics of the 1930s, the Popular Front opened the way for Socialists, reform-minded liberals, civil libertarians, and a broad range of intellectuals to submerge or suspend their mistrust of the Communists as an alien party serving the interests of the Soviet Union and to unite with them against the threat of domestic fascism and international fascist aggression. The object of this chapter is to reconstruct the climate that made the French Popular Front possible.