Leftist History Lesson

That year’s elections brought to power a coalition of leftist parties and moderate republicans into the Front Populaire.

With the far right on the rise across Europe, not least in France, and the economy sputtering, the Front’s victory seemed to promise that moderation and commitment to popular democracy would be the watchwords of French politics.

The Front Populaire’s reality was less impressive, and many of the conflicts in which it came to grief have strong parallels with the situation of the Nouveau Front Populaire.

Although its advent relieved centrist and left-wing voters, the Front began life with a great deal of personal baggage. Most of the leading figures involved disliked each other personally and politically.

Three had been involved in the partial decomposition of the leading French socialist party, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), at Tours in 1920.

Maurice Thorez had joined with the party’s left wing in adopting the Third International’s 21 Conditions for Admission to the Communist International.

Thorez became party secretary of the newly formed Parti Communiste Français (PCF), spent the Second World War in Moscow, and rounded off his career in the postwar period as one of Josef Stalin’s most dependable toadies.

Marcel Déat had sided with the right wing of the SFIO at Tours. His political itinerary took him in the opposite political direction, from right-wing socialism to collaboration with the Wehrmacht and a death sentence in absentia from a postwar French court (Déat was in hiding in Italy at the time).

Léon Blum stayed with the SFIO at Tours, famously declaring, “While you go on an adventure, someone must stay to look after the old house….”

Blum managed to rebuild the SFIO and was the leading figure in the Front Populaire. Both a socialist and a Jew, Blum was sent to Buchenwald in 1943, which he survived.

While the three dominant representatives from the left had their internal differences, the main faultline was between them and Camille Chautemps, the leader of the misleadingly named Parti Radical.

Chautemps and his party were radicals or socialists. They were liberals of a relatively moderate persuasion.

There was a world of difference between the socialist policies of the early Front Populaire and the liberalism of its later months. Much about Chautemps’ politics can be gleaned from his serving under Daladier, Reynaud, and Petain in the last years of the Third Republic.

The Front Populaire was more than simply the political parties’ leading figures. At least initially, it was a collaboration between those parties and a range of non-party organisations, such as the CGT (the main umbrella group of trade unions) and the League of the Rights of Man.

With France sharing the trauma of the Great Depression, the May 1936 French legislative elections were a watershed in that they were the first time that the SFIO had outrun the Parti Radical. Léon Blum became the first socialist and Jew to lead a French government.

A general strike followed the establishment of the Front Populaire government.

The resulting Matignon Agreements were among Europe’s most far-reaching labour rights agreements during the 20^th century.

French workers were granted the legal right to strike and engage in labour organising. After Blum took office, collective bargaining, a 40-hour work week and paid vacations were added.

Yet, while the Front Populaire made domestic progress, international economic and political conditions confronted the government with challenges to which it was not equal.

Although the worst of the Great Depression had passed by the summer of 1936, French exports we still uncompetitive and the national budget was pressed to ramp up arms production to keep pace with Nazi Germany.

In the summer of 1936, civil war broke out in Spain. Although a government heavily leavened with figures from the left might have taken steps to back the legitimate government of its neighbour, the coalition adopted a policy of neutrality.

Divisions within the Front Populaire had a paralysing effect. The government was worried about foreign hostility and that the Spanish Civil War might trigger a larger European conflict.

In 1937, as Blum struggled to assist the Republicans in Spain, the polarisation between the extreme left and extreme right that had plagued politics for most of the decade intensified.

The following year, having taken on the role of centrists, the Parti Radical managed to push the socialists out of the cabinet.

After the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, which the Communists refused to ratify, they became the de facto sole governing party.

The crises facing the Nouveau Front Populaire, which came into being as a means of assembling opposition to the rise of the populist right (read Rassemblement National), are different from those that faced the first popular front.

However, there are enough similar points that it is worth considering whether lessons can be drawn from one case to apply to the other.

The Nouveau Front Populaire is an exercise in negative integration. It was a matter of the centre-left and far-left parties putting aside their differences to focus on one thing about which they all agreed.

The issues that differentiate the participating parties, such as the Les Écologistes, La France Insoumise and Place Publique, are just as great as those that shaped the political divides between the various elements of the French left and centre-left in the 1930s.

Still, it’s fair to say that it’s not quite as personal as it was the first time around.

Having said that, it doesn’t take a particularly great degree of political savvy to figure out that the discrete charm of not being Rassemblement National is only going to last so long.

As of this moment, the only things that the Nouveau Front Populaire agree on are lowering the retirement age and increasing government spending.

The rubber will really hit the road when questions about what this spending will entail begin to be debated in concrete terms.

Unlike in 1936, France hasn’t been wracked by violent sectarian rioting.

The Gilet Jaunes seem little in evidence, and even at their height, they never had the venom or threat of Croix de Feu or similar organisations from the 1930s.

The fundamental failure of social democratic parties since the 1980s has been pivoting to the right in search of greater consensus. The Nouveau Front Populaire cannot make the same mistake.

The Front Populaire government’s failure to act in solidarity with Spanish Republicans gave their politics a phlegmatic edge and created a space into which extremists from both right and left could flow.

This doesn’t mean the Kyiv-Moscow war is comparable. Ukraine is not Spain, and Putin is not Franco.

However, in order to maintain the momentum of its recent electoral triumphs, the Nouveau Front Populaire needs to govern as leftists.

This will alienate some, but those voters would be alienated by any left-of-centre government.

Political identity matters, particularly in the context of Emmanuel Macron’s hodgepodge regime, which makes a pretence of centrism but trends far-right, combined with neoliberal economic policies.

France has narrowly escaped government by a Nazi-adjacent party that made racism central to its political project. However, this is not a victory but simply the avoidance of defeat.

In order to win, the left must agree on which principles it can work on together to defend.

If it doesn’t, this will just be a respite before a storm. If the Nouveau Front Populaire can, in the words of Marceau Pivert, “Everything is possible!”