French elections 2024 – NPF rally in Montreuil. Photo by Colin Falconer

The Popular Front then and now – France and the elections

Ian Birchall looks back at the history of the original Popular Front and outlines what’s at stake in France’s general election.

The electoral alliance of left parties formed to fight the forthcoming French election has taken the name ‘New Popular Front’, a clear reference to the Popular Front of the 1930s. Although those events were some nine decades ago, and beyond living memory, they remain an important part of the mythology of the French left.

In reality the events of the Popular Front were complex and contradictory, and it is important to clearly recognise the positive and negative aspects.

In 1933 Hitler took power. France now had fascist regimes on two of its major frontiers, in Germany and Italy. But even on the left the danger was often not understood. Just three months before Hitler’s victory, Léon Blum, leader of the Socialist Party, had written that Hitler had no hope of taking power.

It was on the far left that the danger was first recognised. As a young revolutionary, Daniel Guérin toured Germany, smuggling illegal leaflets in his bicycle frame and reporting on the opposition within the country.[1] But as he noted, many in the Socialist Party still argued that all was to be explained by the fact that the Germans were ‘boches’ and that it couldn’t happen in France

It took the right-wing riots of 6 February 1934, which brought down the government, to awaken the French left. Hitler had succeeded because the German left was deeply divided. The two mass parties of the left, Communists and Socialists, refused to cooperate, and the Communists described the Socialists as ‘social fascists’.

Now there was widespread pressure for unity of the French left. On 14 July 1934 half a million people demonstrated in Paris. The leaders of the left were forced into united action. A Popular Front was formed bringing together the Communist and Socialists, but also the Radical Party, which had taken part in many previous governments and represented the lower middle classes – lawyers, shopkeepers and civil servants.

The French events coincided with, and helped to influence, a major shift in the Communist International. Stalin’s clique realised that their policy in Germany had been a disastrous error, creating a major threat to the Russian regime, and there was a rapid, but unexplained switch to a Popular Front policy. This was to be applied throughout the world. In fact, in many countries it had little impact – in Britain, for example, the Liberals were not very interested, and ‘progressive Tories’ were hard to find.  It was in France that the policy was to achieve its most striking results. In many ways it corresponded to a tradition of left unity that could be traced back to the French Revolution.

In May 1936 an alliance of Socialists, Communists and Radicals won an electoral majority. A government of Socialists and Radicals was formed, with the Communists supporting from outside. The Prime Minister was Blum, France’s first ever Jewish prime minister. He faced overt anti-Semitism from the right. Xavier Vallat, later to be in charge of Jewish affairs in the pro-Nazi Vichy government, said in parliament on 6 June that it was to be regretted that ‘this old Gallo-Roman country of France should for the first time be ruled by a Jew.’

Strikes and occupations

But before Blum could even take office, the working class intervened. A mass strike spread rapidly, involving two million workers. As the anti-Stalinist journal La Révolution prolétarienne claimed, it was ‘the most formidable movement of direct action that the French proletariat has ever carried out’.

The workers did not simply withdraw their labour; they occupied their factories. They were thus asserting that the workplaces where they produced the goods needed by society were their property. Moreover, strikers did not return to their individual homes to be exposed to the hostile press and radio, but stayed in solidarity with their fellow-strikers. It was one of the great moments of French working-class history, to be imitated on a larger scale in May 1968.

It was the strike, and not the benevolence of the Popular Front government, that obtained real gains for the working class – substantial wage increases, trade-union rights in the workplace, a forty-hour week and two weeks annual paid holidays. Trotsky rather optimistically claimed in Whither France? that ‘the French revolution has begun’.

As Daniel Guérin, a leading activist in the Revolutionary Left faction of the Socialist Party argued, there were two Popular Fronts: on the one hand there was the ‘misalliance, on the parliamentary and electoralist level, of bourgeois radicalism and Stalinism, under the banner of national defence’. But alongside it there was

…the powerful popular movement, the anti-fascist ‘unity of action’, for which the political and trade union organisations of the working-class, supported by the intellectuals, had taken the initiative – a genuinely popular movement in the sense that it drew behind the working class a not inconsiderable layer of petty bourgeois and poor peasants’.[2]

For the Revolutionary Left faction, the struggle against fascism meant not just legislation, but confrontation on the streets. They set up the mass organisation Toujours Prets Pour Servir (Always Ready to Serve – TPPS). As the Trotskyist author Yvan Craipeau described it:

Organised in tens, thirties and hundreds, with their leaders elected by the rank and file, the TPPS went out at night to fly-post, paint slogans in red lead, and throw leaflets into factories. […] They went to defend working-class paper-sellers, and sometimes stopped the fascists selling their papers. […] Usually the fascists were dealt with. Everywhere they were driven out of the working-class quarters.[3]

Defeat and the legacy

But despite these positive features, from now on it was downhill all the way. Blum refused to honour an agreement to supply arms to the Spanish Republic, where another Popular Front government was under attack from the fascist Franco.

After just over a year in power Blum was removed by the Radicals. A second period in office lasted less than a month. The Revolutionary Left faction was thrown out of the Socialist Party.

The Popular Front parliament, elected with such enthusiasm in 1936, was now the basis for increasingly reactionary governments. When Franco achieved victory in Spain, France refused to welcome the half million refugees who crossed the Pyrenees; they were herded into horrific improvised camps set up on French beaches.

After the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the Communist Party was made illegal by a government still based on the Popular Front parliament.

The impact of the Popular Front was now very double-edged. As the historian RH Tawney had pointed out: ‘Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a tiger paw by paw’. He should have added that if you do attack a tiger one claw at a time, it gets very cross. The Popular Front attacked the interests of the French bourgeoisie – it did not immobilise them or remove them from power. As a result the French right became more aggressive, and as war loomed in 1939, it was common in upper class circles to hear a preference for Hitler rather than any repeat of the Popular Front.  After the German invasion in 1940, the majority of the Popular Front National Assembly – Radicals but also a majority of the Socialist deputies – voted to set up the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

But the myth of the Popular Front lived on, especially in the French Communist Party (PCF), which after 1945 was the main organisation of the working class. In 1956, because its strategy was centred on recreating a Popular Front, the PCF supported the Socialist Party’s policy of stepping up the war to keep Algeria French, and voted for ‘special powers’ in Algeria, which included rule by decree and transfer of police powers to the army.

The new Popular Front and the elections

The results of the European elections on 9 June this year were a major setback for President Macron. His supporters won only 14.6% of the vote, outnumbered by both the left and the far right. Only just over half the electorate could be bothered to vote at all.

Macron’s policies have been a disaster for working people – a raising of the pension age, police violence and systematic Islamophobia. Now he finds himself in trouble, Macron again puts his own electoral interests ahead of any concern for popular well-being. The snap election he has called offers great opportunities to the far right Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN).

The RN was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an open fascist and Holocaust denier. Since his daughter Marine Le Pen has taken over the leadership, she has tried to sanitise the organisation’s image, but the fascist hard core remains, and its policies centre on hostility to immigrants and especially to France’s six million Muslims. Immediate proposals include denying medical care to undocumented migrants, providing social housing only to French nationals, and preventing people with dual nationality from getting jobs in the public service.  In the longer term the RN still threatens to make the wearing of the hijab illegal in public. This would mean that Muslim women would have to renounce a religious obligation or be unable to go to work or take their children to school.

There has been substantial alarm at the threat of an RN government, and there have been large demonstrations, some called by the trade unions. Many potential RN voters are not fascists or racists, but are sickened by Macron’s rule. The only way to win them away from the RN is by offering a radical alternative.

So it is good news that within just a few days of hectic negotiations the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front – NFP) has been formed. It should be said that it is not actually a ‘Popular Front’ in the way that term is commonly used on the left. The four main components are the Socialists, Communists, Greens and La France Insoumise (Insubordinate France – LFI). Three of these are socialist organisations with roots in the working class. The Greens have no pro-capitalist base and their ecological demands often point them in an anti-capitalist direction. So there is no equivalent of the Radical Party, which dominated the original Popular Front and pulled it to the right.

For an alliance cobbled up so rapidly, the NFP has got a remarkably detailed programme:

• immediate recognition of the state of Palestine
• immediate ceasefire in Gaza
• reversal of Macron’s raising of the retirement age with the perspective of retirement at sixty
• control of prices for food and fuel
• a plan to fight climate change
• raising of the minimum wage
• filling empty posts in health and education
• opposition to all forms of racism

,,,,, and much much more.

Yet the NFP has attracted many criticisms. The Guardian’s Europe correspondent Jon Henley devoted himself to attacking Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the LFI, one of the main architects of the alliance. In the course of one short article Mélenchon was called ‘radical left firebrand’, ‘domineering and abrasive’ and a ‘fiery leader’. Now, since 1991 Mélenchon has published at least a dozen books. There is no evidence that Henley has consulted any of them; he does not deal with Mélenchon’s ideas, preferring personal attacks of the sort the Guardian delighted in directing against Corbyn.

The LFI has a good record of defending Palestinian rights – two of its deputies have waved Palestinian flags in parliament – which means that it is the victim of attacks from Zionists. One almost tragic example is the case of Serge Klarsfeld. Klarsfeld survived the Nazi occupation as a Jewish child – his father perished in Auschwitz. He devoted his life to identifying and prosecuting former Nazis.  Now, at the age of 88, he has announced that he will vote for the RN if necessary to oppose the LFI.

In fact, the leaders of the four main NFP parties have issued a very firm statement against anti-Semitism, condemning ‘those who use our Jewish compatriots as scapegoats for all the ills of the planet’. But the lies and slanders will persist, as they did with Corbyn.

Unfortunately, the NFP has not got total support on the left. There are those who still want to juxtapose their own theoretically ‘correct’ programme to the actual reality which the NFP represents.

Thus Lutte Ouvrière (LO), which in the past has run very creditable electoral campaigns in the name of revolutionary socialism, dismisses Mélenchon and other left leaders as merely ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie within the workers’ movement’. LO is proposing to run some 550 candidates of its own, an enormous expenditure of money and effort for a tiny organisation. Sadly the results will be derisory and make no impact on the struggle against the far right; in the European elections LO got just 0.49% of the vote, as against 2.0% for the Animalist party.

Happily other sections of the far left are taking a more positive attitude. The Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste – L’anticapitaliste (NPA-A), which originated from the Fourth International has joined the NFP. It will run a candidate and says

…tens of thousands of people, parties, unions, associations have started talking to each other again and acting jointly, in working-class areas, with the aim of getting rid of Macron and his policies, and blocking the far right.

Whether the NFP can neutralise the RN threat remains to be seen in the first round of voting on 30 June, and then in the negotiations that will take place as the line-up for the second round on 7 July between left, centre and right emerges. French parliamentary elections take place in two rounds – traditionally only the two top-scoring candidates stand in the second round, though any candidate who gets more than 12.5% on the first round can stand. The NPF agreement means that the left has a good chance of having many more candidates in the second round.

John Mullen, an active supporter of the NFP, has a reasonably optimistic assessment of the situation in a very useful article in Counterfire.

The fact of this unity, and the quite radical joint programme produced, have motivated a dynamic campaign, and encouraged people to think that now is the time to move against fascism. Over 10 000 new people joined the networks of the France Insoumise within a few days.

It is to be hoped he is right. A success for the RN would give an enormous boost to the far right throughout Europe.

[1] Daniel Guérin, La peste brune, Paris 1933, translated as The brown plague.

[2] Daniel Guérin, Front Populaire, Révolution Manquée [Popular Front, failed revolution], Paris 1936, pp. 93-4

[3] Yvan. Craipeau, Le Mouvement Trotskiste en France, Paris 1971, pp. 123–4