iii<\/span><\/h2>\nThe French parliamentary elections of 1936, coming less than three months after the assault on L\u00e9on Blum, produced a result that surprised many, probably including the chief beneficiary. First, the election produced a clear victory for the parties of the left, which returned 386 deputies to the right\u2019s 224. Second, within that left grouping, the socialists (formally the French Section of the Socialist International \u2013 SFIO) emerged as the largest party, with 149 seats, as against the radicals\u2019 115 and the communists\u2019 seventy-two. The government that followed, commonly referred to as the Popular Front, was hated and feared by many in France, while its performance in government was to be later assessed by others, particularly those on the more radical left, as at best disappointing.<\/span><\/p>\nL\u00e9on Blum\u2019s biographer Jean Lacouture makes a number of cogent points about the Popular Front experience, which lasted less than two years. First, the Front was in many ways a defensive alliance against the threat of the far right. The electoral victory of the left may have constituted a defeat for the right but the threat it represented did not go away: the radical right, after all, cared little for elections or democracy. <\/span><\/p>\nSecond, the Front was a coalition, which depended on, and could not survive without, the support of all of its components: socialists, communists, radicals. Third, the relative weight of the parties after the election came as a surprise to almost everyone; what had been expected was a government in which the radicals would have the preponderant role and the socialists, and perhaps the communists, would offer support based on some concessions to their own political programmes. The socialists, not expecting to lead, were not up to speed with the realities of the financial situation. <\/span><\/p>\nFourth, the Front took power after a period of austerity and deflation; its Keynesian policies of stimulation of consumption and state sponsorship of large-scale public works were stubbornly resisted by the institutions that controlled credit. Fifth, the international climate, particularly after the nationalist rebellion in Spain, supported by the Axis powers, was extremely dangerous. If France\u2019s reformist phase was to look like developing into a revolutionary one, the consequences could not be foreseen. <\/span><\/p>\nSixth, L\u00e9on Blum, though a subtle theoretician, perhaps did not adequately realise that being in government did not necessarily mean being <\/span>in power<\/span><\/i>. In particular, he did not and his government did not after 1936 enjoy a monopoly of the use of force. There were serious reasons to doubt the army\u2019s loyalty to the government (or even to the republic); and the same, to a lesser degree, could be said of the police.<\/span><\/p>\nThe change of government in May\/June 1936 was accompanied by a nationwide wave of strikes and factory occupations. To many it seemed that France was in a revolutionary situation: the left-wing socialist Marceau Pivert indeed gleefully proclaimed that now \u2018everything is possible\u2019. The incoming Blum government, formed on June 4<\/span>th<\/span>, met with the employers and proceeded to negotiate an end to the occupations based on a raft of concessions that would compensate workers for the severe loss of purchasing power they had experienced under the previous government\u2019s deflationary policies. <\/span><\/p>\nThe Matignon Accords, signed on June 7<\/span>th<\/span> and 8<\/span>th<\/span>, allowed for union recognition in the factories and the right of the workers to choose their own shop stewards and engage in collective bargaining, a wage increase of 7 per cent for higher salaries and 15 per cent for lower and an undertaking from the employers that there would be no victimisation of workers for their actions during the occupations. Blum added that his government would immediately legislate for a forty-hour week and two weeks\u2019 paid holiday per year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYet in spite of the Matignon agreement the strikes continued in many places. At this point the communist party (PCF), which was certainly supported by a greater proportion of the industrial working class than were the socialists, threw its weight behind the deal. \u2018One must know how to end a strike when satisfaction has been achieved,\u2019 the communist leader, Maurice Thorez, declared. Indeed one might in practice often need to end it even if not all one\u2019s demands had been met.<\/span><\/p>\nThe explosion of strikes in spring 1936 should be seen not just in the context of depressed wages and the desire of the working class to \u2018catch up\u2019. The actions were also a revolt against the system of repression that reigned in the industrial sphere, with workers on the assembly line supervised at every moment, forced to be silent when working and often treated as if they were prisoners performing forced labour. The factory occupations were also marked by a burst of optimism, closely related of course to hopes of reform from the new government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe philosopher Simone Weil, sympathetic to anarchism, who had herself worked for considerable periods on an assembly line, characterised the work stoppages as \u2018strikes of joy\u2019. She wrote: \u2018I went to see my friends in a factory where I worked several months ago \u2026 the joy of being able to walk around the workshops instead of being tied to the machine \u2026 the joy of hearing, instead of the pitiless racket of the machines, music, songs, laughter \u2026 the joy of walking past the bosses with one\u2019s head held high \u2026 the joy of living, among these silent machines, at the rhythm of human life.\u2019 It was true of course, Weil added, that things would soon return to the way they had been, but for the moment the workers did not dwell on that. They were enjoying a holiday from \u2018normal\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThey may also have been consoled by the prospect of taking, for the first time, an actual holiday as the Popular Front legislated for annual leave and cut train fares to enable workers and their families to taste for the first time the delights of the French countryside. At the same time, the Front\u2019s minister for education, Jean Zay, enlisted the director of the national library, Julien Cain, in an ambitious and imaginative programme of bringing books to a part of society they had not greatly touched before, significantly increasing funding for public libraries, initiating mobile libraries and services for children. The poet Paul Val\u00e9ry wrote of Cain: \u2018He is without doubt the man to whom the organisation of French literature owes the most.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\nThe prospect that the poor, or the working classes, might lose that \u2018lively sense of their powerlessness\u2019 that Barr\u00e8s had deemed essential to social peace, that they might have the hope that they could improve their lives or their children\u2019s, that they might widen their physical or cultural horizons, was an extremely unwelcome one to the dogmatists of the nationalist right. Indeed figures like Lucien Rebatet, a journalist and critic chiefly associated in the 1930s with the literary-political review <\/span>Je suis partout<\/span><\/i> (I am everywhere), could be said quite simply to hate the sight of the working class, and particularly its women. <\/span><\/p>\nReturning to Paris after a short trip just after the elections of 1936 he found a city teeming with joyous proletarians, taking their Sunday stroll from R\u00e9publique to Nation, \u2018well-fed, tanned, fresh and plump in their silk blouses, flannel pants and sparkly yellow shoes, celebrating proudly the new era of beach holidays, new cars, dining rooms furnished in cheap walnut, lobster, leg of lamb and triple <\/span>ap\u00e9ritif<\/span><\/i>\u2019. On July 14<\/span>th<\/span> he was appalled to see left-wing crowds, including communists, joining in the festivities: \u2018the last armoured cars had barely passed before monstrous families of Berlin yids proceeded up the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es exclaiming \u201cLong leef ze popular vront!\u201d\u2019<\/span><\/p>\nThe far right had two unbudgeable ideas about the Popular Front: first, that it was manipulated by the communists, who were clearly the real power, second that it was not in any way national or French. As regards the former, it might be noted that the communists were not <\/span>in<\/span><\/i> the Popular Front government but supported it from outside; also that the PCF of 1936 was a different animal from that of a few years previously.<\/span><\/p>\n Hitler\u2019s accession to power in 1933, which Moscow had not been expecting, had moved the Comintern away from its previous sectarian policy of \u2018class against class\u2019 to a model of co-operation with other left-wing parties and centrists to block the path to power of the far right. And if Action fran\u00e7aise persisted in thinking that the Front was ultimately being manipulated by Moscow they were also sure that its leader was no more than a tool of international Jewry. L\u00e9on Blum, whose grandfather came from Alsace and whose father and uncles ran a successful haberdashery shop in Paris, was always denied by his enemies the appellation of Frenchman: he was either a German, or, perhaps worse, an oriental or Levantine. <\/span><\/p>\nMaurras had once suggested that he should be guillotined, with, as was the custom with parricides, a black veil covering his \u2018camel-like features\u2019. Pierre Gaxotte, who performed the function of editor-in-chief of <\/span>Je suis partout<\/span><\/i> before Robert Brasillach took over, wrote in the review <\/span>Candide<\/span><\/i>: \u2018 \u2026 he is ugly, the sorrowful head of a Palestinian mare [\u2026] he is the incarnation of everything that revolts our [French] blood and gives us goose pimples. He is evil, he is death.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\niv<\/span><\/h2>\nIn late September 1938, Adolf Hitler issued an ultimatum to the government of Czechoslovakia: the Czechs had four days, until September 28<\/span>th<\/span>, to agree to the secession to the Reich of the region the Germans called Sudetenland, heavily populated by German speakers but also essential to the security of the Czech state as a mountainous natural barrier to invasion. By way of reassurance, Hitler insisted to the British and French that this was absolutely his last territorial demand in Europe. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, wished to appease Hitler and avert war while still obtaining guarantees for the security of the rest of Czechoslovakia. There was no appetite for going to war to defend an ally few Britons knew or cared about. Much the same can be assumed of France. Chamberlain reflected the popular mood when he said in a radio address: \u2018How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn September 29<\/span>th<\/span> a deal was reached at Munich between the British, French, Germans and Italians, but in the absence of the Czechs. The integrity of the Czechoslovak state would have to be sacrificed for peace. Returning to Britain, Chamberlain told a crowd assembled in Downing Street that \u2018for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.\u2019 The French prime minister, \u00c9douard Daladier, who had also approved the Munich Agreement, was less sanguine. Expecting, on his arrival back at Le Bourget airport to be vilified for his, or his country\u2019s, cowardice, he was surprised to be applauded. According to one diplomat present, he muttered, on emerging from the aircraft and seeing the welcoming party: \u2018Ah, the fools! If only they knew.\u2019 In his memoirs he merely says: \u2018I was expecting to be greeted with tomatoes and I was greeted with flowers.\u2019 On March 15<\/span>th<\/span>, the Germans occupied the remainder of the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia). On September 3<\/span>rd<\/span>, after they invaded Poland, both Chamberlain and Daladier declared war.<\/span><\/p>\nv<\/span><\/h2>\nOn June 10<\/span>th<\/span>, 1940, as German tanks advanced within sight of the Seine, L\u00e9on Blum composed an editorial for the socialist newspaper <\/span>Le Populaire<\/span><\/i>. The situation was indeed grave, he wrote. But in spite of the disparity in men and <\/span>mat\u00e9riel<\/span><\/i> between the French and the Germans, \u2018resolution\u2019 on the part of the defending French army could still see off the invaders. This, patently, was wishful thinking. In the next few days Paris was declared an \u2018open city\u2019 to save it from destruction. The Germans entered on June 14<\/span>th<\/span>. The French had lost approximately 60,000 dead in the six-week campaign of the Battle of France.<\/span><\/p>\nBlum was reluctant to leave the capital in spite of the repeated pleas of his friends and political allies. On the evening of June 10<\/span>th<\/span> he was driven to Montlu\u00e7on in central France to consult with his close friend Marx Dormoy, a former minister of the interior in the Popular Front government. On the morning of the 11<\/span>th<\/span> the two returned to Paris, where Blum visited the empty parliament building and held consultations with the <\/span>pr\u00e9fet de police<\/span><\/i> and the American ambassador, William Bullitt. <\/span>On June 14<\/span>
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