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by Jackson, Julian

  France’s attachment to a policy which condemned the economy to asphyxiation defies rational analysis. It reflected complacency that, in terms of unemployment, the social impact of the Depression was less devastating than elsewhere. Many French leaders believed that their large agricultural sector had protected France from the problems of excessive industrialization. They continued to believe in the virtue of a self-regulating gold standard and blamed the rest of the world for not playing by the rules. After the devaluation of the dollar the economist Charles Rist wrote: ‘France finds herself on an isolated rock lashed by waves, but the other countries are on floating islands. In the tempest a rock, even isolated, is preferable to a floating island.’19 This refusal to admit the reality of the outside world disguised deep anxieties. Devaluation was associated with the inflation of the 1920s. Apocalyptic visions were conjured up of the final ruin of the rentiers—who were in fact profiting from the falling prices of the 1930s— and the collapse of social order. Politicians compared the defence of the franc to the defence of Verdun.20

  The social consequences of the Depression in France were different from those in other industrialized countries. Even if official figures underestimated true unemployment, which peaked at about 1 million in 1935, this was lower than elsewhere. Owing to falling prices, the real wages of those in work increased. Workers suffered instead from employers’ attempts to rationalize work practices by introducing time and motion studies or imposing piece-rate payment (the Bedaux system). Those worst affected by the Depression were peasants—agricultural prices fell by up to 60 per cent—shopkeepers, small businessmen, and artisans. Thus the Depression created the conditions for extreme social polarization: it hit the conservative electorate and stoked up working-class resentment, but, owing to relatively low levels of unemployment, the potential strength of labour was not as weakened as in other countries.21

  For governments, the Depression meant massive budget deficits caused by falling tax revenues and rising social expenditure. The two left-wing parties which won the 1932 elections had different responses to this problem. The Radicals wanted to cut government expenditure and eliminate the budget deficit; the Socialists believed this would deepen the Depression. Logically therefore the Radicals should have governed with the right whose economic views they shared, but this was impossible immediately after winning elections on a left-wing slate. So Radical governments tried to obtain Socialist support for conservative policies. The result was deadlock: seven ministries in eighteen months.

  This political paralysis caused an explosion of direct action by social groups intervening to protect their interests. There were demonstrations of State employees, peasants, shopkeepers, and small businessmen. Agricultural protests were organized by Dorgères’s Defence Committees; shopkeepers mobilized behind the Taxpayers’ Federation. These organizations crossed the frontier between interest-group representation and political extremism, mining a latent tradition of anti-parliamentarianism. The Taxpayers’ Federation declared in February 1933: ‘we will converge on this lair which is called parliament, and if necessary we will use whips and sticks’.22

  The anti-parliamentary leagues reappeared on the scene. Two new ones appeared in 1933: the self-avowedly fascist Francistes of Marcel Bucard, a former Action française activist, and Solidarité française, run by a former colonial officer, Jean Renaud.23 The membership of these groups was tiny. More alarming was the growing consensus, within the parliamentary right, that France’s crisis had become an institutional one: that the regime was no longer working. The political deadlock was broken by the 6 February riots. The government resigned, the Radicals terminated their alliance with the left, and entered a government of National Unity headed first by Doumergue, and then successively by two other conservative politicians, Pierre-Étienne Flandin and Pierre Laval.

  The 1930s Crisis: The Right’s Response

  The right’s return to power in 1934 seemed like a replay of 1926, but there was a striking difference: 1926 had been the resolution of the crisis, 1934 was only its beginning; 1926 had been a political crisis, 1934 was a crisis of the liberal state itself. The fundamental reason for the difference was the economy: 1926 had witnessed an epiphenomenal financial crisis in a flourishing economy; in 1934 the economy was sinking deeper into depression. The right’s response was deflation: cutting government expenditure to eliminate the deficit and forcing down costs to make the franc competitive again. This policy culminated in 1935 when Laval cut all government expenditure by 10 per cent, including pensions and State bonds. Deflation was as unsuccessful as it had been in Germany in 1930. Like Brüning, Doumergue and Laval resorted to emergency decree powers to force through deflationary policies: normal parliamentary procedures had failed.24

  Another striking contrast between 1926 and 1934 was that whereas extra-parliamentary agitation had quickly abated after Poincaré’s return, in 1934 it increased after Doumergue’s arrival. The league overshadowing all the others was the Croix de feu (CF) which had started as a war veterans’ organization in 1928. Its leader from 1931 was Colonel de la Rocque, a career officer of aristocratic background who had retired from the army. La Rocque steered the movement towards politics, and opened it up to non-veterans. In 1931 the CF created paramilitary organizations and in 1933 a specialized volunteer corps called the Volontaires Nationaux (VN). On 6 February 1934, a CF column 2,000 strong had marched on parliament from the Left Bank, unlike the other demonstrators who were across the river. Only a flimsy barricade protected the parliament building, but La Rocque ordered his men to disperse.

  The explosion in CF membership took place after 1934. By the end of 1935 there were over 300,000 members. What made this growth different from the development of previous leagues, besides the fact that it occurred after the right’s return to power, was the fact that the CF attacked the traditional right as well as the left. La Rocque described Doumergue’s government as only a ‘poultice on a gangrenous leg’.25 The CF demanded a limitation of the powers of parliament, the outlawing of the ‘generators of disorder’ (the Communists), and the implementation of corporatist economic ideas. In other respects La Rocque was studiedly vague—like the Nazi and fascist programmes which avoided specific commitments which could narrow the basis of support. The same fluidity characterized La Rocque’s attitude to democracy: he claimed to support the Republic, but rejected any ‘fetishism’ of electoralism (the CF refused to stand in elections), and denounced political parties as ‘lying, parasitical, bribed, outdated’.

  The CF presented itself as a new elite, guided by a charismatic leader, ready to regenerate the nation and save it from Communists and Freemasons. How La Rocque intended to take power was unclear. He warned his followers against premature action and stressed his commitment to order, but he also made frequent references to ‘H-Hour’ and organized paramilitary mobilizations and parades. This sustained an atmosphere of strength and menace. Sometimes street violence occurred, but La Rocque discouraged this, preferring to give an impression of discipline. As far as membership was concerned, the CF seems to have drawn on the urban lower middle class, but also some managers and salaried engineers. One striking feature of the movement was that it professed religious neutrality, but its social doctrines attracted some social Catholics, allowing it to mobilize some of the populist anti-elitism of social Catholics. In short, it represented a revolt of rank-and-file conservatives against their leaders.

  At the time, the left was convinced that the CF was a fascist movement. Until recently historians rejected this view and downplayed its challenge to democracy. The CF was portrayed as a conservative force containing little of fascism’s radicalism. Its paramilitarism was dismissed by the historian René Rémond as ‘Boyscouting for adults’. More recently, however, historians have questioned this orthodoxy.26 The argument matters because those who argue that the CF was not fascist are by implication inclined to downplay the seriousness of the crisis of liberal democracy in inter-war France.

  Sometimes La
Rocque’s ‘moderation’ on 6 February is used to demonstrate the CF’s non-radical nature. But quite apart from the fact that neither Hitler after 1923 nor Mussolini had attempted to seize power by street violence alone, the CF’s radicalization occurred after 6 February. It developed into an authoritarian-populist movement offering a major threat to liberal politics. Did this make it fascist? It is not fruitful to search for some essentialist notion of fascism. All fascist movements combined radical and reactionary elements. Certainly the CF was less anti-democratic than the Nazis and less violent on the streets than the Italian fascists before 1922. But even Mussolini between 1923 and 1925 was ambiguous towards the liberal state, and the dream of Liberals that he might be ‘tamed’ was not entirely absurd. In the conflict between the radical and moderate elements in Italy, it was ultimately the radicals who prevailed. In the CF the balance of forces between radicals and moderates may have been different, but so was the context. As Kevin Passmore reminds us, in Italy and Germany fascism developed as a response to the perceived threat of the left after the war; in France the rise of the CF pre-dated the mobilization of the left which occurred in response to the perceived threat from the right. Once the left had started to gather its forces against the CF, it became clear that the radical and anti-democratic—fascist—option would not succeed in France.27

  In December 1935 La Rocque agreed to disarm his followers providing the left did the same and in June 1936 he did not contest a new law banning the leagues. Abandoning paramilitarism, he turned the CF into a political party, the PSF. The rise of the Popular Front showed that the left could not be beaten in the streets.

  The 1930s Crisis: The Left’s Response

  The Popular Front was born out of the left’s response to 6 February. On 12 February, a general strike in support of democracy revealed how frightened the left had been by the events of that night. What channelled this fear into a successful political movement was a reversal in the policy of the Communist Party. Before 1934, the Communists had pursued a sectarian line, attacking the Socialists and denouncing the Republic as a bourgeois regime. But Hitler’s arrival in power had shown the consequences of left-wing disunity, and in 1934 Comintern drew the lesson that the left must unite if France was not to suffer the same fate. At the same time, Stalin was beginning to court France as an ally against Hitler. This made it illogical for the Communists to weaken French democracy or undermine French military strength.

  During 1934 the Communists adopted the so-called Popular Front line—an attempt to build the widest possible political coalition to defend the Republic against ‘fascism’. Where Communists had previously sung the Internationale and brandished the red flag, they now draped themselves in the tricolour and sang the Marseillaise. The Popular Front policy was remarkably successful: in January 1936 the Communists, Socialists, and Radicals signed a joint electoral programme. An alliance between the Communists and the Radicals was an extraordinary event, and it demonstrated the alarm caused by the antics of the CF. Support for the Popular Front was also generated by the Depression and the impact of Laval’s deflation policy. The Popular Front was both a social response to the Depression and a political response to the fear of fascism. Its vast demonstrations brought huge numbers of people into the streets, showing that when it came to mass politics, the left could mobilize larger forces than the right.

  In May 1936, the Popular Front won the elections. The total left vote was not much larger than in 1932, but there was a shift within the left from the Socialists to the Communists, whose vote doubled, and from the Radicals to the Socialists. The number of Communist députés rose from eleven to seventy-two, and the Socialists became the largest party in Parliament. Léon Blum became France’s first Socialist premier at the head of a Socialist and Radical coalition government (with Communist support). His government lasted for a year after which it was brought down in a financial crisis. Blum’s successor, in June 1937, was the Radical Camille Chautemps. Although in theory the Popular Front remained intact— Socialists remained in the government, and the Communists continued to support it—Chautemps’s government was the start of a drift to the right by the Radicals. This culminated, in 1938, in the dislocation of the coalition that had been elected only two years earlier.

  Even at the peak of its reforming zeal, Blum’s government was never an experiment in socialism. Its aim was to strengthen democratic institutions and restore economic prosperity: to make capitalism work and modernize the liberal State. One sign of this was the creation of a Ministry for the National Economy to counteract the influence of the Ministry of Finances which was seen as a citadel of financial orthodoxy (Tardieu had tried something similar). The minister, Charles Spinasse, surrounded himself not with inspectors of finance, but with a new breed of economic expert, including some members of X-Crise.28 Jean Coutrot was one of those who lent his help to the government. Blum also appointed a ‘Secretary of State for the Organization of Leisure’. The holder of this new portfolio, Leo Lagrange, announced that he intended to democratize sport, culture, and leisure—promoting youth hostels, encouraging workers into museums—and show that democratic states were as ready to meet the challenge of mass politics as fascist ones.

  These ambitious cultural objectives make the Popular Front one of the transforming cultural moments of the French twentieth century, drawing intellectuals into politics on a scale not seen since the Dreyfus Affair.29 They included historic figures like Romain Rolland and André Gide, but younger ones as well: André Malraux; the Socialist planiste Georges Lefranc who participated in workers’ education projects run by the CGT; Le Corbusier who was given the chance to show some of his projects at the Exhibition of 1937. Even Mounier showed cautious sympathy. Thus, despite its strongly Republican identity, and its manipulation of traditional Republican iconography, the Popular Front, which was sufficiently all-encompassing in its objectives to offer space for all kinds of cultural projects, succeeded in rallying many of those 1930s nonconformists who had so little time for Republican politics. But they allowed themselves to be mobilized in spite of the Popular Front’s traditional republicanism not because of it. Or at least they were willing to give the Republic a last chance to prove it was more than just an empty husk: the Popular Front’s failure only reinforced their conviction that it was.

  The Popular Front was also a mass social movement which profoundly radicalized French politics. The electoral victory of 1936 sparked off a wave of strikes unprecedented in French history. In June 1936 alone there were about 1.8 million strikers, and over 12,000 strikes. Even more alarmingly, three-quarters of these strikes turned into factory occupations; many employers were locked out of their own premises. Under this pressure the government promised to introduce a forty-hour week and annual holidays of two weeks’ paid leave; and, in the Matignon Agreement, employers’ leaders conceded wage increases and recognition of union rights. Employers were now obliged by law to enforce collective contracts and to accept a system of compulsory arbitration.

  The strikes were less a revolutionary movement than an expression of enthusiasm at the election victory, and an attempt to hold the new government to its promises. Once the employers had conceded reforms, the strikes died down. But patterns of authority in the factory had been irremediably breached, and, revolution or no revolution, the Popular Front represented a massive shift in power towards organized labour. Between February 1936 and December 1936, the membership of the Communist Party swelled from 90,000 to 288,000, making it the largest party of the left. Even more remarkable was the explosion in trade-union membership. In 1935, in the wake of a move to political unity, the CGT and its Communist rival, the CGTU, had united to form a single CGT. The membership of the united CGT was 785,000 in 1935; a year later, it was 4 million.

  The massive increase in union membership was not only a conjunctural effect of the Popular Front. It was also a reflection of structural changes that had taken place in the French economy over the last twenty years. Previously unions had been strongest
in the public sector and weakest among the proletariat of the mass production industries—especially the aircraft and car industries. Although these industries were the most technologically advanced sectors of the French economy, employers had continued to exercise authority as if by divine right, barely agreeing to recognize unions: modern techniques of production coexisted with traditional patterns of social relations. In the Renault factory, workers arriving two minutes late would be dismissed; cloakrooms were searched for subversive material; union activists were sacked; informers were everywhere. It was difficult for these workers to defend themselves. Recruited from immigrant labour and from the countryside, they were socially heterogeneous in origin, without roots in the labour movement. The old syndicalist vision was not appropriate to their situation.

  It was from this new working class that the mass of trade unionists came in 1936. In the Renault factory, there had been almost no unionists in 1935; there was almost no one who was not in the union at the end of 1936. By 1937 the single largest component of the CGT was metallurgical workers: in 1935 4 per cent of them had been unionized, in 1937 71 per cent. In the unified CGT, the former CGTU and CGT leaders, respectively the unitaires and confédérés, retained their separate identities, and it was above all the unitaires—the Communists—who benefited from the massive influx of new members. They were more adapted to the politics of mass unionization than the former confédéré CGT leaders. Just as the Communists had offered a voice to the dispossessed inhabitants of the industrial suburbs in the 1920s, so in 1936, the Popular Front, in particular the Communist Party, forged a collective social identity for the new working class.

  The Consequences of the Popular Front