Interviewed on French television last Friday, a prominent parliamentarian from the far-Left La France Insoumise, Matilde Panot, defended a claim made by her leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, about the relative inexperience of Léon Blum when he became head of the French government in 1936. When she was reminded that Blum had sat in parliament for over 15 years as leader of the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO), she conceded defeat. “I don’t know where I got that from,” she muttered.
Similar confusion hangs over the New Popular Front. The party is a surprise development of Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election. Its name invokes the union of the Left in the Thirties, which culminated in the Popular Front government formed in 1936: a government led by Léon Blum and a host of ministers from the SFIO and the Radical Party, and supported from the outside by the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) of Maurice Thorez.
Yet as Panot demonstrated, the choice of the name does not come from an intimate acquaintance with the history of the Popular Front. Today, it is little more than a slogan, one that celebrates a surprisingly quick display of unity on the Left and — above all — a desire to impress upon French voters the danger of a radical Right victory in the forthcoming elections. Indeed, if we compare more closely the world of 1936 with that of 2024, we can see how the New Popular Front is a very different beast from its namesake: rather than echoing the changing interests of particular social groups in France, it is an expression of electoral opportunism.
As the historian Claire Andrieu recently observed, the Popular Front of 1936 was a fusion of the socialist and communist movements in France, forced upon reluctant party and parliamentary leaders by party members and activists determined both to block France’s drift into authoritarian nationalism and to secure specific gains in the class war between workers and bosses. This move was triggered by violent demonstrations led by the far-Right Action Française group on 6 February 1934, which many viewed as an attempt to seize power. For months, leaders of both the PCF and the SFIO resisted these bottom-up demands for unity, until the PCF was told by Moscow to strike a deal with the socialists.
This fusion, and the elaboration of a shared legislative programme, was made more difficult by the nature of French democracy at the time. Though still excluding women, the Third Republic had become deeply embedded in society. Its political arena was populated not just by political parties but also a host of organised labour groups, and a plethora of committees and leagues of intellectuals. As a result, the Popular Front’s programme was signed off not only by the PCF, SFIO and Radicals, but also by the country’s principal trade unions. Thus the coalition was one of the first expressions of what the sociologist Peter Wagner called the era of “organised modernity”: collective action, pursued by social groups, structuring the lives of individuals, of families, of villages and towns, resulting in a fusion between politics and society.
By contrast, the New Popular Front of 2024 was negotiated in six days, behind closed doors, by party bosses. The agreement was struck between the Socialist Party, the Greens, La France Insoumise (LFI) and the French Communist Party. It also brought on board prominent figures who enjoy a more distanced relationship to the main parties on the Left: Raphaël Glucksmann, whose “Wake Up Europe” campaign for the Socialist Party did surprisingly well in the European elections, and François Ruffin, a firebrand who sits loosely on the LFI benches but functions more often as an independent voice on the Left.
Most obviously, their alleged catalyst is the prospect of a victory for the far-Right in the legislative elections. Macron’s decision to dissolve the national assembly came as a surprise for most and reflected a willingness to gamble with what he thought was still a refusal, among a majority of French voters, to accept that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) could ever become the party of government. Aware that this historic refusal may no longer exist, the disparate forces of the Left decided to put to one side their differences. This “antifascist” animation, however, is far from the only reason for this new alliance’s genesis — and perhaps not even the most important one.
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