The French Popular Front and the Strikes of 1936

From a Riot to an Oath

On the evening of 6 February 1934, the far-right leagues, Action Française and the Croix-de-Feu among them, marched on the Chamber of Deputies. Police opened fire on the Place de la Concorde; fifteen people died and more than 1,500 were injured, and the Radical premier Daladier resigned the next day. Most historians now conclude the riot was not an organized coup, but the left of the time read it as a dress rehearsal for a French fascism. Hitler had taken power in Germany just a year earlier, and the memory of Social Democrats and Communists calling each other the main enemy while being destroyed one by one was fresh.

The answer came from below. On 12 February, the day of the CGT's general strike, the Socialist and Communist columns set out separately, but when they met at the Place de la Nation the workers embraced to shouts of 'Unity!'. The leaders' pact came five months later: on 27 July the two parties signed a unity-of-action agreement, and in October at Nantes, Thorez proposed widening the alliance to the Radicals, coining the name 'Popular Front of labour, liberty and peace'. This sequence, in which the French section ran ahead while the Comintern's upper floors hesitated, was ratified the following August at the Seventh Comintern Congress by Dimitrov's report and became the official line of world communism.

When the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty was signed in May 1935 and Stalin declared that he 'fully understood and approved the national defence policy of France', the French Communist Party, whose identity had been built on antimilitarism, dropped its opposition to the defence budget overnight. Party posters reading 'Stalin is right' went up in the streets of Paris. On Bastille Day, half a million people marched in Paris and recited the oath of the Rassemblement Populaire: bread, peace and liberty, the dissolution of the leagues, the defence of the Republic.

'Bread, Peace, Liberty': A Modest Programme, a Clear Victory

The Popular Front programme published in January 1936 was no revolutionary charter. Dissolution of the fascist leagues, reform of the Bank of France, public works, support for grain prices, nationalization of the arms industry, and a 'study' of the 40-hour week: there was no clause about a transition to socialism, because the ceiling was what the Radicals could accept. Blum himself insisted this would be the 'exercise' of power, not its 'conquest': within capitalism, within legality, only as far as the mandate reached.

In the elections of 26 April and 3 May 1936 the Popular Front took 386 of 608 seats. The Socialists became the largest party for the first time with 147 seats, the Communists jumped from 10 to 72, and the Radicals actually shrank. The total left vote grew only modestly, but its movement leftward was unmistakable. The Communists chose to support the government from outside without taking ministries; Thorez argued that joining would 'feed the panic', and Moscow judged likewise.

Between victory and taking office lay a month's gap. By constitutional custom Blum had to wait until early June, and what filled that month was not parliament but the factories.

The Strike That Sleeps Beside the Machines

On 11 May, workers at the Bréguet aircraft plant in Le Havre sat down inside their factory, demanding the reinstatement of two comrades sacked for striking on May Day. The occupation won within a day. Latécoère in Toulouse and Bloch in Courbevoie followed, and on 28 May, 33,000 workers stopped the machines at Renault in Billancourt. In the first week of June the strikes spread beyond metalworking to department stores and cafés, insurance offices and farms. By the Labour Ministry's count, June alone saw 12,142 strikes with 1,830,000 participants, 8,941 of them with occupation.

Occupation was this movement's invention. Staying inside the factory blocked replacement labour, and guarding the machines forestalled the charge of sabotage. And inside, the workers held dances and played accordions. Simone Weil, who had worked at Renault, recorded this 'pure joy': the joy of walking on one's own feet through the place where one works, unhounded by orders, head unbowed. The strikes were not organized from above; the CGT and the Communist Party alike ran to catch up. Trotsky wrote on 9 June that 'the French revolution has begun'; Marceau Pivert of the Socialist left wrote that 'everything is possible'. The Communist daily replied that it was not.

On the night of 4 June, Blum formed his cabinet: France's first Socialist and first Jewish prime minister, with three women undersecretaries in a country where women could not vote. In the Chamber, the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat declared that 'this ancient Gallo-Roman country will for the first time be governed by a Jew'. Three days into the government, on the night of 7 June, the employers' confederation and the CGT sat down at the Hôtel Matignon, and in negotiations lasting into the small hours the employers conceded everything at once: wage rises of 7 to 15 per cent, collective agreements, freedom of union activity, elected workers' delegates. Jouhaux called it the greatest victory in the history of the labour movement; the employers' delegates considered it the price of getting their factories back.

Parliament passed the two-week paid holidays law on 11 June by 563 votes to 1, and the 40-hour week on the 12th. On the evening of the 11th, Thorez told Communist activists of the Paris region that 'one must know how to end a strike once satisfaction has been obtained'. Not everything was possible yet. With the party's weight behind the return to work, the occupations wound down one by one through the end of June.

First Holidays, First Retreats

That summer, 600,000 people left on the first holidays of their lives with the railways' 40-per-cent-discount 'popular tickets', created by Léo Lagrange, the undersecretary for leisure and sport. Youth hostels multiplied tenfold in two years, and the beaches belonged to workers for the first time. When Blum, before his deportation to Buchenwald, listed his government's achievements at the Riom trial, what he chose was not nationalization or wages but the 'break in the clouds' let into difficult and obscure lives.

The retreats began the same summer. When the generals rose in Spain in July, Blum at first wanted to help the Republic, but under British pressure, Radical opposition and the fear of the war spreading into France, he turned in August to non-intervention. The Communists answered with the campaign 'Planes and guns for Spain', and the coalition began to crack from inside. In September came the devaluation of the franc he had promised to avoid; capital was already crossing the border. In November, interior minister Salengro, who had carried out the dissolution of the leagues, was hounded into suicide by a fabricated story in a far-right weekly.

The 'Strike of Money' and the Wall of the Senate

The gains of Matignon did not survive a year against prices. The capital that was supposed to return with devaluation did not return; by the summer of 1937 inflation had effectively swallowed the wage rises back, and gold went on draining out of the Bank of France. The left called this 'the strike of money' and wrote that the 'two hundred families' were holding the Republic hostage. The trouble was that the government drew no conclusion from its own diagnosis. Without exchange controls, moving capital abroad was perfectly legal, and a government that had accepted financial orthodoxy had only one answer left: cutting spending. On 13 February 1937 Blum declared a 'pause' in reform, trimmed the public works programme, and entrusted the defence of the franc to a committee of three orthodox economists. The measures were meant to reassure the markets; the markets were not reassured, and the government's own supporters heard a declaration of surrender.

A month later came blood. On 16 March, in the working-class town of Clichy, the Parti Social Français, successor to the dissolved Croix-de-Feu, held a cinema meeting; thousands of Popular Front supporters demonstrated against it, and police fired into the crowd, killing five and wounding hundreds. The dead were not the government's enemies but its own voters. The CGT called a half-day general strike of protest, and Blum, who went to the hospitals that night, later said he had thought of resigning. After this night, on which a Popular Front government had in effect fired on a Popular Front crowd, the heat of the street was never organized again.

When speculation hit the franc again in June, Blum asked for emergency financial powers. The Chamber granted them; the Senate, where the Radical elder Caillaux held the finance committee, refused twice. There were ways to fight: to stand on the Chamber's majority and dare the Senate, or to appeal to the street, and voices inside and outside the party demanded both. Blum refused both. The promise to act within legality, only as far as the mandate reached, also meant stopping wherever the effectively unelected Senate built its wall. On 21 June he resigned. In the country where a year earlier 'everything was possible', the government withdrew without testing its strength against either the banks or the Senate.

Unravelling: From Chautemps to 30 November

The government passed to the Radical Chautemps, with Blum staying on as vice-premier. The Chautemps government let the franc float, in effect a second devaluation, and added one last major item to the reform ledger: in August 1937 the five loss-making private railway companies were merged into a single company with a state majority, the SNCF. But the direction was already reverse. As the sense spread that no government would defend what the workers had won, strikes flared again and employers began clawing back, workplace by workplace, what they had conceded at Matignon. In January 1938 Chautemps re-formed his cabinet without the Socialists, and on the weekend of 12 March, as Hitler annexed Austria, France had no prime minister at all.

On 13 March Blum formed his second government. Facing the Anschluss, he proposed a government of national unity stretching from Thorez to Reynaud on the right; the right refused. He then went back before the Senate with an emergency financial plan built on a capital levy and exchange controls, this time with Mendès France as his treasury undersecretary. The result was the same as the year before, and the second government ended after 26 days. When Daladier formed his government on 10 April, the seats were exactly those of 1936, but the majority was already something else. With the same Popular Front chamber Daladier won approval for the Munich agreement in September (only 75 deputies, the Communists foremost among them, voted against), and in October, at its Marseille congress, the Radical Party declared its break with the Communists. The Popular Front was disappearing without any act of dissolution, its member parties stepping out one by one.

The final blow came in November. When finance minister Reynaud dismantled the 40-hour week by decree, declaring that 'the week of two Sundays has ceased to exist', the CGT called a one-day general strike for 30 November. The government requisitioned the railways, garrisoned the plants with police and troops in advance, and broke every attempted occupation on the spot. The strike collapsed within the day; thousands were sacked in reprisal at Renault and elsewhere or taken back only after signing individual re-engagement papers, and the CGT's four million members fell to around a million within a year. The balance of forces built in June 1936 was thus liquidated in thirty months.

How to Read June 1936

The argument of the time became the argument of the historians. For Trotsky, June 1936 was a revolution that had begun, and the Popular Front was the machinery of class collaboration that caged and killed it in parliamentary form. Seen from the other side, the Popular Front was the rampart that blocked the road to fascism in France and defended democracy, and Matignon was the greatest gain ever won without a revolution. Scholars such as Julian Jackson stress, between the two readings, the constraints the government carried: no majority without the Radicals, a Senate hostile to the end, and once financial orthodoxy was accepted, room for reform decided by capital flight.

What is beyond dispute is what remained. Paid holidays and collective agreements became the skeleton of French labour law; the memory of 1936 fed the 1944 programme of the National Council of the Resistance and postwar social security. And the name 'Popular Front' itself became, from Spain to Chile and on to the Soviet Union's final years half a century later, the common noun by which the left calls for unity in the face of danger.

What Survived and What Was Rolled Back: Three Layers of Debate

The question of what the Popular Front actually settled splits into three layers of debate. The first is the economy-and-rearmament argument. The decrees of Daladier and then Reynaud dismantled the forty-hour week and the wage settlements, and the right went further, trying to hang the defeat of 1940 on the Popular Front: the ceiling on hours, the story went, throttled aircraft and tank production and left France trailing German rearmament. But employers had been chanting "Plutôt Hitler que le Front populaire" (better Hitler than the Popular Front) and moving capital abroad since the summer of 1936, before any law was rolled back. Left historians read 1940 not as a defeat but as the victory of the coalition's domestic enemies, and recall that the skeleton of the reforms outlasted devaluation and the pause. The second is the revolution-versus-reform argument. Critics in the Trotsky line saw the strike wave of June 1936 as a moment of revolutionary possibility, and argued that Blum smothered it in the moderate Matignon Agreements, opening the road to fascism's victory. On their account the flaw was not Blum's personal weakness but the very politics of an alliance with the bourgeois Radicals. Defenders of reform answer that the majority of workers in 1936 were demanding bread, holidays and collective bargaining rather than proletarian power, and that Blum's transposing those demands into law was itself the achievement. The third is the continuity argument. Although Vichy scrapped the forty-hour week and dissolved the unions, the institutions of paid leave, collective bargaining and worker delegates passed through Vichy and the Liberation into the 1944 programme of the National Council of the Resistance and the social-security system of 1945. It was only then that the holiday first seen in the summer of 1936 by workers' families who had never laid eyes on the sea became an inalienable legal right. All three debates rest on the same question: a year that founded no stable barrier against fascism and launched no revolution, yet rewrote the working day as a framework of law, can that be written down as failure? Historians have still not settled the answer.

What It Settled, and What It Left Unsettled

The victory of 1936 settled two questions. First, factory occupation was not merely a wage tactic. It showed that workers could stop production and use collective power to alter the terms on which the state and capital negotiated. The Matignon Agreements and the June laws translated that power into legal rights. Collective bargaining, shop stewards, paid holidays, and the forty-hour week did not come from the electoral programme alone. They were won after workers in Le Havre, Billancourt, and elsewhere occupied their workplaces. Second, the Communist, Socialist, and Radical parties proved that they could construct a common republican front against the far right's mobilization in the streets. Blum's appointment of three women as under-secretaries, in a country where women still could not vote, also marked an expansion of the old republic's boundaries.

Yet the victory did not settle who would control the state. The Popular Front programme promised reform of the Bank of France and nationalization of the arms industry, but it did not move beyond private property or the parliamentary state. The Communist Party stayed outside the cabinet while supporting it, and Maurice Thorez argued that once demands had been won, one had to know how to end a strike. From the party's standpoint, this was a practical retreat: it bought time to defeat fascism, avoided a confrontation for which the movement was not ready, and protected the gains already made. To its critics, the same restraint was the choice that closed the occupations' potential inside parliamentary bargaining. Both interpretations explain the sequence of 1936. Workers' action pushed the law forward, but party and government leaders decided when that action would end.

This is also where the historians' disagreement remains. Julian Jackson treats the Popular Front as an attempt to defend democracy, while summarizing its legacy as disappointment and failure. Labour historians, by contrast, warn against judging 1936 only by short-term figures for wages and production. Paid holidays and collective bargaining survived the war and occupation, becoming part of the institutional language that led through the 1944 programme of the National Council of the Resistance to postwar social security in 1945. That inheritance cannot simply be called the planned completion of the Popular Front. The institutions were rebuilt by new relations of force during the Liberation. The choice, then, is not between a failed revolution and a successful reform. In 1936 the working class was strong enough to change the law of the state in a few weeks, but not organized enough to remake power itself while facing capital flight, the Senate's veto, the Spanish question, and divisions over war preparation.