People of the Revolution and the USSR

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1872–1950 ○ Heart disease

France's first Socialist prime minister, who left behind paid holidays and the 40-hour week

'I rarely left my desk while in power; but whenever I went out and crossed the Paris suburbs and saw the roads covered with processions of jalopies, motorcycles and tandems, with working-class couples in matching pullovers, I had the feeling that, despite everything, I had brought a kind of clearing, a break in the clouds, into difficult and obscure lives', statement at the Riom trial, March 1942

A literary critic drawn into politics by the Dreyfus affair, he kept the Socialist SFIO's 'old house' standing at the 1920 Congress of Tours when the majority left to found the Communist Party. As prime minister of the 1936 Popular Front government he brokered the Matignon Agreements and enacted two weeks of paid holidays and the 40-hour week, becoming France's first Socialist and first Jewish head of government and a target of the far right. One of the eighty parliamentarians who voted against full powers for Pétain in 1940, he turned Vichy's Riom trial into a platform for defending the Popular Front, survived internment near Buchenwald, and briefly headed a caretaker government in late 1946.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1889–1946 ○ Natural causes

SFIO general secretary who led the Tours vote to join the Comintern, became the first PCF general secretary and left in 1923

At the 1920 Tours Congress, Frossard led the move to join the Comintern and became the French Communist Party’s first general secretary, but left in 1923. Later a minister, he joined Pétain’s cabinet in 1940, voted for his full powers, and was acquitted of collaboration after the war.

A teacher from the Belfort region, he joined the SFIO and became its general secretary in 1918. After visiting Moscow with Cachin in 1920 he backed joining the Comintern at the Tours congress and became the first general secretary of the new French Communist Party. Clashing with the Comintern’s demands for discipline, he left in January 1923 and returned to the SFIO. He served as a minister in several governments in the 1930s and joined Pétain’s first cabinet in June–July 1940, but declined to serve Vichy; after the war he was tried for collaboration and acquitted.

France state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1890–1936 ✕ Suicide

The Popular Front's interior minister, hounded to death by the far-right press

In a note to Blum before turning on the gas, he wrote: "If they could not succeed in dishonouring me, they will at least bear responsibility for my death. I am neither a deserter nor a traitor."

A Socialist politician, mayor of Lille, and Blum's interior minister. In the strike wave of June 1936 he refused to clear the occupied factories by force, and he carried out the dissolution of the far-right leagues, the first item of the Popular Front programme. When the far-right weekly Gringoire barraged him with a fabricated story of desertion in the First World War, a military court of honour and an overwhelming vote of the Chamber cleared him twice over; the campaign did not stop, and on 17 November he took his own life at his home in Lille. Hundreds of thousands came to his funeral, and his death set off the debate on legislating against press defamation.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1895–1958 ○ Illness

The Socialist left's tribune who wrote 'Everything is possible', the Popular Front's left frontier

'Everything is possible', the title and the conclusion of his front-page article in Le Populaire as the strikes surged, 27 May 1936

A schoolmaster who became the leader of the Socialist SFIO's left. In 1935 he founded the Revolutionary Left tendency, supporting the Popular Front while arguing for a revolutionary way beyond it, and at the height of the strikes in May 1936 he planted himself at the centre of the argument with 'Everything is possible' in Le Populaire. He ran the premier's press service under Blum without ceasing to radicalize, and when the party expelled him in 1938 he founded the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP). Exiled in Mexico during the war, he returned to the SFIO afterward and stood on its left and in the anticolonial camp until his death.

France state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1900–1940 ✕ Killed in action

The undersecretary for leisure and sport who designed the workers' first holidays

'Our simple and human aim is to let the mass of French youth find joy and health in sport, and to organize the leisure of the workers so that they may enjoy the joy of life and the dignity regained', radio address on taking office, 10 June 1936

A lawyer and Socialist deputy who took the post the Blum government created first in the world: undersecretary for leisure and sport. With the railways' 40-per-cent-discount 'popular tickets', a boom in youth hostels and a popular sports certificate, he organized 600,000 first paid holidays in the summer of 1936, defining leisure policy as the restoration of dignity to workers. Volunteering for service in 1939, he was killed by shellfire on the Aisne front on 9 June 1940. Thousands of stadiums and gymnasiums across France carry his name today.