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In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx postulated that historical events always take place twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. The underlying assumption is that all of the actors involved have a notion of how some past event played out, and are bracing for a possible repetition of that event. But since one does not fall down the same hole twice in a row, what actually occurs is not an identical repetition, but a mimicry, at best, of the previous occurrence.
Bernard Schmid, born in 1971 in southern Germany, lives in Paris. He holds a doctorate in labor law and works full-time as a lawyer. In addition, he works as a freelance journalist and writer. Since 1990, he has been writing about the National Front and other topics such as trade unions and social movements in France and North Africa.
Against this backdrop, France’s 2024 elections raised a question that continues to preoccupy the country today: is history — in the form of the left-wing coalition that shaped the country’s destiny in the ten years leading up to the Second World War — now reproducing itself as farce?
Tragedy or Farce?
In the 1930s, the left-wing alliance went by the name of Rassemblement populaire pour le pain, la paix et la liberté (Working-Class Rally for Bread, Peace, and Freedom), but has since been simply referred to as the Front populaire. This roughly translates to “Working-Class Front”, or “Popular Front” in the sense of a working-class coalition, rather than a widely approved one. (In French, a quartier populaire is, similarly, not a “popular neighbourhood”, but a working-class neighbourhood, or a residential district of the lower classes.)
At very short notice and in response to Emmanuel Macron’s dissolution of the National Assembly on 9 June 2024, the French left-wing parties formed a new electoral alliance, which they dubbed the Nouveau Front populaire (New Popular Front, or NFP). Is this a case of the return of the past, a historical tragedy repeated as farce? That was the claim made by some of the new alliance’s bourgeois opponents. In reality, the claim is untenable, because the experience of the Front populaire in the 1930s was by no means tragic. Also, the differences between the two Fronts’ respective situations are glaring: In 1936, the left-wing alliance won the parliamentary elections of 26 April and 3 May with a resounding 57.8 percent of votes cast, and its government would go on to pass a series of progressive social reforms. By contrast, though the NFP did become the strongest force in a fragmented parliament after snap elections on 30 June and 7 July 2024, and asked President Macron for the mandate to govern — which he refused — it was still far from gaining an absolute majority of the vote, winning 28.8 percent in the first round and 26.7 percent in the second round of voting.
As a result, the NFP was unable to make any headway in parliament. Most significantly, the alliance was quick to quarrel, as stark internal divisions had a polarizing effect, especially between the Parti socialiste, which had last governed from 2012 to 2017, and the electoral platform La France insoumise (“France Unbowed”), often labelled as left-wing socialist or even populist. International issues, especially, including the so-called “Middle East conflict”, made for mutual accusations and reproaches.
Looking Back without Anger
How does this cloud our view of the years around 1936, when the French left was united, triumphed temporarily at the ballot box, and succeeded in pushing through a number of changes in the period that followed (even if it failed to achieve others)? It doesn’t. The period remains a historical benchmark, and not just within the ranks of the left. Even a long-form history programme, shown on public broadcaster France 3 on the evening of 19 May 2026 (1936: The Front populaire, between Joy and Anger), concluded that the period was one of fundamental and, on balance, positive significance. Towards the end of the programme, it was pointed out that the 1936 governing coalition had planned to introduce a universal healthcare and old-age insurance scheme. Though this had to wait until 1945 — after Nazi Germany’s defeat — it was achieved by the same political forces, which brought in the Sécurité sociale (social security) system that exists to this day.
There is little to dispute in the fundamentals here. Even though Léon Blum’s 1936 coalition government was forced to step down after just one year, and even though this was followed by a genuine tragedy in the form of France’s military defeat by Nazi Germany and the four-year German occupation, the latter was no consequence of the left-wing government, but rather an expression of its enemies’ victory.
Facilitating France’s rapid fall to Hitler’s Germany in 1939–40 were the French left’s longstanding political opponents: the reactionaries and the employers’ associations. Even before France surrendered in 1940, they had followed the maxim: Plutôt Hitler que le Front populaire ! (“Better Hitler than the Popular Front!”).
The Catalyst
On 6 February 1934, French rightists — an agglomeration of war veterans’ associations, Mussolini sympathizers, and Charles Maurras’ monarchist-nationalist, antisemitic Action française party — attempted to storm the National Assembly in Paris and, invoking corruption scandals, overthrow the Republic. The attempted coup was put down, with 17 dead and 2,300 wounded. News of these events transpiring on the Place de la Concorde shocked French society.
The French Communist Party (PCF) leadership’s official reaction was in line with the Communist International’s then doctrine on “social fascism”. The head of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, declared to the parliament: “You are all, governing officials and deputies of the Right or the Left, leading the country into fascism. International experience proves that there is no difference in nature between bourgeois democracy and fascism.”
Among the left-wing parties’ base, however — including that of the PCF and the social-democratic French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) — the antifascist united front practically built itself. When two separately organized demonstrations to protest the attempted putsch were held in Paris on 12 February, one social-democrat and one communist, they spontaneously joined forces to cries of “Unity! Unity!” The combined demonstration was 150,000 strong.
Under heavy pressure from the Communist base in France and neighbouring countries, but also influenced by the experience of the Nazis’ crushing defeat of the German Communist Party (KPD), the Communist International decided to change its position. Party leadership in Moscow now called on the various national Communist parties to unify against fascism, to make alliances with social democrats and even with bourgeois parties in the Western imperialist democracies, and to start making use of patriotic language.
The PCF went so far as to sing the national anthem alongside the “Internationale”, and flew the tricolour flag. The party’s base massively resisted the latter gesture; many members would roll up the French national flag so that only the red could be seen.
On 27 July 1934, the PCF and the SFIO signed a “unity of action” pact. A year later — on 14 July 1935, Bastille Day — and in view of elections looming in April and May, the parties formed an electoral coalition, which the Radicaux (Radicals) also joined. (The name of the latter is sometimes falsely translated as “radical left”. Nothing could be more misleading: since the nineteenth century, France’s “Radicals” have been an anti-clerical liberal party of the middle class. “Radical” in this sense corresponds to something more like “free-thinking”.)
1936 Parliamentary Elections: Beating Antisemitic Propaganda
The general election was won by the alliance of the left. This was also an important political and ideological victory over the influential far-right mass media and the pro-fascist militant groups known as the ligues (leagues), which were banned and disbanded in June 1936 when Léon Blum became head of government.
Prior to this, the new prime minister had been the target of a vicious campaign of antisemitic propaganda. The far-right press, which at the time had a circulation in the millions, railed against Blum, the “wandering, rootless Jew” (juif errant), referring to the “tyranny of this man of a different race”, calling him “the Asiatic”. The right-wing press spread sinister rumours: that Léon Blum’s real name was actually Karfunkelstein, that he was not French at all, that he came from Bessarabia (now Moldova), and that he had a secret fortune in diamonds.
But the campaign’s effects fizzled out, and the left stood firmly behind Blum. The nationalist right held onto its fundamental opposition to his presence and his person; when he took office, the headline of the Action française paper read: “The Jewish Question in Parliament”.
Meanwhile, due to the reforms he introduced, Léon Blum remained a popular figure in the historical memory of a large section of French society.
A Catalyst for Social Struggles
Due to the global economic crisis that had begun in the US in October 1929 and whose effects had been felt in France since 1931, the workers’ movement had suffered a series of setbacks and defeats. The 1936 left-wing election victory triggered a spontaneous mass movement, discharging social tensions that had already been building up for years.
The immediate trigger for the widespread struggle was the firing of factory employees for failing to turn up to work on 1 May — a date that was not yet a public holiday at the time. This led to disputes from 7 May 1936 onwards. Between 11 and 13 May, strikes broke out at two aircraft factories, the Breguet works in Le Havre and the Latécoère factories in Toulouse. What began as local walkouts then triggered a massive strike movement. This rapidly grew in intensity with a second wave of walkouts, this time over pay demands. At the height of the mighty wave of strikes between 9 and 11 June 1936, 1.5 million workers were striking. The striking workers occupied their factories and workplaces.
Communist party leadership and the heads of the most powerful trade union congress, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), pressured public service workers, and in particular the strongly unionized transport workers, not to join the May 1936 strikes. In an article for the magazine Historia, Professor Jean-Paul Brunet writes: “[The leadership of the PCF and the CGT] feared the movement’s breadth, which was escaping their control, and they assumed that the mass of non-unionized workers would step over the bounds of what they considered reasonable.”
Four days after an agreement was reached with the unions on 7 June 1936, the general strike began to deflate. Yet it was precisely this strike that helped push through some of the Front populaire’s most significant reforms.
The Most Important Social Reforms
For instance, the Front’s electoral programme had promised only in very general terms to “shorten the working week with no loss of wages”. But it was not until June 1936 — after the strike — that the concrete prospect of replacing the prevailing 48-hour working week with a 40-hour one re-emerged.
By contrast, prior to the wave of strikes, the left-wing parties had not expressly raised the demand for paid holidays, even though statutory holidays already existed in Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. Parts of the PCF were even explicitly hostile to the policy; according to their view, such a demand “denigrates the working people” by making them seem to be lovers of sloth and idleness rather than proud producers. In earlier waves of strikes, such as the Citroën strikes in 1925 and 1933, the PCF had actually proved itself eager to remove paid holidays (first brought up by workers themselves) from the list of demands. By 1936, the PCF cadres were also heavily influenced by the work ethic then being preached in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
For its part, the social-democratic SFIO had made timid parliamentary attempts to secure a legal basis for the right to paid holidays. Yet this ambition always remained stuck somewhere in the parliamentary gears, even though the SFIO was a partner across multiple coalition governments. The necessary change was brought about by the strike wave of May and June 1936.
Overnight between 8 and 9 June 1936, Charles Picquenard, director of the Ministry of Labour, produced at high speed a draft bill on paid holidays, which was immediately submitted to parliament. Faced with the wave of strikes, even the right-wing deputies now assented to a law on paid holidays, despite their opposition on principle to such reforms, which were alleged to foster “the laziness of the lower classes”. The parliamentary decision to introduce two weeks’ paid holiday, on 11 June 1936, was unanimous; all of the 592 deputies present voted in favour (only a handful of representatives chose to passively refuse, by failing to attend the vote).
In its first weeks, the Front populaire government brought in one reform after another: in only 73 days, 133 laws were passed. The most important were those pertaining to the 40-hour week, annual paid holidays (many saw the sea for the first time in their lives in the summer of 1936), robust wage increases (principally through the establishment of a minimum wage), as well as laws that created a legal framework for collective bargaining (similar to the German system that exists now). And for the farmers, who then comprised 30 percent of the working population, the Office du blé (Wheat Board) was established. This was an important innovation: a public authority that would guarantee a fixed minimum price, considerably reducing the often overwhelming economic risk to which agricultural producers were exposed.
The Power of Capital
Brunet, the historian of the Front populaire cited above, summarizes the Front’s economic programme as follows: “Léon Blum’s economic doctrine was not in essence socialist … Blum’s scheme aimed at increasing domestic consumption … and assumed that the prospect of more profit would encourage business to make new investments.” In other words, this was a Keynesian programme.
Yet the bourgeoisie at the time preferred to put their capital “somewhere safe”, preferably Switzerland. The French franc lost ever more ground due to currency speculation. Léon Blum refused at first to take a clear decision, such as to voluntarily devalue the currency (which would make imports more expensive and exports cheaper, at the risk of damaging France’s reputation for “stability”). In the end, he had to accept a devaluation of the franc, forced on the country from the outside.
On 25 October 1936, Paris concluded an agreement with London and Washington over the exchange rate, with the franc losing between 25 and 35 percent of its value. The positive effects (cheapening of production and exports) quickly disappeared with the ongoing flight of capital from the country, and speculation on its currency. The negative aspects — pricier imports and the outflux of speculative capital, which had previously been invested in French francs — set in apace. The inflation rate, 70 percent over 12 months, driven by price hikes on many goods, soon enough began eating up the workers’ increased wages. This was how capital clawed back what it initially had to fork out.
In a radio address on 13 February 1937, Léon Blum called for a “pause” to the reforms. The pressure from privately owned capital, which had basically maintained its position of economic power, was now overwhelming. On 15 June of the same year, Blum sought comprehensive economic authority from parliament to put through restrictive measures: the end of the (in principle) automatic pegging of loans to rising prices; five billion francs in additional taxes; a drastic increase in the prices of tobacco, the post, and the trains. At the same time, he wanted to introduce controls on speculative currency trading and other activities of finance capital.
While the PCF decried the first set of measures, the bourgeoisie was outraged by the second. Ultimately the PCF voted for the whole package “in order to save the Front populaire”. But the Radicals were double-dealing: in the National Assembly, the lower house, they voted with Blum. But in the Senate, the upper house, they voted against him. During the night of 21 to 22 June 1937, Léon Blum tendered his resignation as Prime Minister.
The same National Assembly composition that had carried the Front populaire government remained in place until the French surrender of May–June 1940. But now it was mainly the Radicaux who were governing, breaking with the left and seeking majorities by teaming up with bourgeois parties. The reform programme had been officially “paused”.
[Translated by Sam Langer and Anna Dinwoodie for Gegensatz Translation Collective.]
