The Popular Front in France: no solution to fascism

In France this summer, victory seemed promised to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN; National Rally), following a lightning-fast campaign after snap elections were called by President Emmanuel Macron.1 Instead, the left obtained the largest number of parliamentary seats. To raise support as rapidly as possible, left parties and the trade unions invoked the memory of the Popular Front of the 1930s. They also adopted its underlying strategy, summoning up a myth about the 1930s that has been circulating for decades: that a left unity government repelled fascism.

The extraordinary thing is what this myth fails to make clear—at a time when, once again, the stakes are high, including the possibility of a fascist party coming to power. First, it was not the 1936 Popular Front government that acted as a barrier to French fascism. It was the mass fightback, which had forced the fascist leagues onto the defensive two years earlier. Second, the experience of the Popular Front government was so disastrous that it was the parliament elected in 1936 that gave full powers to Marshal Pétain in 1940. He would become the head of the French collaborationist regime after expelling the Communist parliamentarians and outlawing their party.

The elections in summer 2024 have not distanced the RN from the prospect of power: fascism is stronger than ever in France. However, what the mobilisation during the electoral campaign shows is that fascism’s victory is not inevitable.

The potential for a fightback

When the results of the elections to the European Parliament were announced on 9 June 2024, it was not the triumph of the RN in France that created a surprise, dramatic as it was. The fascists came first in more than 90 precent of communes (municipalities), and nine million people voted for the far right.2 Sadly, however, it sparked no mobilisation by the left, though the outcome had been predicted for weeks. What did cause surprise was the reaction of the French president. The same day, Macron announced the dissolution of parliament with elections scheduled for three weeks later. He announced that, if RN won, he would ask it to form a government.

French society suddenly realised that the prospect of fascists forming a government was not theoretical. Initial opinion polls confirmed that the RN might win a majority. Representatives of the biggest French companies tried to contact the RN, to sound out its intentions and influence its policies.3

Sophie Binet, the leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labour), the largest of France’s union confederations, launched a solemn appeal for unity on the left, saying that it was “one minute to midnight”.4 In days, the parties of the left decided to stand united in the elections in an attempt to block the extreme right. Most of what goes in France by the name of “social movements” gave their support: unions, associations and campaigns. Significantly, adopting the name Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP; New Popular Front) was its first decision, well ahead of the agreement over the allocation of candidates or a joint programme.

On the weekend of 15-16 June 2024, 800,000 demonstrators, responding to the appeal by the trade unions and campaigning organisations, took to the streets to call for a vote for the NFP. Right up to the first round of elections, mobilisations continued unabated. Thousands participated in meetings to find out how to get involved in the campaign, which included activities such as leafleting and canvassing. Alongside this came numerous demonstrations and rallies, promoting the social, ecological and feminist demands of the movement. These demonstrations, with their open hatred of fascism, showed that the process of “de-demonising” the RN could be quickly reversed.5 Among youth, it was a slogan from the 1990s and the struggle against Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, that was taken up: “la jeunesse emmerde le Front National” (“Youth say: fuck the National Front”).6 On Saturday 29 June, on the eve of the first round, the annual Pride marches were massive. In Paris, the same slogan was shouted by tens of thousands of young people as the Pride demonstration arrived at its destination.

Lessons of the 1930s

When the Popular Front won elections in May 1936, the extreme right in France was on the defensive.7 This was not caused by the agreement for a left government.

Two years earlier, in February 1934, the situation was totally different. The far-right leagues were on the offensive against a backdrop of economic crisis, mass unemployment, corruption scandals and parliamentary instability.8 These various leagues—antisemitic, nationalist, monarchist and sometimes openly fascist—often comprised tens of thousands of members. They were also rooted in mass organisations, such as those of former servicemen or small businesses, with hundreds of thousands of members.

The left, divided at the political and trade union level, was at an all-time low ebb. The early 1930s saw historically feeble levels of strike action. The two main trade union organisations had around three-quarters of a million members between them.

However, in a context marked by the example of Hitler’s seizure of power a year earlier and the total destruction of the workers’ movement in Germany, an attempted coup by the far-right leagues on 6 February 1934 unleashed an extraordinary fightback. Local protests, often of a unified character, rejecting the sectarian approach hitherto taken by the Communists to the Socialists, began spontaneously in the following days. On 12 February, in response to a call by the CGT, five million workers went on strike against fascism across the country, with mass demonstrations in 346 cities. In the following weeks and months, this initial success led to a real effervescence of anti-fascist activity. Anti-fascist collectives and committees, again often unifying different forces, were formed across France, from big cities to villages. The anti-Stalinist activist and writer Daniel Guérin claims there were 3,000 such committees.9

The committees had several important characteristics. Pivotal was the class character that the involvement of union militants and their local base gave them. From 12 February onwards, the scale of local demonstrations correlated with the degree of trade union implantation. The class nature of the core allowed these mobilisations to then be extended to other social layers and other organisations. Another characteristic was the unity these committees imposed on their national leaderships, despite continuing opposition from the latter for several months. It was clear from the outset that demonstrations were biggest where trade unions acted in a unitary fashion.10 In Paris, two demonstrations were organised, one led by the Communist Party, the other by the Socialist Party. However, as they arrived, these two demonstrations merged under pressure from the demonstrators to shouts of “Unity!”. Joint action cemented this unity. Counter-demonstrations, festivals and meetings organised by these committees denied the fascists any public expression by occupying localities and often violently driving the fascists out of them. By denying fascists a public platform, the movement rendered them unable to cement a socially heterogenous potential membership or to supposedly represent “the people”.

Fascism’s advance towards creating mass organisation depends more on the passivity and demoralisation of the working class than on recruiting significant sections of it, while a mass response revives the fighting spirit and collective confidence of the working class and isolates the fascists. In addition, fascism can only become an instrument for the ruling class—the ultimate condition for gaining power—if it demonstrates a capacity to weaken the combativity of the working class and its collective organisational capacities.11 Fascists cannot achieve this if their initiatives play, albeit temporarily, the opposite role, triggering workers’ struggles.

The NFP plays it backwards

To understand the NFP, substitutionism is key. Mobilising against the fascists was replaced by the need to convince voters. The expression that sums up this orientation is that these people are “fâchés mais pas fachos” (“angry but not fascist”).12 That is to say, they are angry about social attacks and susceptible to reactionary and racist arguments. They are just “angry in the wrong way”. If that is true, to bring them back into the fold of the left, we would simply need to propose a social alternative. The NFP replaced unity by organisations in action with leaderships around a programme. Class conflict and the methods of struggle that go with it were replaced by class collaboration and methods that do not question state institutions.

So, pleading that this was an emergency, the NFP formed a “pact to govern”, based on positions compatible with those of the right of the Socialist Party, which no longer has anything in common with the left. In addition to emergency social measures, this programme also supports arms being sent to Ukraine and upholds French military sovereignty. It postpones issues linked to immigration—particularly the repeal of the latest racist immigration law—to the indefinite future. Such were its concessions that it won over, not only an ex-minister of Macron’s, but also François Hollande, the former president of the republic in whose government Macron had served. In essence, Hollande, in power from 2012 to 2017, pursued the same racist and neoliberal policies as Macron.

The spirit of militancy could have provided the opportunity to build a framework for anti-fascist mobilisation. Instead, the energy was channelled into electoral propaganda. None of the leaderships of the forces involved in the NFP—parties, unions, associations—called for mobilisations against fascism or against the RN during the campaign. It is also significant that, of the issues for the centrally-organised demonstrations (which included social measures, environmentalism, feminism), those of racism and of solidarity with Palestine met an impasse.13 No call was made to drive the RN from marketplaces or demonstrate against its public meetings. Very much to the fore was Binet, of the CGT, along with sections of the union apparatus. She made multiple media appearances, while the national and local structures of the CGT organised numerous leafleting sessions. However, there was never any question of strike action against the fascists—only a call to vote for the NFP, a call that took up union demands and, emblematically, the repeal of the pension law that had mobilised millions of workers in opposition in 2023.

Despite the mobilisation of the NFP, the first round put the RN top of the polls, enabling it to retain candidates in nearly every constituency. With 11 million votes, its progress was nothing less than spectacular, doubling its total from the 2022 legislative elections. The left did not see any need to change strategy. The logic of the NFP led its component parts, from the most radical to the most right-wing, to argue for a de facto agreement with the centre right and the parties supporting Macron. Every NFP candidate who came third in the first round withdrew to support the government or conservative candidates against those of the RN. That led the NFP to call, for example, for a vote for Elisabeth Borne, the prime minister who had rammed through the attack on pensions in 2023, and also for Gérald Darmanin, the minister for the interior and originator of the most racist law of recent decades.14 During the 2022 presidential campaign, Darmanin had even suggested Marine Le Pen was “too soft” over immigration and Islamism.

In weeks, we had gone from defence of an, albeit moderate, left programme as the barrier to fascism to contentless and struggle-free collaboration with some of the most neoliberal and racist currents of the ruling class. The leaders of the RN were quick to point out that this showed that they were the only real opposition to “the establishment”.

Nothing was settled

The will of the working class is often expressed through defective political channels. In this instance, voting for non-RN candidates gave broad expression to the idea that the RN is “a party unlike the others”, that it represents a specific danger and must be stopped from coming to power by any means necessary.

However, the left ought to have drawn two conclusions from this popular mood. First, mass mobilisation against the RN vote, attacking racism and fascism, could have further squeezed its audience. Second, that radical left social demands needed to be combined with anti-racist struggle to create an alternative to the politics of despair feeding the RN.

The constituent components of the NFP did not draw these conclusions. Olivier Besancenot of the far-left Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA; New Anticapitalist Party) and Binet celebrated the result as a victory.15 This underestimates the nature of the danger and is an obstacle to a necessary change of strategy. Those who talk of victory refuse to understand that the situation created by the elections has strengthened the danger of fascism. First, though the RN failed to win a majority, as noted, it dramatically increased its votes. Moreover, its votes held up between the two rounds, despite the violently racist and sometimes openly fascist profile of about 100 of its candidates being widely disseminated. Second, the absence of a majority in the Assembly has handed back to Macron the power to seek to nominate a government, one that will pursue the same policies that have allowed the RN to make progress. Significantly, the last act of the preceding government before it resigned was to publish the decrees implementing the harshest aspects of its racist anti-immigration law, which it forced through with the votes of fascist parliamentarians.

This racist policy will be implemented under conditions of accelerating instability, in which the basis for the preferred political form of bourgeois domination in many societies, parliamentary democracy, is being eroded. Only one thing is certain at the time of writing: France will have lived without an “official” government for at least two months. Supposing a government can be appointed by the end of summer, without an immediate crisis, it will not be able to govern by relying on votes in the Assembly. It will seek to impose itself through force, relying increasingly on the state apparatus, through decrees, injunctions and the police.16

The increasingly formal nature of parliamentary democracy will have as its consequence the fragility of a government subject to the machinations of politicians, amplifying a climate of populist rejection of mainstream political parties. Two weeks after the elections, an opinion poll already revealed that nearly nine out of every ten French people thought that the existing political parties were neither “credible” nor “honest”.17

Those who speak of a reprieve should draw the strategic consequences. Instead of pursuing the strategy of shoring up the rotten woodwork of parliamentary democracy, they should develop forms of struggle and organisation on the terrain where the struggle will play out, that of the fight against fascism and racism, and of class conflict. That implies a rupture with the politics of the NFP.

The Popular Front against the revolution

There is no watertight bulkhead between the struggle against fascism and the struggle against capitalism.18 The struggle against fascism is a defensive struggle—a struggle to defend, not parliamentary democracy per se, but the democratic gains that allow our class to organise.

To fight fascism effectively, we need the greatest possible unity in action. The united front, for which Leon Trotsky argued in the 1930s, should be the practical conclusion.19 By developing the organisation and unity of our class, the struggle against fascism also builds confidence and political generalisation.

In France, it was this experience that led to a revival in social struggles in the 1930s, even taking the form of insurrectional struggles in Brest and Toulon in August 1935.20 It was the start of a revolutionary process, as defined by the German-Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg.21 The electoral victory of May 1936, that of the Popular Front, was not the origin of this process, but simply a link in the chain. It was the signal for hitherto poorly organised sectors of the working class that the ruthless domination by the bosses was going to be done away with. A tempestuous movement of strikes and factory occupations started in May that year. The employers’ panic led to agreements between them: the Matignon Agreements, signed on 7 June 1936. A guarantee was given by the new government and the trade union leaderships that the movement would be curtailed. The gains imposed on the bosses were considerable—including wage increases, a 40-hour week, paid holidays and trade union rights. Today, they are presented as the result of the elections and of government action. In fact, they were the fruit of strikes and occupations.

These gains did not stop the movement. It was in the aftermath of the agreements that the movement generalised. However, the Popular Front government and the forces supporting it did everything in their power to halt this movement, which ran counter to their strategy. When Marceau Pivert, a radical figure in the Socialist Party, famously declared “everything is possible”, an editorial in the Communist Party’s L’Humanité, replied: “No! Not everything is possible now”.22

Using the danger of fascism as a pretext, the Communist Party replaced the perspective of revolution with one of defending democracy—whether bourgeois or not.23 Its response to the growth of workers’ demands was to argue that now was not the time, that pursuing those demands would frighten the middle classes and throw them into the arms of fascism. “We must know how to end a strike,” declared Maurice Thorez, the Communist Party leader.24

Space does not permit the detailed development of the stages of the rightward evolution of the Popular Front and the repeated action taken by the political and trade union leaderships against the movement. I will just give one example, because it illustrates the link between anti-fascism and the wider struggle. The factory struggles continued, became ever harder and were increasingly repressed by the state, paralysed by the trade union leaderships and often isolated one from the other. Then, in March 1937, the Popular Front government announced a “breathing space” in pursuing reforms. An employers’ journal of the period declared its satisfaction: “This is more than a breathing space—it is a conversion”.25 The same month, the authorities authorised a fascist party to hold a meeting in Clichy, a suburb of Paris. This fascist party, the Parti Social Français, was the new form taken by the Croix de Feu, which the government had dissolved in June. A counter-rally was called by local trade union and political forces, a significant section of which decided to go to the venue to prevent the fascists from meeting. The confrontation took place, not with the fascists but with the police acting on the orders of the Popular Front government. Several people were killed. When the national leaders denounced the “provocateurs” (they were referring to the anti-fascists), this triggered demonstrations and a spontaneous strike movement that the union leaderships did their utmost to neuter.

Forcing fascism back is possible

Today, the RN enjoys a mass electoral following, but it has not yet succeeded in transforming its audience into a force it can mobilise in activity. We should not be in the least complacent about this, as the situation might soon play to the RN’s advantage. The racist riots in Britain this summer are one sign of this. They show how the racist climate can lead to far-right explosions. One can only imagine what this might lead to in France, given the strength of the RN.

The stock exchange turmoil, centred on Japan in early August, shows that rapid economic collapses may come. Insolvencies among small and very small businesses are already at a record level in France.26 An enraged petty bourgeoisie lies at the heart of fascist street movements historically and still today. There may be a rough balance at the ballot box between fascists and the left, but, for now, the left remains stronger in its capacity to mobilise in action. The weeks of the electoral campaign showed that.

This only reinforces the urgency of building the struggle against racism and fascism, without waiting for initiatives to be taken nationally. Building the struggle must be implemented neighbourhood by neighbourhood, workplace by workplace. Where such initiatives were taken, there were also results. In several places, this had begun even before the most recent election. In other places, it was during the campaign that new collectives were established. For instance, at St Brieuc in Brittany, an anti-fascist front organised a united demonstration on 21 April 2024, bringing 2,000 people together.27 At Le Havre, in Normandy, the links forged in 2023 to oppose a national meeting of the RN made it possible to organise the only mass united initiative specifically targeted at fascism during the electoral campaign.28 At Rennes, also in Brittany, anti-fascist assemblies were organised during the campaign and worked in coordination in three different neighbourhoods. These assemblies merged with two other networks of solidarity with migrants, setting up a common front against fascism, inspired by the example of St Brieuc.

In Paris, a few days before the European elections in June, a demonstration held annually to commemorate the assassination of a young comrade by Nazis took place. It crystallised the coming together of the struggle against fascism, of solidarity with the Palestinian people and of the struggle in solidarity with the undocumented (sans-papiers) and young migrants. On 14 July, a demonstration against fascism, racism and colonialism took place in Paris, initiated by the Marche des Solidarités, the sans-papiers collectives and the movement for solidarity with Palestine.

A major difference with the 1930s is that we are not starting from a situation in which the level of struggle is low. The current absence of perspectives “from above” due to the parliamentary deadlock will favour initiatives “from below”. Struggles will take place that will provide opportunities to develop fighting trade union sectors and rank-and-file organisations. It is not a matter of making anti-fascism a prerequisite for these struggles, but the struggles must provide the opportunity to develop arguments and bases of struggle against racism and fascism. We must draw on the example of the 2023 movement over pensions. What led to its defeat was the political logic of the Popular Front under another name, that of “l’intersyndicale”, the inter-union leadership. However, the cause was also the absence of an interconnection with the struggle against racism and fascism, which meant that this movement made no inroads on the audience of the RN.29

Combatting the Popular Front

The example of France in the 1930s shows how a revolutionary dynamic brought the movement into confrontation with the state and with the leaderships of the Popular Front. It might seem paradoxical that this movement also led initially, and particularly in June 1936, to a real explosion in membership of the organisations whose leaders defended the Popular Front. In a few months, the CGT quadrupled its numbers to four million. The same is true of the Communist Party, which was widely identified as a revolutionary party and which became a mass party in this period.

This was part of a process of radicalisation. The movement pulled behind it layers of the working class that had hitherto been passive. While the February 1934 movement had been driven by the most organised sectors of the working class, sectors in which political activists also had the largest presence, the tempestuous June movement was driven by sectors in which the trade unions were the weakest.30 These sectors included metallurgy, textiles, chemicals and department stores. They saw the strongest organisational growth in response to the struggles. This explains why, for a while, the leaderships found it difficult to control the movement. It also explains why these new, less politically armed activists, were less able to resist the politics of the organisations they had joined in the long term.

The answer could have been found in a common organisation of the politically better-armed militants of February 1934 with the radical and enthusiastic elements from the strike wave of June 1936. Yet, the explanation for the absence of strikes among the most organised sectors in June 1936 is that in these sectors activists mostly backed the line of their leaderships and “expected” the government to meet their demands. That is not, though, the whole picture. As early as 1935, there were left oppositions in the Socialist Party, and also in the Communist Party, developing a critique of the Popular Front.31 However, out of concern not to isolate themselves from the movement, their stance towards the Popular Front and its parties remained ambiguous. As such, they were unable to either widely popularise an independent revolutionary perspective, and so enrich the movement, or weld together a coherent political force in this struggle. The left opposition in the Socialist Party was finally excluded in 1938 and rapidly marginalised. The opposition in the Communist Party was progressively destroyed through expulsions. Oppositions that existed independently of the Popular Front were numerically too weak and too little rooted in the working class to be able to play a significant role.32

Conclusion

Fascism is both the expression and consequence of a crisis of capitalism, the ultimate truth of which is “either them or us”. Matters will not be settled peacefully. To allow the politics of the Popular Front to dominate is simply to prepare for our defeat. Clarification is indispensable if we are to build autonomy for our class and the struggle against fascism. That must be implemented concretely. We need more revolutionaries if we are to defend these politics openly, to propose initiatives, and to test and learn from the experience in every locality and every workplace. Being rooted in the working class is also a condition for these politics to become an alternative when the level of struggle rises and the impasse of the traditional leaderships of the movement becomes more obvious.

The obstacle that the Communist Party represented in the 1930s no longer exists. Across France there are collectives, groups of activists looking in the same direction. Things could advance rapidly, allowing the development a revolutionary organisation—but time is short.

Denis Godard is one of the initiators of the anti-racist coalition Marche des Solidarités and a member of the revolutionary group Autonomie de Classe.