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368 dick geary

their time in the League of Maidens as a liberation from parental control. It should

also be noted that many women participated – as nurses, doctors, welfare profes-

sionals, and even concentration camp guards – in the campaigns of sterilization,

euthanasia, and extermination. There was no single female fate under Nazism.

To return to the theme of gender and modernization, although a new Marriage

Law made divorce easier, it did so primarily for men, who could now dissolve their

marriages on the new grounds of race or physical and mental inﬁrmity, rather than

for women. Again, therefore, the clear imperative was racial hygiene rather than any

identiﬁcation with “modern” social trends. Furthermore, divorce by mutual agree-

ment was not permitted by Nazi legislation; and most of the grounds for divorce,

apart from those relating to racial hygiene, remained the same as before in both law

and practice.

Although few aspects of social existence were fundamentally transformed between

1933 and 1945, in one area of social engineering the Nazis did realize radical goals

and did so with enormous violence: that of race. It has become increasingly clear that

the “racial hygiene” campaign of the Third Reich touched virtually all aspects of life,

including the delivery of welfare, the treatment of criminals, and relations at work

and in the family. The aim of creating a racially pure “People’s Community,” purged

of “unhealthy” and “alien” elements, intruded into the lives of Germans in a multi-

tude of ways. All those deemed by the Nazis to be “of no biological value,” “useless

eaters,” and “community aliens” were to be removed from the Volksgemeinschaft.

Political opponents (communists and social democrats) experienced terror at the

hands of local Nazis in the spring and early summer of 1933. Many were subsequently

moved into concentration camps. Others, whose loyalties were deemed suspect

(Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses), suffered a similar fate. From 1936–7 onwards,

however, other “outsiders,” whose problems were held by the Nazis to be genetically

determined, were carted off to camps or subject to various forms of medical interven-

tion. These groups included “asocials” (the homeless, tramps, prostitutes, the “work-

shy”), “hereditary criminals” (deemed predisposed to a life of crime by their genes),

and homosexuals. Until 1939 relatively few of these “community aliens” had been

killed, but the onset of war radicalized their treatment, especially after 1941. Now

some were shot, given lethal injections, subject to medical experiments, worked to

death, and transported to the death camps.

Programs of genetic engineering were also unleashed on those the Nazis held to

be “unhealthy.” The term “hereditarily ill” was used by the regime to describe a large

number of people: “the congenitally feeble-minded,” “schizophrenics,” “manic

depressives,” “chronic alcoholics,” those with serious physical deformities, and suf-

ferers from Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, and deafness. Welfare support

was removed from such people, many of whom (some 320,000 Germans) were forc-

ibly sterilized. Dangerous criminals were not infrequently castrated and all prisoners

held in the Reich were subject to medical testing. The most infamous example of

Nazi inhumanity towards its own sick was the so-called “euthanasia” campaign, in

which over 70,000 mentally ill and physically impaired Germans were murdered.

Outside the Reich the Nazi racial program had further consequences. In the areas

under German occupation in the east the allocation of land, material resources, and

power followed a clear racial hierarchy. Germans plundered whatever they wanted

without regard to the needs of the Slavic populations, millions of whom were forced

the nazi new society 369

into servile labor both inside and outside the boundaries of the Reich. Furthermore,

the regime embarked on a policy of racial resettlement (“ethnic cleansing”) in Poland,

in which Poles and Jews were transported out of areas to be settled by ethnic

Germans. Most notoriously of all, Nazism attempted to exterminate European Jews

and Gypsies, a story told elsewhere in this volume.

A German Identity?

There is yet another perspective from which the issue of social change under Nazi

rule may be addressed: to what extent did the regime succeed in changing the

attitudes and identities of its citizens? Even if inequalities of wealth and income

continued, was it still not possible that the Third Reich oversaw the destruction of

traditional group identities and created a united German consciousness? We have

long known that some aspects of the Nazi regime and its policies were popular:

foreign policy successes before 1939, speedy military victories between 1939 and

1941, and the conquest of unemployment, as well as the restoration of “law and

order,” “traditional family values,” and national greatness, and the repression of social

democrats and communists. Recent literature has taken this picture of approval even

further. On the basis of oral history testimony, which remembers the peacetime years

of the Third Reich as quiet and prosperous; of the huge numbers who ﬂocked to

join Nazi organizations; of the participation of many “ordinary” Germans in the

implementation of Nazi racial policy; and of the fact that a signiﬁcant number of the

Reich’s citizens were prepared to denounce their workmates, neighbors, and even

family members to the Gestapo, it has been argued that the regime rested on the

consent of its citizens, or that at the very least most Germans were prepared to

accommodate themselves to that regime.

Research on the Saarland has claimed that

distinctive Catholic and working-class identities were overridden by this process,

while Nazi success in winning the loyalty of industrial workers has been stressed by

a number of studies.

While it is certain that the Third Reich had a great deal of support, a generalized

concept of consent is problematical on a number of counts. Firstly, the reports of both

the Gestapo and the SPD in Exile make it quite clear that the popularity of some

aspects of the regime was matched by the unpopularity of others. Hitler enjoyed wide-

spread public support, but the Nazi Party was loathed. Foreign policy successes

without war were popular, but German public opinion was not in favor of another war

before 1939. Attacks on communists appealed to many, but this did not apply to

attacks on the churches.

Moreover, the concept of consent needs to be differentiated.

Consider, for example, the experience and attitudes of the working class under

Nazism. The worker-friendly discourse of the regime and the removal of unemploy-

ment may have had a positive impact on some workers, while new systems of payment,

the creation of workforces in new industries and places, industrial rationalization, and

the racial restructuring of the labor force may have undermined traditional structures

of class solidarity. However, some workers, who had been unemployed in the

Depression, could still be found complaining that they earned less in 1938 than in

1929. The individualization of pay packets may have been supported by young and

energetic workers, but others denounced the new working practices. In any case, it is

questionable whether living standards provide a key to class identity and solidarity.

370 dick geary

The factory ﬂoor and worker solidarity were not as transformed by technological

rationalization as some would have us believe. This may have been true of the largest

companies, which have been the focus of scholarly attention, but it was far from true

across the whole of German industry, where a lack of uniformity was the most strik-

ing characteristic. In any case, even if shop-ﬂoor hierarchies had been transformed,

the impact this would have had on class identity is far from clear. For thirty years

labor historians have become increasingly insistent that solidarities are rarely formed

on the shop ﬂoor – or at least on the shop ﬂoor alone – but rather by factors exoge-

nous to the labor process. For in the factory there have always been differential

systems of skill and reward that have had the potential to divide rather than unite

interests. This takes us into the most important reason for doubting that the identity

of the German working class was unequivocally transformed by Nazism: there never

was a single, monolithic, German working class. Different groups of workers had

different histories and identities – of occupation, skill, religion, race, gender, region,

ideology – which cut across or undermined the solidarity of class long before 1933.

The experience of mass and long-term unemployment had done a great deal to frac-

ture, demobilize, and demoralize German labor before the Nazi seizure of power: a

united working class was and remained a fantasy.

This diversity of working-class experience and identity did not disappear after

1933. Where class loyalties had never been strong, as in the Saarland, or where labor

forces were new, as in the aircraft industry of Bremen, or where workers possessed

strong nationalist traditions, as at Krupp in Essen, it is not surprising that class identity

is difﬁcult to ﬁnd. That letters from former workers serving on the front tell us little

about class identity is also scarcely surprising in the context of a brutal conﬂict, in

which the distinction between Germans and the enemy was bound to dominate.

Perhaps most crucially, class identity has never been easy to forge across skill, occu-

pational, gender, and generational divides. Solidarity was never a given; it had to be

created by the agencies of the labor movement (parties, unions, social clubs). In this

context the complete destruction of the institutions of the German labor movement

and the incarceration of its leaders by the Nazis was crucial. It robbed labor of a

collective voice and an institutional backbone of solidarity. In the absence of these,

many workers retreated into a privatized existence; and in this context such a retreat

(or even collusion with the regime) may be better understood as opportunistic sur-

vival strategies rather than the result of ideological afﬁnity. We know that many joined

the NSDAP to get or keep jobs, for example, and that most denunciations to the

Gestapo were inspired by self-interested and non-ideological motives. These actions

certainly constituted collusion with the regime. Whether they can be construed as

consent, however, is a different matter, for consent can only be measured where his-

torical actors can choose between real alternatives without detriment to themselves.

No such choice existed in the Third Reich, not least because of terror and

persecution.

Recent literature has played down the Nazi terror, pointing out that there were

relatively few Gestapo ofﬁcers and violence was targeted at speciﬁc “outsiders” rather

than the German people as a whole. Though true, these observations miss the point;

for those “outsiders” included that 30 percent or more of the German electorate,

which had voted “left” (for the SPD or KPD) in virtually every German election

between 1912 and 1932. Against this group terror was exercised not only by the

the nazi new society 371

Gestapo but by the SA and Nazi Party thugs, as in the spring and early summer of

1933, when large numbers of social democrats and communists were carted off to

“wild” concentration camps, where they were beaten, tortured, or murdered.

Between 1933 and 1945, 150,000 KPD members were “detained” in prisons or

concentration camps and 42,000 communists were murdered. The destruction

of the SA leadership in 1934 and the antisemitic pogrom of November 1938

offered further examples of what any opponent of the regime might expect. These –

as well as the concentration camps, the absence of civil liberties, and the destruction

of independent institutions – set the context in which Germans had to live

and work between 1933 and 1945. The context was further radicalized in the later

stages of World War II. In the ﬁrst half of 1943 alone, 982 Germans were convicted

of treason, of whom 948 were executed. At the same time almost 9,000 were charged

with left-wing activity, 8,727 with “resistance,” and just over 11,000 with “opposi-

tion.” A further 10,773 were arrested for fraternizing with foreign workers and

prisoners of war.

The signiﬁcance of this repressive context for the behavior of Germans was made

clear by developments when that context was removed. After 1945 trade union,

socialist, and even communist organizations reappeared with remarkable rapidity,

indicating the continued existence of older group solidarities. The 1949 national

election in West Germany has also been described as the last Weimar election, with

both Catholic and socialist camps surviving the Nazi onslaught. Subsequently, the

combination of the Cold War and Germany’s “economic miracle” created a new

politics. This transition, however, may also have been a consequence of generational

change, in which Nazism did play a major role. Though an older generation may

have returned to pre-Nazi identities after 1945, the younger generation, which grew

up under Nazi rule, was cut off from those traditions and subject to a distinct,

homogeneous, and pervasive socialization. This new generation produced the

individualist and income-maximizing workers of the “economic miracle.”

NOTES

1 For the original Nazi Party program and examples of Nazi electoral promises, see Jeremy

Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds, Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 1 (Exeter: University of

Exeter Press, 1983), pp. 14–16, 70–81. On the contradictions of Nazi economic

promises, see Henry Ashby Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 60–71.

2 On the Nazi economy, see Noakes and Pridham

Nazism, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society

1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984); Tim Mason, Social Policy in the

Third Reich (Providence RI: Berg, 1993); Richard Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery,

2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Richard Overy, War and

Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Harold James, The

German Slump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Volker Berghahn, The

Americanisation of the German Economy (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986); John Gillingham,

Industry and Politics in the Third Reich (London: Methuen, 1985); Neil Gregor, Daimler

Benz in the Third Reich (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Arthur Schweitzer,

Big Business in the Third Reich (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); Daniel P.

Silverman, Hitler’s Economy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). On the

372 dick geary

exploitation of foreign labor, see Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the modernization thesis, see Rainer Zitelmann,

Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987); Michael

Prinz, Vom neuen Mittelstand zum Volksgenossen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986); Michael

Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann, eds, Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991); Mark Roseman, “National Socialism and

Modernisation,” in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Richard Bessel, ed. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 196–229. On agriculture, see Gustavo Corni,

Hitler and the Peasants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and John G. Farquharson,

The Plough and the Swastika (London: Sage, 1976).

3 For a continuous index of real wages, see Gerhard Bry,

Wages in Germany (Princeton NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1966); Mason, Social Policy, p. 132 and the statistical appendix

of Tim Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,

1975). On living standards, see also Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2, pp. 349, 370–1;

Günther Morsch, Arbeit und Brot (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1993); Overy, Recovery,

pp. 26–31. On rationalization, see Tilla Siegel, Leistung und Lohn in der nationalsozial-

istischen “Ordnung der Arbeit” (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989); Rüdiger

Hachtmann, Industriearbeit im Dritten Reich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,

1989); Tilla Siegel and Thomas von Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung unter dem

Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 1991); Tilla Siegel, “Rationalizing

Industrial Relations,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, Thomas Childers and Jane Kaplan,

eds (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), pp. 139–60; Overy, War and Economy, pp.

343–75. On the limits of rationalization, see Alf Lüdtke, “The ‘Honour of Labour’,” in

Nazism and German Society, David Crew, ed. (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 67–109;

and Morsch, Arbeit, which stresses the diversity of workers’ working and living conditions.

On the diversities of working-class identities and what shapes them, see Dick Geary,

“Working-Class Identities in Europe, 1850s–1930s,” Australian Journal of Politics and

History 45 (1999): 20–34.

4 See Lüdtke, “Honour of Labour”; Noakes and Pridham,

Nazism, vol. 2, pp. 331–2,

346–53; Stephen Salter, “Structures of Consent and Coercion,” in Nazi Propaganda,

David Welch, ed. (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983).

5 See Noakes and Pridham,

Nazism, vol. 2, pp. 369–73; Matthias Frese, Betriebspolitik im

Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991); Mason, Social Policy, p. 141; Carola Sachse

et al., eds, Angst, Belohnung, Zucht und Ordnung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,

1982).

6 Herbert,

Foreign Workers; Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 4: The German Home Front

in World War II (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 247, 359–65.

7 On women under Nazism, see Mary Nolan, “Work, Gender and Everyday Life,” in Crew,

German Society, pp. 311–42; Dagmar Reese et al., eds, Rationale Beziehungen?

Geschlectsverhältnisse im Rationalisierungsprozess (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993);

Carole Sachse, Siemens, Nationalsozialismus und die moderne Familie (Hamburg: Rasch

and Röhring, 1990); Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds, When

Biology became Destiny (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Claudia Koonz, Mothers

in the Fatherland (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987); Adelheid von Saldern, “Victims

or Perpetrators,” in Crew, German Society, pp. 141–65; Anita Grossmann, “Feminist

Debates about Women and National Socialism,” Gender and History 3 (1991): 350–8;

Tim Mason, “Women in Germany, 1925–1940,” in Nazism, Fascism and the Working

Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 131–211; Gabriele Czarnowski,

“The Value of Marriage for the Volksgemeinschaft,” in Bessel, Fascist Italy and Nazi

Germany, pp. 94–112; Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 4, p. 247; Shaaron Cosner and

Victoria Cosner, Women under the Third Reich (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997);

the nazi new society 373

Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (London: Arnold, 2003); Lisa Pine, Nazi

Family Policy (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Elizabeth Heinemann, What Difference Does a

Husband Make? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jill Stephenson, The

Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Croom Helm, 1981); Jill Stephenson, Women in

Nazi Germany (London: Longman/Pearson, 2001); Karen Hagemann and Stefanie

Schüler Springorum, Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century

Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

8 See Michael Geyer, “Restorative Elites, German Society and the Nazi Pursuit of War,” in

Bessel, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, pp. 134–64; Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and

Democracy in Germany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). For Zitelmann and

Prinz, see note 2. See also Roseman, “National Socialism and Modernisation.”

9 See note 7 above.

10 See Jeremy Noakes, “Social Outcasts in the Third Reich,” in

Life in the Third Reich,

Richard Bessel, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 83–96; Michael

Berenbaum, ed., Mosaic of Victims (New York: New York University Press, 1990); Michael

Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1993); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994); Robert Gellateley and Nathan Stolzfuss, eds, Social Outsiders in Nazi

Germany (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

11 See Robert Gellately,

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2001); Eric Johnson, The Nazi Terror (New York: Basic Books,

1999).

12 See Klaus Michael-Mallmann and Gerhard Paul,

Herrschaft und Alltag (Bonn: J. H. W.

Dietz, 1991); Inge Marsollek and René Ott, Bremen im Dritten Reich (Bremen: C.

Schünemann, 1986); Herbert, Foreign Workers; Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating

Others,” in The Third Reich, Christian Leitz, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Alf Lüdtke,

ed., The History of Everyday Life (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp.

“What Happened to the Fiery Red Glow?” pp. 198–251; Lüdtke, “Honour of

Labour.”

13 For variations in public opinion by policy, time, and place, see Ian Kershaw’s seminal

Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1983).

14 For a much more extensive account of this argument about the German working class

under Nazism, with detailed references, see Dick Geary, “Working-Class Identities in the

Third Reich,” in Nazism, War and Genocide: Essays in Honour of Jeremy Noakes, Neil

Gregor, ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). On labor in the immediate postwar

years, see Dick Geary, “Social Protest in the Ruhr, 1945–49,” in A Social History of

Central European Politics, 1945–52, Eleonore Breuning, Jill Lewis, and Gareth Pritchard,

eds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). On the signiﬁcance of generation,

see Roseman, “National Socialism and Modernisation,” p. 224.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996). Contains important articles on class and gender.

Renate Bridenthal et al., eds, When Biology Became Destiny (New York: Monthly Review Press,

1984). Contains signiﬁcant contributions on gender in Weimar and Nazi Germany.

Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000). Often brilliant,

sometimes wayward, has relatively little to say on economy and social change.

374 dick geary

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993). Seminal in underlining the signiﬁcance of racial policy for all areas

of life.

David Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society (London: Routledge, 1994). Contains many

signiﬁcant contributions on class, gender, consent, and coercion in the Third Reich.

Dick Geary, Hitler and Nazism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2000). A brief, basic survey.

Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Goes further than

other historians in claiming popular support for the regime.

Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). An

important study of the racial reorganization of the German working class and the latter’s

treatment of foreign labor.

Eric Johnson, The Nazi Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1999). A subtle study of the interac-

tion between coercion and consent.

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1983). A seminal and nuanced account of public opinion under Nazism.

Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols (London: Allen Lane, 1998/2000). The deﬁnitive biography that

contains a host of insights into all aspects of the Third Reich.

Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 4th edn (London, Allen Lane, 2000). By far the best

summary of historical debates about Nazi rule.

Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987). Sees female

collusion with Nazi aims.

Christian Leitz, ed., The Third Reich (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Another collection of useful

essays.

Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich (Providence RI: Berg, 1993). An often brilliant

though problematical account of labor in Nazi Germany.

Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds, Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, 4

vols (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998). By far the best English-language collection

of sources with incisive commentary.

Richard Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1996). Brief, clear,

and convincing.

Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Contains

interesting material on non-conformity.

David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1966). An early claim

that the Nazis succeeded in changing German society, at least as far as status and subjective

consciousness were concerned.

Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: The Policies of Seduction (London: London House, 1998). The classic

statement of the view that Hitler was a “modernizer.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The Popular Front

Michael Richards

The gradual but very public erosion of democratic principles in Italy after 1922 and

the rapid curtailment of all vestiges of the democratic Weimar republic in Germany

from 1933 were huge setbacks to the cause of the political left across Europe. The

rise of authoritarianism undermined social peace and liberalism as the foundations of

progress. For many reasons it proved impossible during the 1920s and early 1930s

to secure a uniﬁed political program that would be effective in resisting the rise of

Nazism. Historians have speculated, with good reason, that left-liberal unity might

have prevented Hitler coming to power, thereby avoiding war in 1939. Generally,

however, they have concluded that the depth of the political divisions within the left

in Germany between 1918 and 1933 is to a signiﬁcant degree explicable through the

seismic fracturing of German society itself. Most obviously, divisions were exacerbated

by mass unemployment following the great economic Crash of October 1929. In

the end, the political left could have done little to prevent the economic and social

crisis that heralded Nazi rule.

Nonetheless, Hitler’s seizure of power was the great turning point in the balance

of power between fascism and its opponents in Europe. The closest the political

left in Europe came to an effective strategy of uniﬁed anti-fascist action in the wake

of this accession to power was the series of written agreements, joint actions, electoral

platforms, and – brieﬂy, in France and Spain – governmental authority, assumed

under the broad banner of the Popular Front. At a formal level, the Popular Front

constituted an alliance of political parties, including Marxists, socialists, liberals,

moderates, and even some conservatives, representing a common defense against

and rejection of fascism.

The electoral victories of the French and Spanish coalitions

of 1936 were its greatest achievements, but the Popular Front was more than a

political pact. The propaganda posters produced in its name illustrated both the

need to defend the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and the Spanish Second

Republic (1931–9), and the modernizing and popular aspects of the Front’s struggle

against fascism. Such images represented collective desires to bring about social and

cultural change, to preserve international peace, and attack the causes and symptoms

of economic crisis.

376 michael richards

These positive aims have, however, to be set beside the undoubted failings of the

Popular Front. The negation of fascism – though it contained within it a positive

promotion of peace, democracy, and an end to hunger – would ultimately prove a

rather weak basis for unity. The effects of the far-reaching social legislation enacted

by Popular Front governments in France and Spain were severely constrained by the

advance of the fascist threat, by economic circumstances, and by the internal differ-

ences within the Front itself. The menacing pursuit of expansionism in Fascist and

Nazi foreign policy posed a grave threat also to international peace. Popular Frontism

was unable to develop an active and effective alternative to the policy of appeasement

of Nazism pursued by the major democracies. The Front proved incapable of becom-

ing a political focus of collective security largely because such a strategy was associated

by the democracies with the interests of communist Russia. The domestic, social, and

international threats combined, relatively unhindered, therefore, as fundamental

causes of World War II.

Mass Politics in 1930s Europe

In his monumental study of British writers during the 1930s, the cultural commenta-

tor Valentine Cunningham has argued that never previously, “not even in the Victorian

‘age of great cities,’ had people been so conscious that modern industrialised,

urbanised life was mass life . . . Inescapably, the post-First-World-War sensibility had

to grasp that it was in an age of mass-production, mass-demonstrations, mass-meet-

ings, mass sporting occasions, mass-communications, mass-armies, a time when

things would be done in, and to, and for crowds.”

The rise and fall of democracy

in Europe during the interwar years can be charted in the attempts by democratic

and anti-democratic movements to absorb and channel the economic and political

demands of this mass society. These demands were imperfectly met by politicizing

growing areas of everyday experience in the 1930s.

While the late nineteenth-century extension of the franchise saw the arrival of mass

politics, the sacriﬁces of the war of 1914–18 had been made possible through mass

conscription and made real through mass “industrialized” slaughter. “Total war”

provided more than enough justiﬁcation to the soldiers, workers, and producers for

radicalizing their collective idea of what democracy was. At the same time, war

seemed to threaten bourgeois morality on the home front. The threat to the “life-

blood of nations” represented by the human losses of the war heightened fears of

degeneration and decline and hardened middle-class doubts about modernity.

War and revolution led to unprecedented upheaval and a new and precarious

political balance in Europe. But in this mass age the forms that politics took depended

on other inﬂuences in public life that were not directly political. Intellectual, moral,

economic, and religious life also reﬂected and responded to the arrival of the masses.

Collective habits, fashions, and means of entertainment and amusement – radio and

cinema, the expansion of the mass media – all channeled the great dynamism of

Europe in the 1920s. In urban Europe, the private sphere of family merged with the

political sphere in struggles, for example, over the public consumption and growth

of leisure in the interwar years.

The conditions of daily life for many Europeans in the 1930s were noticeably

different even to those pertaining as recently as the 1890s. This fast-changing cultural

the popular front 377

landscape interacted with the requirements of political mobilization and manipula-

tion. Exhortations were made to the masses to consume both goods and ideas.

Politics became mass politics – quasi-theatrical and often polarized and violent. It is

perhaps because of this new overlap between politics and other forms of mass public

behavior – and because of the unprecedented depth and breadth of the effects of the

economic crisis – that people seemed so susceptible to political myths during the

1930s.

The Popular Front theoretically linked two signiﬁcant social forces: bourgeois

liberals and the working class. Progressive liberals, guided by the principles of the

Enlightenment and the French revolution, were disaffected by the conservative turn

of bourgeois politics when confronted with the demands of the masses at the end of

the nineteenth century and were horriﬁed by World War I. To all of those who

thought about such things, the enormous political potential and incipient threat of

massing crowds were obvious. Liberals optimistically believed that demands from

below could be directed through enlightened “tutelage” and measures of reform.

This sense of directing the popular will was epitomized by Manuel Azaña, liberal

architect of the Spanish Popular Front in 1935–6. The Spanish Second Republic

had been proclaimed in 1931, chieﬂy by the popular classes represented by a coalition

of republicans and socialists. By the mid-1930s the Republic was in danger of

succumbing to anti-democratic forces, as had already happened in Germany and

Austria. Azaña, middle-class intellectual, reluctant political leader, and no advocate

of proletarian revolution, set out to return Spain to the original reforming spirit of

the democratically elected republican–socialist coalition of 1931. A central part of

the rallying of “the republican masses” was his open-air speech at Comillas (Madrid)

in October 1935, delivered to what was possibly the largest crowd that any European

politician had ever mobilized without recourse to paramilitary methods.

Before some

half a million supporters Azaña called for a democratic “redemption of the Republic”

based on resistance to authoritarianism and fascism. He recognized explicitly the

great potential power of the masses as a positive moral force: “I have no fears of the

popular torrent, nor that it will overwhelm us; the question is to know how to guide

it so that we do not allow this enormous popular force to lose its way or be wasted

or ruined.”

The sense of channeling the will of the people directly echoed the liberal philoso-

pher José Ortega y Gasset who, in his Rebelión de las masas of 1930, argued that

since the masses had become the dominant social force, it was imperative that they

could not be left to “direct their own personal experience,” and still less that they

should “preside over society in general.”

This problematic notion of direction was

intrinsic to Popular Front unity and its program of reform in Spain on the eve of the

civil war in 1936.

While this synergy of liberals and masses was idealistic enough, other European

intellectuals were captivated by a more romantic idea of moral self-regeneration

through integration with “the masses” by joining the communist movement. The

English poet Stephen Spender typiﬁed this experience. He later explained that his

1937 book, Forward from Liberalism, was aimed at people who cared for progress

and peace rather than reaction and imperialist aggression: “I believed that if the

implications of this attitude of mind were clearly stated many liberal individualists

would ﬁnd themselves set on a path which would lead them ultimately to the idea