Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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of the classless international society and to an acceptance of the action necessary –

such as the formation of a United Front – to achieve that society.”

The masses, often favoring socializing measures that radically altered the balance

of economic power, took the proletarian Russian revolution of 1917 as an example

rather than the bourgeois French revolution of 1789, and were not always willing to

be directed. In an era of modern economic and social crisis, the very basis of cross-

class alliances was to be constantly and severely challenged.

The Origins of the Popular Front

For over a decade prior to Hitler’s grasp for power, leftist leaders and analysts – many

of them direct participants in the political struggle – wrestled to determine the causes

of generic fascism. How had Mussolini’s regime been able to sustain itself once power

had been seized, and what was the likelihood of its spread to other states? Marxist

analysis, speciﬁcally, had a further purpose: to provide an impulse towards proletarian

revolution. Partly because the form and extent of the capitalist system varied greatly

across the continent, however, it was no easy matter to relate anti-fascist strategies

to coherent Marxist critiques of capitalism. Moreover, the relationship between fas-

cism’s violent use of the instruments of the state, on the one hand, and its use of

political means for procuring partial consent from society, on the other, proved espe-

cially difﬁcult to explain.

The principal institutional channel of these strategies and tactics was the Communist

International, or Comintern, founded in 1919. A legacy of the Russian revolution

had been a Soviet aspiration to dominate national communist parties, and during the

1920s the Comintern degenerated almost completely into an instrument of Soviet

raison d’état. Stalin was indifferent to the internationalist ideals of the Comintern.

It was clear even in the 1920s, from his declaration in 1924 in favor of “Socialism

in One Country,” that world revolution took a back seat. The priority of Stalinist

foreign policy was not the promotion of progressive forces in Europe but rather an

insular and all-pervasive preoccupation with Soviet security.

The Comintern’s own organizational weaknesses, doctrinal disputes, and rivalries,

and the effects of internal terror within the Stalinist system, also limited its effective-

ness: the International’s initial president, Zinoviev, was executed in August 1936 after

the ﬁrst of the fake show trials. Under such pressures, considerable tension existed

between Comintern orthodoxy, expressed in publicly declared strategic “theses,”

national Party leaderships, and the activist rank and ﬁle. Attempts were made to

impose broad strategic measures from outside regardless of speciﬁc national factors.

In the process, the division of the European labor movement, begun by the secession

of revolutionaries from social democratic parties following the 1917 Russian revolu-

tion and the immediate aftermath of war in 1918, became irreconcilable. The fatal

divide opened up in spite of sporadic attempts by rank-and-ﬁle activists to achieve a

pragmatic unity of action.

The Biennio Rosso (“two Red years”) from 1919 to 1921 in Italy witnessed an

irreparable split in the ranks of the Socialist Party (PSI), resulting in the secession of

a “Bolshevik” wing and the founding of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in

January 1921. This fragmentation of the left preceded the ultimate destruction of

the left’s organizations by Mussolini’s Fascist movement. By early 1926 the PCI’s

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leaders would be arrested, imprisoned, or forced into exile and the party’s Congress

that year would have to be held in Lyons. The right to strike was formally abolished

as a prelude to establishing a dictatorial state structure, including a “fascistized”

judicial system complete with special courts for political crimes. In 1928, Antonio

Gramsci, a founding leader of the PCI and its best-known and most insightful thinker,

would be condemned to 20 years’ imprisonment by such a court.

Following Germany’s defeat in November 1918 there had been a deep, though

chaotic, political and social revolution. Politically, the revolution succeeded in ending

the discredited and unpopular Wilhelmine empire. While a republic was proclaimed,

the working-class movement, until 1917 united within the socialist SPD, split into

two, the communist KPD eventually being formed as a breakaway movement.

With the new republic, political power shifted to the left, though property relations

were not overturned and the consciously socialist aspects of the revolution were

restricted through direct intervention by paramilitary forces loyal to the government,

now in the hands of the social democrats of the SPD. It was partly for this reason

that the Comintern’s crude depiction of social democracy as “social fascism” would

later ring true to many of the ordinary activists of the KPD. Similar rebellions and

risings from below took place and were defeated in Hungary and in Austria, again

leaving a legacy of bitterness within the left. In October 1923, during the ﬁrst great

economic crisis of the years of the Weimar republic, further uprisings occurred, sup-

ported by elements of the SPD and KPD in parts of Germany that ended in failure,

with the regional left-leaning governments deposed by the army at the orders of the

republican state.

The various “theses” adopted by the Comintern rarely did much to make

unity more likely. At its notorious Sixth Congress, held in 1928, revolution with no

compromise was the guiding principle, and the unbending slogan of “class-against-

class” was adopted. Although revolution was far from being Stalin’s desire, once

sanctiﬁed by the Congress, this thesis was accorded the status of analysis by

the leader’s acolytes. Its shaky theoretical foundation was the belief that the rise of

fascism signiﬁed a world crisis of capitalism that would lead to its inevitable collapse.

The weakness of this somewhat arbitrary theory was that it failed to recognize

that fascism, and the capitalist system it supported, was still strong and dynamic.

Evidence on the ground ought to have suggested that fascism was far from static

both in the way it successfully mobilized support and in its use of state power to

remake the existing system.

An element of this dynamism was fascism’s ability to repress and effectively defeat

the organizations of proletarian political power. Under such pressure, the Comintern’s

mistaken prognosis led to a highly damaging strategy in relation to leftist unity. Social

democrats were deemed to be artiﬁcially propping up the “doomed” social, eco-

nomic, and political system because they did not preach immediate workers’ revolu-

tion in order to take advantage of capitalism’s “crisis.” As the main obstacles to the

workers’ revolution, social democrats thus became “social fascists” and were con-

sidered leading enemies rather than allies in the ﬁght against fascism.

With the beneﬁt of hindsight, the International’s insensitivity to the scale of the

setback to democracy represented by fascism is shocking. Even as the delegates to

the 1928 Congress rubber-stamped the new strategy, right-wing extremism in Austria,

in the shape of the paramilitary “Home Defense Units” (the Heimwehr, principal

380 michael richards

organ of Austro-fascism), was rapidly growing. More important still, the Comintern’s

analysis presented a justiﬁcation to activists of the German Communist Party (KPD)

and the Socialist Party (SPD) to hurl insults and sabotage each other’s initiatives

during the Weimar years while Nazi Party support burgeoned.

The signs remained doom-laden in Germany even before the economic Crash of

October 1929. The May Day demonstration, held that year in Berlin, was suppressed

with such violence by the SPD police chief that 29 participants were killed. The ten-

dency for political violence to surface would become generalized with the economic

depression. German economic health was closely linked to the fortunes of the US

economy through the ﬁnancing of postwar recovery programs and it was not long

before the conservative German government of Brüning reacted by imposing an

austerity budget through emergency decree in July 1930. Millions of workers had

come to regard a full-time job as the normal, indispensable basis for their existence.

Mass employment thus brought with it the possibility of mass unemployment and

by July 1930 there were 3 million Germans without jobs. In September the NSDAP

(Nazi Party) gained 107 seats. Two years later, in July 1932, there would be 4.7

million unemployed and in the Reichstag elections the Nazis would win 230 seats.

It was in the wake of the Depression – and with 6 million unemployed – that Hitler

became chancellor in January 1933, backed by a mass Volkisch movement able to

project powerful images onto an ailing German society. These images were reinforced

by national and racial myths and a highly theatrical choreography of the crowd. The

Reichstag ﬁre in February 1933 gave the Nazi state an apparent justiﬁcation for

institutionalizing authoritarian measures – paradoxically by appealing to “the people”

through the Decree for the Protection of the Volk and the state.

No immediate change in political strategy was initiated in Moscow. As late as

December 1933 the Comintern was still able to declare that fascism and “social

fascism,” though not identical in every respect, were indeed “twins.” In the end, the

impulse for change came from below in the form of rank-and-ﬁle initiatives from the

workers’ movement in various parts of Europe, including France, Czechoslovakia,

and the industrial regions of Spain. Belated calls for a workers’ alliance against

fascism-Nazism seemed pointless once free trade unions were abolished by the Nazi

regime and the SPD outlawed. The one-party state was declared in July 1933 and

the ﬁrst concentration camps for political enemies soon began to function.

In Austria the combination of a campaign of anti-democratic threats and propa-

ganda led to the gradual incorporation into government and state institutions of

authoritarian parties. In September 1930 the leader of the Heimwehr had joined the

governing cabinet. In November the Austro-fascist electoral effort was subsidized

ﬁnancially by Mussolini. In September 1931 the Heimwehr attempted a putsch against

the government and the vote for the Austrian Nazi party increased in the provincial

elections. In May 1932 a Christian Social coalition with the Heimwehr was formed;

in March 1933 parliament was suspended and government by decree introduced as

a prelude to the proclamation of a Christian-Social authoritarian regime. The ﬁrst

concerted and armed attempt of the left to face the fascist challenge head-on would

be mounted on the streets of Vienna. Indeﬁnite martial law was declared in Austria

in January 1934 and an all-out attack on the Social Democratic Party (SDAP) was

staged in February by the Heimwehr, which to all intents and purposes had become

the paramilitary wing of the Christian-Social government. The anti-government,

the popular front 381

anti-fascist rising by the workers in response to this attack was crushed within weeks

and the SDAP and trade unions were made illegal.

The lessons of the collapse of Weimar and the authoritarian drift of Austrian poli-

tics gradually combined with the demands of Stalinist Realpolitik to produce a climate

of change. Fearing Japanese expansion in Manchuria, the Soviet Union began to look

for technical assistance from France for its air force during 1933 and 1934. The push

by Stalin for a European strategy of collective security was crowned by Soviet entry

into the League of Nations in May 1934 and by the Stalin–Laval pact (between the

Soviet Union and France), signed a year later.

But the real catalyst for the change of direction can be found within the rank and

ﬁle of the European left and, speciﬁcally, in the events in France in February 1934.

On February 6 demonstrations inspired by the far-right Leagues culminated in a

show of strength outside the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Faced with this discon-

tent, which may have been an attempted fascist coup against the Third Republic, and

reeling from a ﬁnancial corruption scandal, the government resigned, giving way to

a reactionary “national bloc” regime. As a counter to the action of the right, the

organized left staged an impressively supported general strike on February 12. The

Comintern’s obsolete “class-against-class” strategy was thereby revealed as a sham

and communists and socialists marched together to the rallying cry of “Unity!” The

process of unity culminated in July 1934 with a socialist–communist pact, at this

stage to be known as the United Front. This would become the Front Populaire in

October, with incorporation of the Radical Party that stood to beneﬁt from identiﬁ-

cation with defense of republican ideals such as popular sovereignty. Radical support,

gained with encouragement from the PCF, was forthcoming on the tacit assumption

that class-based economic demands would not go too far.

The widespread enthusiasm for unity was undeniable. The Socialist Party leader,

Léon Blum, noted its presence not only in Paris but throughout France: “The same

electric current can be experienced in the most diverse places and at the furthest dis-

tance from each other.”

The PCF resolution adopted at its national conference the

same month stressed the demands not simply of the working class but of “all working

people” regardless of their proletarian credentials: “the unemployed, peasants, trades-

men, intellectuals, ex-service men, invalids, young people, women, the lower and

junior ranks of the army” which, although they “are often under reactionary inﬂu-

ence,” could not be neglected as part of the new cross-class strategy. Blum remained

skeptical, noting how the PCF had been slow to respond to unitary sentiment. He

was only too aware that the communist change of tack had been induced under the

watchful eye of Moscow and that the PCF’s own agenda was its priority: France held

the key to the European security of Soviet Russia. The Socialist Party had to beware

of being carried away by PCF overtures. At the same time, Blum was pragmatic

enough to recognize the need for unity as the basis of anti-fascism and defense of

the Republic.

The unity of the French socialists, communists, and radicals was conﬁrmed by a

joint Paris demonstration, both celebration and political protest, by hundreds of

thousands of supporters who marched from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de

la Nation on July 14, 1935. The sense of collective historical memory was palpable.

Blum published an editorial in Le Populaire entitled Vive la Nation et Vive la

Révolution! The red, white, and blue tricolor of the Republic mingled with the

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traditional red ﬂag of militant labor. As the leaders of the communist and radical

parties, Maurice Thorez and Edouard Daladier, marched side by side, the Marseillaise

was sung with what Blum described as the spirit of 1790, binding the republican

nation together afresh. Ten thousand delegates took the oath of the Rassemblement

Populaire, committed to unity of action, to dissolve the fascist Leagues, and to

develop democracy.

The Comintern was sufﬁciently inﬂuenced by events in France to pursue a new

strategy of cross-class unity that had been underway since the appointment by Stalin

of the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov as general secretary of the Comintern

in the spring of 1934. Dimitrov, who had direct experience of Hitler’s rise and had

been calling for a common working-class struggle against fascism since 1932, would

play a vital role in the International’s change of line. By the summer of 1934 other

leading communists were arguing for broader alliances to encompass petit bourgeois

groups and peasants. The new strategy converged conveniently with Stalin’s foreign

policy objectives and with French pressure “from below.” Thus, the idea of broad

anti-fascist alliances would be embraced at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern

in July 1935. The formal abandonment of the sectarian tactics of the preceding years

made some sense to the rank and ﬁle, though there remained an unresolved tension

between the new line emanating from Moscow and a failure to admit to the mistakes

of the old class-against-class thesis.

National communist parties would now place

anti-fascism above all other priorities, putting revolutionary initiatives on “hold” in

the interests of unity with the middle classes and denying the possibility of class

struggle.

The Popular Front in Practice: France and Spain, 1935–1936

The medievalist historian Marc Bloch would reﬂect in 1940 on how the Popular

Front seemed symbolic of French divisions: “Overnight there was a crevice in the

stratum of French society, separating social groups into two blocs.”

In both Spain

and France the experience of Popular Front government was curtailed by national

and international authoritarianism – in Spain the popular alliance was gradually

reduced to ruins during the civil war and the deep conservatism of French society

ended the reforming experiment well before the country’s fall to the Nazis in 1940.

There were also great tensions within the Popular Front. The level of commitment

to the socioeconomic aspects of its program varied considerably and some parties to

the coalition seemed more attracted by the possible electoral gains to be won by

coalescing with the left. Moscow’s obsession with building an international collective

security system implied an anti-revolutionary stance from communist parties in order

not to scare the democratic powers. In both France and Spain communists became

the most conservative adherents to the pact.

The French election in May 1936 produced a gain of 40 parliamentary seats for

the combined parties of the Popular Front, even though their total combined vote

only increased from 54 to 57 percent. Following the electoral victory of the Front

Populaire, Léon Blum, as leader of the coalition party with most seats, became

France’s ﬁrst socialist premier on June 5, heading a government that would last only

a year. The limited, rationalist objectives of the Popular Front were seen by its leaders,

including Blum, who sympathized with the plight of the workers, as being jeopar-

the popular front 383

dized by working-class dissent. Like Manuel Azaña in Spain, Blum would successfully

mobilize huge crowds in support of the Popular Front while, in fact, standing for

non-threatening constitutionalism and non-revolutionary aims. Blum was received

with huge acclamation at the annual ceremonies, held at the end of May, to honor

the martyrs of the Paris Commune of 1870. Already, pressure from below and from

the left was mounting for action in the shape of substantial reform. This pressure,

aimed at more radical measures, was the product of years of worker frustration and

submissiveness. In socioeconomic terms, both leaders would, however, keep scrupu-

lously to their respective Popular Front electoral programs, published separately in

each country in January 1936.

Blum made a clear distinction between the exercise of power within the framework

of capitalist society, on the one hand, and the revolutionary conquest of power and

transformation of the means of production, on the other. One new remedy for the

depression was the nationalization of certain industries. At this time socialism in

France was more or less synonymous with paciﬁsm and Blum’s government targeted

the arms industry for public ownership. He saw state intervention as a measure of

republican defense. This responded to French society’s post-1918 mood of paciﬁsm

and revulsion at private proﬁteering from warfare. It was an anti-imperialist position

that could be cloaked in the anti-fascism of the Rassemblement Populaire. The Front’s

critics, who depicted Stalin as puppet-master of the new government, were able to

point to a possible contradiction with the alliance’s focus on peace, since the socialists

were in a pact with the PCF which, following Comintern directives, preached active

anti-Nazism. Blum countered with realism: participating in an international front

against the expansionism of Hitler and Mussolini necessarily entailed building French

military strength. Against his natural inclination towards disarmament, the extension

of military service by the Nazis in Germany would therefore force the government

to sponsor a rearmament program.

Fissures within the Front made problem resolution difﬁcult. Of the 31 members

of Blum’s cabinet, 18 were Socialists, 13 Radicals, and four Republican-Socialist

Unionists. There were no women ministers, but three women served as departmental

undersecretaries. The representation of the conservative Radical Party did not faith-

fully represent the spirit of the Popular Front among the lower classes. Combined

with the Radicals’ entrenchment within the Senate (the upper house within the

French National Assembly that ratiﬁed decisions of the elected Chamber of Deputies)

this meant that reforming initiatives were subject to limitation. Meanwhile, the PCF,

not wanting to be tarred with the brush of “bourgeois” government, decided not to

participate directly. This meant they could apply pressure on the government without

having to shoulder any responsibility for decisions.

In mid-May, the greatest strike movement of the Third Republic began when Paris

metalworkers called for a wage increase and paid holidays. Towards the end of the

month a second wave of sit-down strikes for collective-bargaining rights broke out

in metalworking, automobile, and airplane factories, spreading quickly to construc-

tion workers. Following the anti-revolutionary thesis of the Comintern, the PCF was

ﬁrmly on the side of moderation. Although the CGT labor confederation sought to

moderate excessive demands, by June 4 – the day Blum was handed the reins of

power – the strikes were moving beyond Paris. Almost a million workers were

involved. The sit-in protests were not under the control of the trade unions: this was

384 michael richards

a social explosion. It was not irrationally chaotic, though it frightened the middle

classes. At the trial of Blum staged by the Vichy regime in 1942 the socialist premier

would recall the state of “panic and terror” that reigned among the employers. He

argued that it was the tranquility of the protests, the “calm majesty” with which the

workers had installed themselves beside the machines, “watching over them, keeping

them in order, without leaving the buildings, without any sign of external violence

whatsoever,” that contributed most to “the Great Fear” of June 1936, since it seemed

to justify the workers’ co-ownership of the means of production.

On June 7 the “Matignon agreement” was signed by the government, employers,

and unions. Blum’s moderate socialist colleagues hoped this would satisfy worker

demands and cement working-class support. Most socialist deputies therefore hailed

the agreement, recognizing collective bargaining and labor organization and wage

increases as a great victory. The agreement did not put an immediate end to the

strikes. The argument of the PCF leader, Thorez, that the unity of the Popular Front

against fascism was being jeopardized proved decisive in the end, however, with the

all-important metalworking sector.

With the help of Thorez, who again was following the party line, a greater conﬂa-

gration, bloodshed, and even a civil war, were avoided by agreeing to the workers’

demands. The 40-hour week, collective bargaining, and paid vacations would be

introduced legally. Blum, well versed in modern industrialism, such as mass production

(Fordism) and corporativism, argued that although concessions altered the balance

between employer and worker, they were strictly rational in productive terms. One of

his mantras was “leisure is not laziness”; a shorter week and vacations represented rest

after labor and “reconciliation” with family and “natural life.” Moreover, the need to

maintain production as Nazi Germany rearmed at a hectic pace made concessions

inevitable, as employers recognized. Blum had been the savior of industry, but this did

not save his government from revenge for the concessions they had made.

Events in Spain were to cause the fault lines in the Front Populaire to open up.

In the middle of July 1936, only six weeks after Blum’s accession to power, there

was an attempted coup d’état against the democratic Spanish Popular Front govern-

ment. This was the start of the Spanish Civil War. Following in the slipstream of the

Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 and Nazi Germany’s remilitarization

of the Rhineland in March 1936, the Spanish coup precipitated a crisis for Blum’s

government. His instinct was to aid the Spanish Republic, particularly since Hitler

and Mussolini were soon to be sending substantial military assistance to the Spanish

rebels. The Spanish crisis, however, gave the French right an opportunity to point

to the contradictions of the Popular Front. The posters and cartoons of conservatives

claimed that one had only to look at Spain to see that a Popular Front government

led only to “war and bombs”: what started with strikes would end with “commu-

nism.” Indeed, the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum” summed up the attitude of

many French conservatives. Such was the level of hatred that Blum feared the Spanish

conﬂict might cause such tensions that civil war in France was a real possibility.

Moreover, leading elements in the Radical Party, the French socialists’ main Front

Populaire partners, followed the line of appeasement and were set against sending

aid to the Spanish government. Arms supplies to the Spanish Republic were therefore

halted. Meanwhile, the aid sent by Germany and Italy to the rebels effectively

cemented the Rome–Berlin Axis, an alliance formalized in October 1936.

the popular front 385

As in France, the nature of the Spanish Popular Front had been determined by

national political conditions. The year 1931 was a watershed: municipal elections in

April became, in effect, a referendum on the monarchy which had supported a mili-

tary dictatorship since 1923. The victory in these elections of a coalition of republi-

cans and socialists heralded the Second Republic – an experiment in democratization

similar to that initiated by the Weimar republic in Germany in 1918. At the heart of

the Second Republic’s program of modernization were reforms of the land structure,

political recognition of regional identity, the separation of church and state, the

laicization of education, depoliticization of the army, and improvement of the condi-

tions and wages of the rural and urban workforce. The constitution of the Second

Republic would formally symbolize full popular sovereignty, consciously representing

the interests of el pueblo republicano, and enunciating such liberal principles as

freedom of conscience, equality before the law, universal suffrage, and parliamentary

democracy. It would also veer uncertainly towards satisfying the economic desires of

the proletarian masses.

Popular expectations of a shift in power were thus awakened, only to be frustrated

by entrenched elites spurred on in their obstructionism by the successes that fascistic

regimes had won elsewhere in Europe. In turn, this obstructionism widened the

divisions of the left. The Republic had to contend with mass politics at a moment of

economic crisis and from 1933 left-liberal efforts were shaped by the need to avoid

a reactionary and authoritarian backlash as had already happened in Germany and

would shortly happen in Austria. Though failure was not inevitable, the Republic was

weakened politically by serious divisions between republicans, socialists, and anar-

chists, and by the internal factionalism of the Socialist Party (PSOE). As with the

unfortunate rigidity of the French communists, many PSOE leaders and activists

adhered doggedly to Marxist orthodoxy, viewing the Republic merely as the begin-

ning of a middle-class or “bourgeois” revolution with which they ought to be cooperat-

ing only sparingly. This quietism played into the hands of anti-democratic forces just

as had happened in Germany. At the same time, the more activist wing of the PSOE

preached social revolution while abjectly failing to develop any rational strategy for

revolution.

The left’s divisions aided the populist and conservative Radical Party and mass

Catholic party, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (Spanish

Confederation of Autonomous Rightist Groups, CEDA), which sympathized with

the authoritarian aims of European fascism and shared some of its methods and

rhetoric. A Radical–CEDA coalition was able to win the elections of November 1933

because the left was so divided. Government by the Radical Party and the CEDA

until the end of 1935 saw severe attacks on the reforming program of 1931, the

closing down of the ofﬁces of left-liberal political organizations, and the removal of

“unreliable” mayors. This all threatened to destroy the republican–socialist alliance

as the political essence of popular republican expectations. It also fueled the left’s

fear of fascism and appeared to justify giving free rein to the left wing of the PSOE.

A number of ineffective essays in direct action followed which were intended to force

the political right to relinquish its hold on state power.

In June 1934 the land workers’ section of the socialist trade union called a peaceful

general strike. Declared illegal and repressed by the authorities, the action became

an opportunity for the right to defeat one of the most rapidly growing sections of

386 michael richards

the labor movement. When in October 1934 CEDA was given control of three key

government ministries by the conservative president of the Republic it appeared to

the left that the Republic was being handed over to its enemies – a repetition of what

had happened in Austria in February, where armed resistance in Vienna had been

too weak to halt the assumption of power of authoritarianism. A revolutionary general

strike aimed at grasping back power for the Republic and the left was declared, but

lacked coordination in Barcelona and Madrid, where it failed miserably. In the

coalmines of Asturias the strike was organized through the Workers’ Alliance (Alianza

Obrera), a form of leftist unity, incorporating socialists, anarchists, and communists.

For two weeks the local traditions of militant action against the bureaucracy of mine

companies and state were crystallized in the form of a revolutionary commune. After

a couple of weeks the rebellion was violently suppressed. Among the thousands of

leftists across Spain imprisoned for “complicity” was Manuel Azaña. The former

prime minister drew an important lesson from the October events. Unity among the

parties of the working class was effective but required broadening into a “popular”

alliance with liberal republicans and sections of the middle classes.

Uniﬁed political mobilization meant resurrecting the essence of the Republic

through its natural mass support base. The 1931 republican–socialist coalition

would have to be rebuilt as the basis of a political bloc strong enough to survive

the challenge of the Republic’s enemies. A minority government would not do.

This, rather than any signals from the PCE or the Comintern, was the primary

origin of the Spanish Popular Front, whose electoral manifesto was published in

January 1936.

In France the workers’ organizations remained powerful after February 1934.

There had certainly been a moment of real crisis, but not of defeat for the trade

unions. In Spain, by contrast, the unions were defeated and were in no position to

resurrect leftist unity after October. The initiative in reducing the left’s crippling

fragmentation therefore depended on two political groupings which would have

considerable strategic and tactical input, but which possessed hardly any genuine mass

following: the Communist Party (PCE) and Azaña’s liberal Republican Left (Izquierda

Republicana). Azaña’s task would not be easy. Following the Comintern thesis, the

PCE promoted united action through factory, workshop, and neighborhood com-

mittees. Cooperation from the PSOE, which was suffering the effects of division and

defeat, was limited to aid for the 30,000 political prisoners of October. The middle-

class republican parties, meanwhile, were ideologically ill-disposed towards unity with

the communists. Azaña’s campaign therefore depended on peculiarly Spanish condi-

tions and would come to fruition only in early 1936 once the Radical–CEDA

government had collapsed as a result of a ﬁnancial scandal.

Because it had a mass following, participation of the divided PSOE was a pre-

requisite of a united electoral platform. But Azaña foresaw the difﬁculties of linking

a reformist republican program to the collectivist aspirations of the socialist left. What

form would the electoral discourse and day-to-day tactics assume if the campaign was

for a Workers’ Front? If a coalition with the socialists based on recuperation of repub-

lican popular authority as in 1931 was perfectly “legitimate, normal and desirable,”

the same did not apply to the communists: “While bringing in no appreciable number

of votes electorally, they will scare away voters.” In a prophetic summary of the

dangers that were to be realized a year or so later in the republican zone during the

the popular front 387

Spanish Civil War, Azaña feared that the PCE would “corrupt the nature of the

coalition.”

In September 1935 the governing Radical Party collapsed and the prime minister

resigned. This increased fears that CEDA might assume leadership of the government

and intensify the “fascistization” of the Republic. In October, Azaña delivered his

speech to the republican masses at Comillas, calling for a return to the ideas and

essential values of the Republic.

Like the activists of the PSOE, Azaña was acutely

aware of the threatening international context: “All of Europe is a battleﬁeld between

democracy and its enemies, and Spain is no exception. You have to choose between

democracy, with all of its difﬁculties and faults, with all of its equivocations or errors,

or tyranny with all of its horrors. There is no choice. We have made ours.” The

Republic had to be liberated from those who had seized it and provoked the exas-

peration of the republican masses that had been forced to “sacriﬁce their rights and

freedoms.” A pact had to be constructed of all like-minded organizations, represent-

ing republican popular opinion, and including groups which were not speciﬁcally

republican but which wanted to preserve and promote the assumptions of the

Republic. Azaña appealed to both the liberal values of 1931 and to those more closely

held by the working class: the privileges of the moneyed classes had to be “absolutely

destroyed . . . not with a spirit of retaliation, nor of revenge, nor of social dissolu-

tion, but with a creative spirit, with the stabilization of Spanish society.”

The left wing of the PSOE insisted on including the hitherto insigniﬁcant PCE in

the Frente Popular. This exacerbated tensions between the PSOE and its more left-

leaning union confederation, the UGT, just as the Republic was about to face its

greatest challenge. The Popular Front coalition was elected to power in the general

parliamentary elections of February 16, 1936. Azaña became head of the new govern-

ment. But the Spanish Front was a circumstantial electoral coalition rather than a

rationalized tool of government. The limited nature of the signatories’ commitments,

their divisions, and the disparity of their ultimate objectives made a precarious basis for

unity. The government failed to reﬂect the nature of the coalition that had won the

election and the socialist UGT declined calls upon it to commit politically to govern-

ment. In effect, the Popular Front dissolved as a political entity.

Government became partially by-passed, therefore, as the initiative for action

passed back to the trade unions and their revolutionary program for the repossession

of agricultural land, fueling the street clashes between fascist Falangists and leftists

in the few months before the illegal rebellion against the government on July 18.

Much of the unrest the government had to deal with came in the form of labor strikes

and land seizures. This direct action lacked coherent political direction or leadership,

but there was also little coherent basis for a more considered program. Communist

activists, preaching conservatism, were jeered off the stage when they tried to intro-

duce more moderate proposals at workers’ mass meetings.

The Popular Front would be subsumed by the civil war that began with the

attempted coup d’état by a section of the Spanish army in July. Popular Front unity

would become a central part of the rhetoric of war mobilization from July 18, 1936.

The PCE was especially adept at broadening the meaning of what was now known

as “the People’s Front,” stressing unity for the sake of “victory and liberty.” But the

enormous pressure of wartime mobilization laid bare the contradictions of the

Front.

Military assistance to the military rebels from Hitler and Mussolini was part