"BETTER HITLER THAN BLUM" (THE SOCIALIST LEADER OF THE 1930's)

 

THAT WAS THE SLOGAN OF THE RIGHT AFTER THE VICTORY OF THE POPULAR FRONT, AN ALLIANCE OF THE LEFT

(IN 1936)

After two years of tumult it brought the 40-hour week, collective bargaining, two weeks of paid vacation...

      Herodotus

And fury. 

Simone de Beauvoir* describes the ambiance two months before the left's seismic victory:

*The writer and philosopher who described a café during the Occupation.

"The 'patriots' had wanted to give the funerals of Bainville [a royalist historian and journalist] the glow of national mourning. On coming back from the ceremony on the boulevard Saint-Germain they passed the car that was taking Léon Blum to the Chamber; they stopped it, molested the occupants, seriously wounding Blum before the police intervened. There were arrests; Maurras [leader of a far-right movement], who had written violent articles against Blum, was pursued for provoking murder and condemned to several months in  prison. The Popular Front organized a massive demonstration against Blum's aggressors [...]. Meetings, demonstrations [from the left] confirmed the imminence of victory... ."

-- The prime of life, 1960, 271-272 (my trans.)

# # #

Self-interest and racism motivated European collaborators generally, but France was the only occupied country to legally elect a puppet.* Memories of the 19th-century insurrections, especially La Commune, explain that difference.  

 

The messaging of the Vichy regime:

 

     "The Soviets pull the strings of the POPULAR FRONT"

Newspaper excerpts from the Pas-de-Calais region in Normandy

For an enlarged picture and 10 other posters of the time, please click

"The Popular Front, Bolshevism's henchman? Beware of Communist hypocrisy / Vote France / The real peril / How Communists are preparing the revolution in France / For or against the Popular Front"  

The puppet government's "National Revolution" compares a corrupt, internationalist Left with an upstanding, family-oriented, nationalist Right.

# # #

Collaboration protected France from the most extreme German demands, but... 

• Freed Nazi forces to dominate most of the rest of Europe.

• Facilitated deporting Jews and members of the Resistance.  

# # #

The Resistance came mainly from the left and after the invasion of the USSR (in June 1941), was largely Communist: They  called themselves"the party of the 75,000 shot."  

Publication unknown (photo from loose magazine pages found at a flea market)

Communists leave prison to be shot (in 1943).

An exaggeration, said de Gaulle,

but true enough to make Communists'

coming to power in Western Europe likely:

That is the reason for the Marshall Plan.

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Conservatives who joined the Resistance