THE RIGHT'S SLOGAN AFTER THE VICTORY OF THE SOCIALIST POPULAR FRONT
(IN 1936)
It brings the 40-hour, collective bargaining, two weeks of paid vacation...
We have mentioned the 13th's tumult of March 1934
and Simone de Beauvoir,
who described a café during the Occupation,
narrates the ambiance in February 1936,
two months before the elections that brought
the first triumph of the left:
"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.)
# # #
France was the only occupied country to legally elect a puppet regime (the Vichy government). Many conservatives backed it even as German defeat loomed, because they feared the left.
The messaging:
"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 their forces to dominate the rest of Europe.
- The French police deported Jews and Resistance fighters much more effectively than a foreign force could have done.
# # #
So the Resistance came mainly from the left and after the invasion of the USSR (in June 1941), was largely Communist: It called itself "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.
No comments:
Post a Comment