Lessons for Revolutionary Strategy from the Popular Front In France

The second half of Frank’s lecture was harder to translate than part one, and you’ll see some points [in brackets] where we’d welcome feedback from our francophone subscribers.

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International Context and the Rise of Reaction

Consequently, there was in the working class, especially not just the conditions under which it was created, the reasons for which it was created, the elements that constituted the masses, but also what it achieved to bar the path to fascism, to the government.

I will conduct this analysis, especially to allow for an international context, on an international background. The union of the left, which presents... [phrase fragmentée] there is another problem that also played a role in this period: the rise of reaction did not only occur in the capitalist world. The rise of reaction also occurred considerably in the Soviet Union.

Stalinism, the Stalinist bureaucracy, had obviously eliminated the left opposition a number of years prior. The Bolshevik party had become a totally bureaucratized monolithic organization, but in this same period, from '35, '36, Stalinism reinforced its reactionary development. It was in '36 that the Moscow trials began, which formed the basis for the physical extermination of the old Bolshevik party, of all the old fighters of the October Revolution, and this reactionary phenomenon played a role. It combined with the workers' uprising of the masses in Europe. I will explain this more precisely when I discuss what this meant for the Trotskyist movement. But the push of the masses was all the more channeled by the Popular Front because there was no longer a large organization like the Communist Party which for years had defended a revolutionary program. The revolutionary program was reduced and defended by a small organization, so this international context was different.

The Electoral Victory and Mass Mobilization of 1936

Now, there was also another contradictory element on the part of the Popular Front. The electoral victory of the Popular Front was perceived by the masses not at all as a simple electoral victory; the masses thought they would now have their demands satisfied. So a very particular phenomenon occurred, given the constitutional provisions that existed in France between the electoral victory of the Popular Front and the formation [of the government]. The meeting, on the one hand, of the new Parliament and the formation of a new government, had an interlude of a few weeks, and the masses did not understand why people who no longer represented the elected majority remained in government. And this is what triggered, what served as the detonator for the movement of May-June '36, which indeed began in the last days of May, when workers who were on strike in some factories realized that they were facing a government that was not the government they had brought to power. And the movement spread very quickly, which also led very quickly to the formation of the Popular Front government, and in any case, there were indeed illusions among the masses. It is true that there were immense hopes, and because of that, to some extent, the electoral victory of the Popular Front served as a detonator. Of course, in '36, it was the student affair [?]. The day of the barricades served as a detonator. This is another aspec