The fall of Léon Blum's government

On 21 June 1937 the French prime minister, Léon Blum, decided that his government would resign. For the second time in a few days the Senate, the upper house of parliament, had refused him powers to fight the financial crisis by decree, although the Chamber of Deputies had granted them. The Cabinet met in the evening and concluded that it could not govern in defiance of the Senate. During the night of 21–22 June Blum submitted his resignation to President Albert Lebrun, and on 22 June the Radical Camille Chautemps formed a new government. So ended, after little more than a year, the first Popular Front government, the most left-wing cabinet in the history of the Third Republic.

It is often described as the collapse of a “coalition government”. This is a simplification. The coalition of Socialists, Radicals and Communists formally survived, and Blum joined the new cabinet as deputy prime minister. What fell, however, was a government that wanted to change France, and its place was taken by a cabinet that wanted above all to reassure the financial markets and the Senate. The Popular Front survived on paper for more than another year, but its momentum ended in June 1937.

The Popular Front in power

The Popular Front was born of the fear of fascism. After the bloody riots in Paris during the 6 February 1934 crisis, when far-right leagues tried to storm parliament, the Socialists of the SFIO and the Communists, until then at loggerheads, concluded a pact of unity of action in July 1934. The Communists changed course because the Comintern had changed course: Stalin, alarmed by Hitler’s rule in Germany, was looking for allies in the West. The agreement was soon joined by the Radical Party, the party of lower-middle-class, provincial France.

In the elections of spring 1936, held in two rounds on 26 April and 3 May, shortly after Hitler had sent troops into the Rhineland, the Popular Front won a clear majority in the Chamber of Deputies. For the first time the Socialists had more seats than the Radicals. On 4 June 1936 Blum, the leader of the SFIO, became head of a government of Socialists and Radicals. Maurice Thorez’s Communists supported the government in parliament but did not join it. For the first time three women sat in the government, as under-secretaries of state, although Frenchwomen did not yet have the vote; among them was the Nobel laureate Irène Joliot-Curie. On the very day the government presented itself to the Chamber, the far-right deputy Xavier Vallat lamented from the rostrum that this “old Gallo-Roman country” would be governed by a Jew. Antisemitic hatred accompanied Blum throughout his time in office.

The government began amid a great wave of sit-down strikes involving more than a million workers. On the night of 7–8 June, at the Hôtel Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, representatives of employers and the unions signed agreements providing for wage rises of 7–15 per cent, collective agreements and workers’ delegates in the factories. Within a few weeks parliament passed the 40-hour working week and two weeks of paid holiday. In the summer of 1936 hundreds of thousands of French workers went on holiday for the first time in their lives. The government dissolved the far-right leagues, headed by the Croix-de-Feu, nationalised the arms industry and placed the Bank of France under tighter state control.

Money flees France

The reforms had a weak point: finance. Shorter working hours and higher wages raised production costs, prices rose almost as fast as earnings, and industrial output stagnated. Owners of capital, frightened by a Socialist-led government with Communist backing, moved their money abroad and bought gold. The Bank of France was losing its reserves. In September 1936, in response to the growing threat from Germany, the government adopted a multi-year rearmament programme worth well over ten billion francs, the largest for years, which widened the deficit still further. At the end of September France, in agreement with Britain and the United States, devalued the franc, something Blum had promised before the elections not to do.

Devaluation brought only a brief respite. In February 1937 Blum announced a “pause” in reforms: the government gave up new social spending, including a planned pension reform, and assured holders of capital that it would not introduce exchange controls. In March the state issued a national defence loan, which was quickly subscribed. The pause disappointed the Communists, the trade unions and the left wing of Blum’s own party, and failed to win over the right. Tension in the streets rose. On 16 March 1937, at Clichy near Paris, police opened fire on left-wing demonstrators protesting against a meeting of the French Social Party of Colonel François de La Rocque, the successor to the Croix-de-Feu; several people were killed, and the Popular Front government, which was supposed to defend the workers, had to answer for the actions of its own police.

Spain and Moscow

Foreign policy also weakened the government. When civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936, the Republic’s prime minister, José Giral, asked Paris for aircraft and arms. Blum wanted to help a government close to him in outlook, but he was opposed by the Radicals, the right and Stanley Baldwin’s Britain, without which France did not feel safe against Germany. Blum feared that the war in Spain would divide the French as well. In August his government proposed a ban on arms deliveries to both sides, out of which grew the Non-Intervention Committee in London. The Air Minister, Pierre Cot, quietly passed a number of aircraft to the Republicans, and some Soviet supplies passed through France, but this could not balance the aid that Franco was receiving from Germany and Italy. The Communists accused Blum of abandoning the Republic to fascism, and the prime minister himself, as he said, lived through the decision as a personal tragedy. When in February 1937 the committee banned the sending of volunteers, and in April German and Italian airmen bombed Guernica, it was clear that non-intervention protected only the interveners.

In the east Blum tried to breathe life into the alliance with the USSR concluded in 1935. In the spring of 1937 cautious staff talks took place, to which the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was averse. They were cut short by the Great Purge. On 12 June 1937, nine days before Blum’s fall, Moscow announced the execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and a group of senior Red Army commanders. The French General Staff concluded that the Soviet army had been decapitated and was not a worthwhile ally.

The Senate says no

In June 1937 the flight of capital gathered pace, and the Treasury had difficulty meeting its current obligations. Blum and his finance minister, Vincent Auriol, asked parliament for full powers: until the end of July the government would be entitled to take any measures by decree to defend the franc, the Treasury and savings. Opponents saw this as a prelude to exchange controls and new taxes on capital. The Chamber of Deputies, in which the Popular Front had a majority, passed the bill in mid-June by 346 votes to 247.

The Senate, however, was a different chamber. Elected indirectly, mainly by the councillors of small communes, and dominated by older Radical and moderate politicians, it had never accepted the Popular Front’s programme. The chairman of its finance committee, the former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, led the Radical senators against a government in which Radical ministers sat. The Senate passed its own version of the bill, hedged about with so many conditions that the powers became illusory. The Chamber of Deputies restored its text, and Blum appealed in person to the senators not to paralyse the government at a time of international tension, but the Senate again, by a large majority, voted for its own version.

Some Socialists and the Communists urged Blum not to give way and to appeal to the street against the Senate, whose right to bring down governments under the constitution of the Third Republic was at the very least disputed. Blum refused. He believed that a government of the left could not break the rules of the Republic it had defended against the leagues, and that an open conflict between institutions in a country as divided as France in 1937 could end in civil war, as in Spain. The Cabinet decided to resign on 21 June. The next day Chautemps formed a government that included the Socialists, with Blum as deputy prime minister and the Radical Georges Bonnet as finance minister. The Senate gave the new prime minister the full powers it had refused Blum. At the turn of June and July Bonnet gave up defending the exchange rate and let the franc fall.

On the road to war

Chautemps’s government lasted until March 1938. It resigned on 10 March, two days before the German entry into Austria, so that during the Anschluss France was led only by a caretaker government. Blum formed a second cabinet on 13 March, but the Senate again refused him full powers, and after less than four weeks, on 8 April 1938, Blum resigned for the second time. Power passed to the Radical Édouard Daladier, who relied on the centre and the right and in the autumn signed the Munich agreement that handed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Hitler.

The fall of Blum’s government showed how weak France was in the years when Germany was rearming at full speed. A country that had well over a dozen governments between 1932 and 1940 was unable to pursue a consistent policy towards either Hitler or Mussolini. The French were so deeply divided that the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum” circulated on the right, while the left distrusted the army and capital. Capital flight and devaluations weakened rearmament, and the 40-hour week, which was in practice abolished only by Daladier in the autumn of 1938, made it difficult to lengthen production in the arms factories. After the defeat of 1940 the Vichy regime put Blum on trial in the Riom trial, blaming the Popular Front for the lost war. Blum then showed that it was his government that had begun the great rearmament neglected by its predecessors. Historians grant that he was largely right in this dispute, but June 1937 remains the moment when France finally chose caution and concessions over mobilising its strength against the growing threat.