THE FRENCH POPULAR FRONT 1936: CP puts an end to the General Strike

Delegate meetings were called for each industry in June 1936 at which the trade union leaders tried to sell the Matig. non Agreement and end the mass sit-in moveIn the case of the Paris engineering workers, the terms were twice rejected by delegate meetings. Many were demanding a mass demonstration against the employers in Paris. Acceptance of the Agreement proved equally difficult in other industries and the strikes continued.

Sections of the Press and organizations representing the capitalist class did not hesitate to describe the situation as revolutionary. They clamoured for Socialist Party leader Léon Blum to take action. The Prime Minister of the Popular Front government hastened to pass the laws on the 40-hour week and holidays-with-pay in an effort to calm the workers and defuse the situation.

On June 12 the Trotskyist paper 'La Lutte Ouvrière' was seized at the printing press and action was begun against its supporters. This was a sign that Blum saw the danger of a new revolutionary leadership placing itself at the head of the strike movement.

In the days after Matignon the Communist Party played a key role. Its support for the Popular Front ensured that this should be a counterrevolutionary one. On June 10 it congratulated the workers 'on realizing the slogans of the party concerning a national reconciliation' It went on to "address its warmest wishes to Catholic and Croix de Feu [i.e. fascist] workers who, with the Socialists and Communists, fight together and display on the factories, workshops and offices, the tricolour of our fathers and the red flag of our hopes, reconciled by the Communist Party ...

For good measure the CP's Political Bureau denied that 'the Cardes Mobiles [armed police] and the army are hostile to the workers in struggle'.

While churning out this treacherous stuff the Communist Party had to contend with the dangerous fact that the workers were still in the factories despite the employers' willingness to accept the Matignon agreement. CP Secretary Maurice Thorez and his colleagues did not hesitate.

On June Il Party members in the Paris region were summoned to an aggregate meeting addressed by Thorez. He insisted that there was no question of taking power.

To re-assure the militants who saw the Party as genuinely revolutionary, Thorez said that its goal still remained Soviet power — something tary Georges Marchais would not say today. But the time for this had not come. We have not got behind us, with us, with us to the end, all the population of the countryside, said Thorez. 'We run the risk of alienating some of the sympathy of layers of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. What then?

'Then we must know how to bring a strike to an end when satisfaction has been obtained. It is necessary to know when to make a compromise when all demands have not been met, but when victory has been won on the most essential demands.' scious of its responsibilities, has courageously taken its stand without fearing to attack ThA hysterical gesticulations of the Trotskyists and their near-Trotskyists . . . .

"The CC approves the Political Bureau in combating the opinions of those who declare, without any thought for the responsibilities which weigh on the workers' organIzations, that "everything ossible" and they oppose to this dangerous formula the communist declaration that everything is not possible; the principal slogan of the party remains: "Everything for the Popular Pront, everything for the Popular Front"?

Without any doubt the French Stalinists played major part in June 1936 in bringing the strikes to an end and preventing the development of a revolutionary situation in France.

The revolutionary current in the working class had to be arrested before it upset the policy of class collaboration with the 'left' of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Radical Party in the Popular Front. The French Stalinists did in 1936 what they were to do again in 1944-1946, 1958 and 1968. today position official Party This is defended histories. Take, for example, a little book published last year under the auspices of the Institut Maurice Thorez' on the Popular Front period. It is one of a series put out by the Party to cover the period 1934-1954. The reason for this period of time being taken is that the Ministry of Education has recently • introduced a course on this period into the history curriculum of the universities.

The Party therefore has to produce its own, 'official' version of events. in which it played such a prominent role, for the benefit of students. It called upon Party intellectuals as well as some old-time Party members who could speak from personal experience to give courses of lectures which provided the bases for these books.

In the volume for 19341939* as much space is devoted to the question of whether the Party should have participated in the Blum government as is given to the strike movement. This is dealt with in a very sketchy way. It says that the strikes began to decline after June 11—but does not say why: that it was after Thorez had said it is necessary to know how to end a strike and the Party put all its forces into that task!

The question of how the strikes began is left vague; the main emphasis is on the fact that they were not carried out on orders of Moscow. The author, Jacques Chambaz, now has to deal with the accusation that the CP betrayed the workers in struggle. The question is, he says, that the situation was not revolutionary and he claims that the majority of historians - presumably he means bourgeois historians— believe that it was not.

The evidence he gives for this negative conclusion on examination proves to be threadbare. First he says that the workers wanted change through the Popular Front, not revolution.

But the workers did challenge the rights of private property, did begin to establish their own organs of power. It was lack of leadership which prevented this elemental striving from taking the road of a struggle for power.

Then, echoing Thorez at the time, he says other sections of the population, such as the peasantry, did not want revolution-and they amounted to half of the population. So the Communist Party, to put the best interpretation on the official view, tail-ended the petty bourgeoisie.

But this is not the real history at all. This was an alibi which looks no better today than it did when it was put forward at the time. The Communist Party was not waiting for a revolutionary situation to declare itself; it was actively and consciously stifling it by confusing the working class with the policy of the Popular Front and holding it back from any development of consciousness and a struggle for power.

record of the strikes shows that the CP played a remained the fulcrum of its policy in Europe against the menace of Nazi Germany.

In any case the question of whether there was a revolutionary situation cannot be decided by counting heads or middle neins out that the class and peasantry were not prepared for revolution. The decisive classes were the ruling class and the working class; the one tiny minority of the population and the working class, in France at this time, also a minority, though a much larger one than the Russian proletariat in 1917.