Abstract
This is the text of an oath sworn on 14 July 1935. On the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, ‘the people’ pledged to conquer new citadels and to secure the victory of the Popular Front. Such is the founding myth of the Front. According to the myth, as it was rehearsed in various speeches on 14 July 1935, ‘the people’ of France had passed through a trial but had been delivered. The events of 6 February 1934 had shown that France was divided, and that a struggle must commence to unite the country. How the battle was fought was a tale that varied with the teller, but most versions included the following sequence of events.
We take the oath to remain united to defend democracy, to disarm and dissolve the factious leagues and to place our liberties beyond the attack of fascism. On this day which revives the first victory of the Republic, we swear to defend the democratic Liberties won by the People of France, to give bread to the Workers, work to the Young, and Peace for humanity to the World.1
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Notes
This important point is made in Danielle Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue en France: 1918–1968, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris 1997, p. 349.
Again, this is a point made in Berstein, 1975, p. 219. It is also emphasised in Peter J. Larmour, The French Radical Party in the 1930s, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1964, p. 144.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, Ed. and Trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, Columbia University Press, New York 1996, p. 173.
Confédération générale du travail, ‘Au peuple! Aux travailleurs!’, Le Peuple, 9 February 1934, p. 1. See also Antoine Prost, ‘Les Manifestations du 12 février 1934 en province’. La France en mouvement: 1934–1938, Ed. Jean Bouvier, Champ Vallon, Seyssel 1986, pp. 12–30.
Anon. Le Populaire, 13 February 1934, p. 3. For the importance of the distinction between the Front ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ see Gerd Rainer Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1996, p. 27 ff.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London and New York 2001, p. 85.
Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 113. Needless to say, the arguments proposed by Laclau and Mouffe have generated some controversy, not least over the question of the extent to which their project is ‘post-Marxist’ and ‘post-Marxist’, as they acknowledge: Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 4. For their account of hegemony as articulation is an attempt to move beyond the category of hegemonic classes. Thus they attribute an autonomy to the political sphere which is incompatible with Gramsci’s sense of hegemony as ‘political but also and above all economic’, Gramsci, 1996, p. 183. Nevertheless, their account clearly does not preclude the articulation of ‘class’ struggle, even if it does preclude its privileging. For one overview of the questions raised here see Michèle Barrett, ‘Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Mouffe’, Mapping Ideology, Ed. Slavoj Žižek, Verso, London and New York 1994, pp. 235–64.
Gabrielle Duchêne, ‘Pourquoi ce mouvement’, Les Femmes dans l’Action Mondiale, No. 1, undated [1934], pp. 1–2, p. 1, ellipsis added. Duchêne, the leader of the movement, was a fellow traveller, and the inspiration for the committee was Communist: see Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes, 1914–1940, Fayard, Paris 1995, p. 297.
For the Comité mondiale des femmes, see Bard, 1995, p. 297. For the SFIO see Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, pp. 219–20.
Jacques Kergoat, La France du Front populaire, Editions La Découverte, Paris 1986
Georges Lefranc, Histoire du Front populaire, 1934–1938, Payot, Paris 1965
Pascal Ory, La Belle Illusion: Culture et Politique sous le signe du Front Populaire, 1934–1938, Plon, Paris 1994.
Jeanne Bouvier, Mes mémoires, ou 59 années d’activité industrielle, sociale et intellectuelle d’une ouvrière, L’Action intellectuelle, Poitiers 1936, pp. 174–5.
Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti: Pour une sociologie historique du PCF, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris 1989, pp. 144–58.
On the international context of the PCF turn see Denis Peschanski, Et pourtant ils tournent: Vocabulaire et Stratégie du PCF, 1934–1936, Klincksieck, Paris 1988, p. 38 ff.
Annie Kriegel, ‘Langage et Stratégie: L’exemple du Front populaire’, Communismes au miroir français: Temps, cultures et sociétés en France devant le communisme, Gallimard, Paris 1974, pp. 95–114
Needless to say, these developments were not universally welcomed. The contradictions within the Popular Front were most forcibly denounced by Léon Trotsky: see ‘Whither France’ and ‘Once Again, Whither France’, On France, Ed. David Salner, Pathfinder, New York 1979, pp. 29–62
Maurice Thorez, ‘A tout prix, battre le fascisme. Pour un large Front populaire antifasciste’, L’Humanit#x00E9;, 12 October 1934, p. 4. For the Radical cult of the Encyclopedists and the party’s doctrines of progress see Jammy-Schmidt, Idées et images radicales, Excelsior, Paris 1934, p. 5
See Pierre Birnbaum, Le Peuple et les gros: Histoire d’un mythe, Grasset, Paris 1979, p. 16
Cited in Jacques Duclos, Le Triomphe du Front populaire. De la Conférence Communiste d’lvry (Juin 1934) aux Assises de la Paix et de la Liberté du 14 Julliet 1935, Les Publications révolutionnaires, Paris 1935, pp. 37–8.
From October 1934 Thorez invoked the Jacobins with increasing frequency. See in particular ‘Interpellation’, Journal Officiel: Débats Parlementaires, Chambre des Députés, Session of 13 November 1934, pp. 2294–8. The importance of this speech is discussed in Nicole Racine and Louis Bodin, Eds. Le Parti communiste français pendant l’entre-deux-guerres, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris 1982, p. 225.
The term ‘Jacobinisation’ is used in Kriegel, 1974, p. 104. Jacobinisation entailed a shift in the attitudes of the PCF towards the nation; on this shift see Serge Wolikow, ‘Le PCF et la nation au temps du Front populaire’, Antifascisme et nation: Les Gauches européennes au temps du Front populaire, Eds. Serge Wolikow and Annie Bleton-Ruget, Editions universitaires de Dijon, Dijon 1998, pp. 129–40.
My account of the Révolutionary festivals is reliant on Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Révolution, Trans. Alan Sheridan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1988, p. 32 ff.
Lefranc, 1965, p. 82 proposes Jacques Kayser as a co-author, and cites Chamson as the authority for this. Chamson’s wife also suggests this: see Lucie Mazauric, Avec André Chamson, Vol. 2, Plon, Paris 1976, p. 103.
Cited from François Furet, The French Revolution: 1770–1814, Trans. Antonia Nevill, Blackwell, Oxford 1996, p. 64.
This reanimation was in response to a crisis; one could say that in such moments of crisis the imagined community of the nation requires a more powerful presentation, that it requires staging. For a full discussion of these imagined communities see Anderson, Imagined Communities: On the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London and New York, 1993.
The significance of this trajectory is discussed in Rosemonde Sanson, Les 14 juillet (1789–1975): Fête et conscience nationale, Flammarion, Paris 1976, p. 118.
Tristan Rémy, ‘Une grande journée populaire’, Le Peuple, 19 July 1935, pp. 1–2, p. 2. On this article see Tartakowsky, 1997, p. 347. For a discussion of the complexity of Rémy’s position see Simon Dell, ‘On the Metaphor and Practice of Photography: Socialist Réalism, the Popular Front in France and the Dynamics of Cultural Unity’, History of Photography, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 52–60.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London 1971, p. 168.
On Réal, see Christian Bouqueret, Des années folks aux années noires: La nouvelle vision photographique en France, 1920–1940, Marval, Paris 1997, p. 18
Alain Fleig, Etant donné l’âge de la lumière: Naissance de la Photographie comme média en France dans les années trente, Editions Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 80
Natalie Cattaruzza, Le Rôle des patrons, rédacteurs en chef, directeurs artistiques de la presse illustrée dans le développement de certains tendances photographiques, en France des années 1920 aux années 1960 (reportage, photojournalisme, mode, publicité, illustration), Allocation de formation et de recherche. Mission de patrimoine photographique, Paris 1995, p. 25 ff.
Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, Trans. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1981, p. 27.
On the photograph as solemnising see Pierre Bourdieu et al, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Trans. Shaun Whiteside, Polity Press, Cambridge 1990, pp. 20–1.
Walter Benjamin, ‘L’Oeuvre d’art á l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’. Trans. Pierre Klossowki, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 5, 1936, p. 65.
See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 270 ff.
Benjamin, 1936, p. 65. The relationship between the masses and the authoritarian leader was developed by Theodor Adorno in ‘Freudian Theory and Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Eds. Andréw Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Continuum, New York 1998, pp. 118–37.
Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 1, Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1947, pp. 887–906
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© 2007 Simon Dell
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Dell, S. (2007). ‘People of France’: The Image Created. In: The Image of the Popular Front. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286955_3
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