Introduction

In 1934, after the disastrous defeat of the German working class, the focus of the advanced workers of Europe shifted away from Germany and towards France, where on 6 February, gangs of fascists and monarchists had organised a provocation, leading to riots and clashes with the police in which 2,000 people were injured and seventeen killed.

These riots were followed by a response from the working class organisations: a massive demonstration on 9 February followed by a general strike three days later. The divide between the Socialist and the Communist Party was pushed to the side, as both their trade union confederations and their parties were united in action on the day.

The actions of the working class pushed back the fascists, but it resolved nothing. Instead the Gaston Doumergue regime rose to power, balanced, as Trotsky points out, between the two. The bourgeoisie attempted to find a new stability in an outsider, the retired previous president Doumergue, backed by two generals. The new government attempted to restore order, but it did not last long.

The article ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, written in July 1934, tackles the theoretical questions raised by the period. Trotsky explains what the nature of the new regime in France was:

A government which raises itself above the nation is not, however, suspended in air. The true axis of the present government passes through the police, the bureaucracy, the military clique. It is a military-police dictatorship with which we are confronted, barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism. But a government of the sabre as the judge arbiter of the nation – that’s just what Bonapartism is.

Trotsky pointed out precisely how the new government, in spite of nominally being based in parliament, in reality had raised itself above it. He makes this important theoretical point about the nature of both Bonapartism and democracy:

The strength of finance capital does not reside in its ability to establish a government of any kind and at any time, according to its wish; it does not possess this faculty. Its strength resides in the fact that every non-proletarian government is forced to serve finance capital; or better yet, that finance capital possesses the possibility of substituting for each one of its systems of domination that decays, another system corresponding better to the changed conditions. However, the passage from one system to another signifies the political crisis which, with the concourse of the activity of the revolutionary proletariat may be transformed into a social danger to the bourgeoisie. The passage of parliamentary democracy to Bonapartism itself was accompanied in France by an effervescence of civil war. The perspective of the passage from Bonapartism to fascism is pregnant with infinitely more formidable disturbances and consequently also revolutionary possibilities.

The new regime, being based on the unsteady equilibrium between fascists and the workers, was very weak, and it was to end in a revolutionary movement two years later.

As Trotsky was writing his article ‘Whither France?’ in November 1934, Doumergue resigned and was replaced by Flandin, who was not long after replaced by Bouisson, then Laval, then Sarraut – five governments in two years.

The reason for the instability of the governments was the collapse of the Radicals, the political centre. Their political base, the petty bourgeoisie, was being crushed by the crisis and became politically restless.

Society was in a crisis and it needed to be resolved either one way or another:

The social crisis in its political expression is the crisis of power. The old master of society is bankrupt. A new master is needed.

Who was that master to be? Was it to be the fascists or the working class? That was the real question. The petty bourgeoisie needed to be won over to the proletariat, or they would be won over by the fascists:

The petty bourgeoisie will reject the demagogy of fascism only if it puts its faith in the reality of another road. That other road is the road of proletarian revolution.

Now, however, the policy of the Communist International had shifted from the ultra-left period to opportunism. It now aligned its policy with the failed policy of social democracy; in other words, an alliance with the collapsing liberal Radicals, to try to shore them up.

This was preparing a very similar disaster to that of Germany, and the very opposite of what was needed:

The working-class party must occupy itself not with a hopeless effort to save the party of the bankrupts. It must, on the contrary, with all its strength, accelerate the process of liberation of the masses from Radical influence.

The Popular Front

Of course, the small forces of the Left Opposition in France, the Trotskyists, were unable to affect events. The Communist Party and the Socialist Party joined with the Radicals in a Popular Front in 1935, in time for the elections the next year.

The elections of May 1936 produced a wave of enthusiasm. Already in March, Trotsky was writing ‘France at the Turning Point’. He took up again the question of the Popular Front. He again pointed out that the crisis of capitalism could not be resolved by attempting to prop up the status quo. The leaders of the workers in France were preparing another disaster:

The People’s Front [Popular Front], the conspiracy between the labour bureaucracy and the worst political exploiters of the middle classes [the Radicals] is capable only of killing the faith of the masses in the revolutionary road and of driving them into the arms of the fascist counter-revolution.

Precisely because it was a cross-class alliance, it was bound to break down at the first impact of events:

The People’s Front will fall to pieces at the first serious test, and deep fissures will open up in all of its component sections. The policy of the People’s Front is the policy of betrayal.

Indeed, these words were to prove prophetic. The victory of the Popular Front led to a massive strike wave, starting on 26 May. It became a general strike involving more than a million workers and factory occupations.

But this was not suited to the new alignment on the French left. The line was that one mustn’t upset the coalition, and naturally the bourgeois Radicals were not at all happy about this turn of events:

The leading centres of the working-class organisations, including those of the Communist Party, have been caught unawares. They are afraid, above all, lest the strike spoil all their blueprints.

In order to preserve the Popular Front, the movement needed to be betrayed. Much like what was to happen thirty years later in May 1968, a massive revolutionary movement that could have taken power and abolished capitalism, was betrayed for lofty promises from the bourgeoisie.

An agreement was signed, which included major concessions to the workers. After all, when their back is against the wall, the bourgeoisie is willing to make all kinds of concessions, in order to save the system as a whole. However, far from creating a lasting basis on which to get further concessions, once the movement has died down, the bourgeoisie will exact their revenge.

Trotsky warned of the consequences:

The very essence of the matter lies in the fact that the reforms, very meagre as they are in substance, upon which the capitalists and the leaders of the labour organisations agreed in June, are not viable, because they are already beyond the powers of declining capitalism, taken as a whole.

The big bourgeois of course could weather the crisis, with their massive financial reserves and monopoly power, and the cost would be borne by the small and medium producers. The consequences of the political support for the Popular Front were not hard to work out.

‘Do not expect miracles from us!’, the pedants in power keep repeating. But the gist of the matter lies precisely in the fact that without ‘miracles’, without heroic decisions, without a complete overturn in property relations – without the concentration of the banking system, of the basic branches of industry and of foreign trade in the hands of the state – there is no salvation for the petty bourgeoisie of the city and country.

The betrayal of the strikes and the capitulation to the Radicals spelled the end of the movement. The Popular Front was wound up in 1938, after having moved to the right. From then on, each new government represented a further move to the right, until the French bourgeoisie could take their revenge with the capitulation to Hitler in 1940.

Niklas Albin Svensson
From ‘Democracy, Bonapartism and Fascism: lessons for today’, Marxist.com
9 May 2025