deals. In January 1934 he shot himself, and the
police, who could have saved his life, allowed him
to die. It was rumoured that his death had
shielded highly placed politicians and the police
from the revelation of their involvement in his
crimes and in these allegations there was un-
doubtedly some truth. All the anti-parliamentary
forces seized on the scandal to make a concerted
effort to overthrow not only the government but
the Republic. The members of the various leagues
were summoned in their thousands onto the
streets of Paris to oust the politicians. The climax
was reached during the night of 6 February 1934
when street battles raged in Paris; the police and
Garde Mobile narrowly gaining the upper hand.
Hundreds of demonstrators were wounded,
some seriously, and it is surprising that the death
toll – some eighteen people – was relatively small.
The supposedly strong government under the
Radical prime minister Édouard Daladier turned
out to be weak after all and promptly resigned.
The Republic was saved by a few of its resolute
defenders among the Paris police by luck and,
above all, by the total disunity of the leaders of
the right. There was no Hitler or even Mussolini
among them.
Weak French governments, which could find
no solution to the political, social and economic
problems, succeeded each other during the next
two years. The elections of May 1936, however,
seemed to herald a turning point: the parties of
the left – the Socialists and Communists –
together with the Radicals had by then formed an
electoral alliance, the Popular Front. This extra-
ordinary change had been made possible by the
volte-face of the French Communist Party. In
June 1934 the Communists and Socialists had
overcome their mutual suspicions to join in a
United Front to fight fascism. The reasons
for the change have fascinated historians, for
the Communists had regarded the Democratic
Socialists, or ‘social fascists’ as they called them,
as their worst enemies. They accused them of
leading the proletariat away from the true goal of
communist revolution under the guise of repre-
senting the working people’s class interests. The
fascists, on the other hand, could be recognised
as the enemy of the proletariat and were but a
passing phenomenon associated with the later
stages of capitalism before its inevitable demise.
Outside the Soviet Union, some of the com-
munist parties that subscribed to the Soviet-
controlled Comintern began to question these
doctrinaire views. How could all Social Democrats
be regarded as enemies when they were fighting
the same foe as in Austria, where the Social
Democrats forcibly resisted the authoritarian cleri-
cal Dollfuss government and were, in 1934, bom-
barded into submission in Vienna? In Germany
Hitler’s Nazis looked like consolidating their
power. Communists languished in concentration
camps, their party organisation smashed. There
was a serious danger that fascism would win power
in other European countries. The French commu-
nist leader, Maurice Thorez, became especially
fearful of a fascist triumph in France. The French
Communist Party took the lead in creating a new
United Front with the Socialists. They could not
have openly disobeyed the Comintern in Moscow.
But the Soviet leadership was divided and per-
suaded by the brilliant Bulgarian communist
leader, George Dimitrov, the hero of the Reichstag
fire trial, to allow some latitude and experimenta-
tion of tactics. From the summer of 1934 onwards
Thorez pushed on, the Soviet leaders acquiescing.
The socialist and communist trade unions merged.
Not satisfied with a socialist alliance alone, Thorez
extended the alignment even further to include the
‘bourgeois’ Radicals, and so turned the United
Front into the much broader Popular Front. The
electoral pact of the three parties – Socialist,
Communist and Radical – gave the Popular Front
electoral victory over the right in the spring of
1936 and brought Léon Blum to power as prime
minister. Though the Radicals did least well, the
Communists gained greatly and the three parties
together won 378 seats against the right’s 220.
The electoral arrangements, rather than a large
shift in the voting, had achieved this result. But
French society remained more divided than ever.
This polarisation was as important as the election
results. Léon Blum had taken no part in the elec-
tions. He had been nearly beaten to death in the
street when fanatics of the Action Française had set
upon him. Fortunately, he was rescued by building
workers who happened to be nearby. That was the
other side of French politics.