View images of the unrest in France.
The images of great rivers of striking workers and students surging along Paris boulevards or blockading petroleum refineries have gripped the French nation and the Western world. With intensifying force since September, hundreds of thousands of French workers have pressured President Nicolas Sarkozy's government to back down on its plan to overhaul the pension system and raise the retirement age -- an effort made all the more urgent by his party's surprise decision to move up the vote on the proposed legislation to Oct. 22.
Despite the timeliness of the protests, as Europe enters a new "age of austerity," the images evoke a much less recent event. Next year France will mark the 75th anniversary of the raucous birth of the Popular Front government in France. The protests that gave rise to the Popular Front laid the foundations for the social contract now at stake in the current confrontation -- and anticipated it in some other, more surprising ways.
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In the summer of 1936, France was wracked by a series of unprecedented and largely unplanned protests against the deflationary economic policies of the conservative governments of the interwar period. Beginning in mid-May, workers in factories and stores, ports and refineries, joined the protest movement, eventually bringing the national economy to a standstill. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their work places or simply sat down on the job, locking out their supervisors.
French industrial workers had for a long time been caught between the terrifying prospect of being without work and the appalling reality of the jobs they held. The French philosopher and theologian Simone Weil, who worked for a spell as a power press operator at a Paris factory in the 1930s, was ordered at the end of her first day to double her output if she wished to keep her job. The employer, she told a friend, "makes a favor of allowing us to kill ourselves and we have to say thank you."
From the bowels of such factories flowed the visceral resentment that found its public expression in the great waves of strikes that broke across France that summer. Just weeks before the strikes began, the Popular Front had come to power. An uneasy coalition formed by the Socialists, Radicals (who, despite their name, occupied the center of French politics), and Communists, and led by the Socialist leader Léon Blum, the Popular Front carried the immense hopes and aspirations of both urban and rural workers. In fact, the left's electoral victory helped bring the strikes into being: The workers' protests were meant to both celebrate and secure this new beginning.
These hopes were not just social and economic, but also political and moral. Right-wing "leagues" (radical movements inspired by Italian fascism), such as the Croix de Feu and Action Française, were menacing, fueled by hatred of foreigners and the conviction that France could defend itself against Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia only if led by an authoritarian regime of its own. When these movements clashed with Parisian police during bloody street demonstrations in early 1934, many believed that the Third Republic itself was in danger. The Popular Front crystallized at this moment, largely forced on national leaders by voters and workers who were no less galvanized by the frailty of the Republic than by the paucity of their paychecks.
Blum's government acted swiftly. The leagues were dissolved, and the government brokered an unprecedented agreement between unions and employers. Not only did workers secure the right to join unions and bargain collectively, but they also won the 40-hour work week and two weeks of paid vacation. Quite suddenly, the borders of France burst beyond the confines of one's working-class neighborhood in Paris or Lille, extending as far as the mountains and coasts. For the first time in their lives, men and women could truly know their country.
Ultimately, the expectations stirred by this vast social movement in 1936 were too great a burden for any government, especially one based on so volatile and narrow an alliance. Within a year, the Popular Front had imploded, and the hope it had embodied gave way to disenchantment. The deep and ineradicable ideological differences among the Socialists, Communists, and Radicals -- made manifest with the start of the Spanish Civil War -- and Paris's disastrous devaluation of the franc led to the government's demise scarcely a year after its birth.
Yet few events have greater emotional resonance with the French left today. On Oct. 8, the elder statesman of the Socialist party, Pierre Mauroy, delivered an emotionally charged speech in the Senate defending the right to retire at the age of 60. When he warned that "one does not have the right to abolish history," he meant not just the laws introduced when he was prime minister in the 1980s, but the foundational laws created by the Popular Front.
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