Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Summary
‘Le temps des loisirs‘: thus ran an article in the communist magazine Regards in 1938. The theme was not novel: with the introduction of paid holidays (congés payés) and the forty-hour week in June 1936, ‘leisure’ (loisirs) had become the catchword of the age. One of Blum's most remarked-upon appointments was that of Léo Lagrange to the new post of under secretary of state for the organization of sport and leisure. Defending his government in 1942, Blum referred to his pride that ‘through the organization of work and leisure’, he had brought ‘a ray of light into difficult lives’. As the Popular Front becomes increasingly sanitized by history, the congés payés loom ever larger as its supreme achievement. The photographs of crowds waving from departing trains have become as much a symbol of 1936 as the barricades have of 1968.
With its first legislative act, therefore, Blum's government left the domain of politics and entered that of legend. In doing so it achieved a fundamental aspiration. Unlike ‘planism’, the other strategy which claimed to offer resistance to fascism in the 1930s, the Popular Front centred its defence of democracy around the parliamentary Republic. Not the least of its aims, therefore, was to provide a mystique for democracy in an era susceptible to other myths, to reinvigorate the republican idea in France. That this should be attempted in the field of leisure was particularly significant since most contemporaries recognized that the ‘organization of leisure’ was something in which the fascist states had been pre-eminently successful. Even the Communists could refer admiringly to the achievements of Nazi Germany.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The French and Spanish Popular FrontsComparative Perspectives, pp. 226 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989