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
The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
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
Whilst there may not seem to be a great deal of point in attempting to oppose a well-established convention, I should like to propose in this essay that before the Civil War there existed in Spain no political entity which can properly be called a Popular Front. It was only after the war had started that there emerged in many places committees, denominated ‘popular front’, whose function was to negotiate with the anarchist trade union, the CNT, for control of executive positions on the various defence committees. But as regards a formal agreement between political parties to create a government coalition complete with a programme for the defence of parliamentary democracy, I think that the use of the term Popular Front is entirely misplaced until the emergence of the aforementioned committees constituted by Socialists, Communists and Republicans. The supreme expression of these, of course, would be the May 1937 Negrín government itself, the origins of which one must seek in the process which led Communists and Socialists to agree a unity of action initiative in April 1937. With this in mind, rather than clarifying the origins of the front, or the manner of its constitution, I will be attempting to explain the reasons why a Popular Front did not exist in Spain before the outbreak of the Civil War.
The reasons for this failure reside in the fact that within the Spanish left as a whole during the 1930s the most important group was the trade unions.
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- The French and Spanish Popular FrontsComparative Perspectives, pp. 24 - 37Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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