The People, the Workers, and the Nation: Contested Cultural Politics in the French Popular Front

This dissertation discusses the cultural politics of the French Popular Front. It examines the cultural practices Popular Front activists in France utilized to unite the French people against fascism, and the corresponding perceptions of nation and class that divided groups within the leftwing alliance. In the mid-1930s, mobilized antifascists formed the Popular Front, a grassroots movement and leftwing political coalition. Popular Front members hoped to establish the French people as a bulwark against fascist encroachment by imbuing them with French antifascist values and attitudes. Cultural figures worked to pull the population into politics through cultural engagement, and to create a common antifascist French identity. Popular Front cultural activity focused on `the French people' as a socially and politically inclusive group devoted to a leftwing understanding of the French nation.;The Popular Front movement highlighted the nation as the unit of resistance to fascism and national traditions as the key to marshaling opposition. The alliance groups embraced the people as the heart of the French nation, and the left adopted nationalist concepts traditionally associated with the right. Communists defined the people as the carriers of leftwing French values. Moderate republican Radicals, such as Education and Fine Arts Minister Jean Zay, relied on a longstanding republican legacy of linking republican ideals to the French nation. Historians have long acknowledged the left's national turn; my study provides an analysis of how national ideas were integrated with leftwing values.;My dissertation argues that Popular Front cultural politics entailed competing attempts to determine who embodied `the people,' revealing conflicting notions of nation and class. Zay viewed the cultural movement as defensive, protecting republican France by spreading dedication to republican values. He conceived of the people in a civic sense, the body of equal citizens, and promoted equal access to republican cultural life as a way to overcome class divisions. Communists saw cultural life in the very class terms Zay attempted to evade. Communist Popular Front cultural activity championed the cause of the working class through cultural means, endeavoring to give workers agency through cultural creation. Workers, they argued, as the modern incarnation of the people, embodied France's most essential (leftwing) values, and thus the advancement of workers also protected national identity. Political activists in provincial cities also produced divergent cultural politics based on different political constructions of `the people,' confirming the cultural divide within the Popular Front as a national phenomenon. Different urban contexts produced disparate cultural movements, complicating the attempt to create a unified national cultural movement.;A study of cultural activity in provincial cities illuminates the cultural interactions between Paris and the provinces. The desire to make culture universally accessible to everyone in the nation involved cultural activists in efforts to reach the population in the provinces. Popular Front activists reclaimed regionalism, considered the purview of the right. This turn away from Paris to the provinces represented the rejection of an undemocratic, restricted, and elitist cultural model and the search for a popular, democratic audience. Revitalizing cultural life in the provinces contributed to nationwide Popular Front grassroots momentum. However, local activists did not interact as expected with the exportation of Parisian culture to the provinces. Rather, they adapted it to local cultural needs. They celebrated regional culture for its own sake, and not necessarily as part of a national project. The most successful cultural decentralization initiatives arose when Parisian support aligned with provincial cultural goals.;Unlike previous studies, my dissertation distinguishes among cultural projects with different ideological underpinnings and encompasses the national, regional, and local dynamics of Popular Front cultural politics. Through the concept of the people, activists reworked the positions of leftwing groups towards France, the Republic, and the working class, interweaving tradition and innovation. Popular Front members reimagined leftwing national identities. The divergent images of the people activists held sheds light on the difficulties of reconciling democracy and mass society, a problem made particularly urgent by the rise of fascism.