Front Populaire ou Front Populiste? Les communistes français, le peuple et les colonies

In: Studia politica: Romanian political science review ; revista română de ştiinţă politică, Band 17, Heft 4, S. 561-574

Abstract

This article focuses on a very specific issue: the French left and its
concept of people. More specifically, it aims to map the way this concept
evolved in the period of the Popular Front and the challenges due to the
colonial issue. More specifically, as the French historian René Gallissot
writes, the 1930s and the fascist threat in Europe have contributed to a
new theoretical understanding of the people by the French Communist
Party. This new understanding means that the pluralistic concept of
"people" – namely the "oppressed people of the colonies" – was replaced
by the concept "the French people". While the concept of "people" was
used in order to stress the internationalism of French communists in the
1920s and early 1930s, with the Popular Front, this concept evolved and
had an important impact on what has been called the social-chauvinistic
turn of the French Communist Party (i.e the absence of support for the
anticolonial movements). However, it is true that this question is not
specific to the French Communist Party only; similar behaviours have
been chronicled in the cases of the US and British communist parties.
Despite this caveat, the article illustrates how the study of the "populist"
dimension of the French Communist Party can provide a better understanding
of the complex relations between the Left and the colonial question.