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

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.