National and Local: Rural Politics 1932-1936

Abstract

French politics and politicians during the crucial decade of the 1930s have had few admirers, no more among contemporaries than among historians, for whom the final years of the Third Republic were but dismal preparation for the drama and disaster of 1940.1 The political system itself has excited no envy and has rarely evoked more than apology. Many students of modern France would concur with Stanley Hoffmann's view that the Republican synthesis, which since the turn of the century had guaranteed social and political immobility under the safeguard of a noisy ideological cover, unraveled inexorably in response to mounting domestic turbulence and international crisis in the 1930s, and that polarization in society and politics climaxed in the duel of the Resistance against Vichy. Moments of hope, such as the first months of the Popular Front government, and movements for innovation, particularly in politics and economics, have been studied in recent years, as have the major parties of the left.2 Few of these inquiries have escaped the long shadow cast by the catastrophe of 1940, and very many scholars have felt compelled to emphasize the role of their subject in