The Parliamentary Opposition to the Front Populaire and the Elections of 1936

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-695
Author(s):  
A. W. H. Shennan

At the beginning of his venomous critique of conservative parliamentarians, Abel Bonnard commented:Le parti modéré, négligeable en apparence et si l'on s'en tient au peu qu'il a fait, ressemble à une carafe d'eau claire où le vulgaire ne voit que le plus nul des objets, mais dans laquelle un devin penché aperçoit mille scènes du passé et de l'avenir.To judge by the continuing dearth of works on the French parliamentary right in the inter-war years, the properties of this subject have remained hidden. Scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively towards the ideological extremes of both left and right. Those nearer the centre of French politics, possessing a less identifiable ideology but a far greater numerical strength inside the Palais Bourbon, have been largely ignored. There is still no detailed or comprehensive account of the parliamentary right's evolution in the final decades of the Third Republic.

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Joshua Cole

This chapter explores the way that political polarization in the 1920s and 1930s played out in both metropolitan France and in French Algeria. Extremisms of both the right and the left challenged the legitimacy of the Third Republic. This confrontation between left and right was complicated in French Algeria by the appearance of an active cohort of Muslim politicians running for office under the terms of the 1919 law. By the early 1930s this cohort was led by a dynamic politician from Constantine named Mohamed Bendjelloul, whose activities created tension within the local political establishment.


1977 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Hayward ◽  
Vincent Wright

FRANCE IS A COUNTRY IN WHICH PAST POLITICAL BATTLES ARE IN the forefront of the minds of those who are engaged in contemporary conflicts. The March 1977 elections in the 36,383 communes of metropolitan France could evoke memories of 1877 and 1947. The thirtieth anniversary of the Gaullist landslide of 1947 was directly concerned with local elections as such, while 1877 recalled the defeat of President MacMahon's attempt to impose his choice of government a century ago, which finally settled the struggle between Left and Right over the regime of the Third Republic. Anticipation that the regime established by General de Gaulle would be put to the searching test of a clash between the President and a Left-wing Assembly majority converted in some people's minds the March 1977 local clections into a prologue to this decisive national confrontation.


1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. McMillan

Most historians of modern France would agree that the quarrel between clericals and anticlericals was one of the most significant political issues in French politics between 1870 and 1914, especially in the period before the passing of the law which separated Church and State in 1905. The charges brought against the Catholic Church by the anticlericals were many, but until recently few students of nineteenth-century France have commented on the fact that one of their most serious allegations was that the Church oppressed women. Perhaps the most celebrated formulation of this theory came from the pen of the historian Michelet who, in a virulent polemic entitled Priests, women and the family, bitterly attacked the powers which priests were reputed to exercise over the female mind through the institution of the confessional, to the great detriment of marital life and family unity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 660-685
Author(s):  
JEROME GREENFIELD

AbstractThe French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.


1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Wileman

ABSTRACTMadeleine Rebérioux was right to wonder whether France was truly a ‘Radical republic’ in the years between the Dreyfus affair and the Great War. Archives only opened or explored since Rebérioux published in 1975, and the re-interpretation of older newspaper sources, show that control of the Third Republic was still hotly contested in those years. The Radicals tried to build a republic in their own image, but in a situation where left and right were closely balanced, they were almost always foiled. Crucial to this process was a politically republican but socially conservative centre – best typified by the A.R.D. The A.R.D. wanted a Third Republic frankly favourable to the interests of big business. Since it held the parliamentary balance of power between the left and a right only partly republican, it generally got its way. Statistical sources also support this interpretation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Geoff Read

This article explores the case of N’Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in “Poukhombo’s Rebellion” in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh’s original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors.


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