Frontist Party

The Frontist Party, also known as the Common Front or Social Front, was a political party in France founded in 1936 by Gaston Bergery and Georges Izard. It was a founding member of the Popular Front. Gaston Bergery and the 'Common Front Against Fascism' Bergery had originally been the leading figure of the most left-wing faction of France's dominant centre-left progressive party, the Radical-Socialist Party. An undersecretary to the President of the Council (prime minister) during the first Cartel des Gauches (coalition of the left) in 1924, he had been heavily disappointed by the coalition's collapse in 1926. Thereafter, he advocated a close cooperation of the left-wing parties - chiefly the Radical-Socialists and the Socialist Party - around a programme of state-intervention in the economy and opposition to fascism. This policy found little popularity within the Radical-Socialist Party (where Bergery was mocked as a "Radical-Bolshevik"), and in early 1933 Bergery quit the party. In the wake of the anti-parliamentary riots of February 1934 the mood in France changed: the centre-left coalition collapsed bringing down the Radical-Socialist government, replaced by a government of the right which the Left feared was a prelude to fascism. Dissidents from the three major left-wing parties, Bergery the ex-Radical-Socialist, Jacques Doriot the number-two Communist leader, and the prominent socialist Georges Monnet, broke with their respective parties to form a 'Common Front Against Fascism', designed as a network where anti-fascists could coordinate resistance against further dictatorial trends, independently of party lines. Bergery had thought that the Common Front would fill a much-demanded empty niche in French politics: a centre-left progressive party that was explicitly committed to opposing fascism and defending parliamentary institutions, while also addressing financial and economic issues through state intervention, and formally allying with the Socialist Party to do so. But it found no support from the main parties: the Socialist and Communist parties banned their members from participating, while the Radical-Socialist Party initially sided with the National government before gradually adopting the very ideas that Bergery had advocated. Bergery imagined that the public would prove more enthusiastic than the party leaders.