LThe “republican front” is resisting. Secret like a ballot slipped into a ballot box, versatile like a government of the IVe Republic, elastic like voting instructions for the second round under the Ve, the expression defies the years. She has already caused so much ink to flow, fed so much exegesis in The world for over seven decades.
Here it resurfaces on the eve of the second round of regional and departmental elections, Sunday, June 27. She comes back, but aged, some would say cacochyme, a little lame and even podagre. Witness the waltzes-hesitations, twisted arms, around withdrawals to block the far right, meetings that have punctuated the chronicle of the past week, especially in PACA.
Front against fronts. In the daily columns, the republican front has long opposed the National Front and its multiple extreme right-wing variants, from post-war Poujadism to today’s National Rally. But, on re-reading the articles, we see that the same republican front has long been the antagonist of another front, the Popular Front, and of everything that could be compared to a rally of the whole of the left.
“The triumph of the” scheming “”
The expression appears in The world October 29, 1947, from the pen of Jacques Fauvet. The political journalist then probes the pangs of the socialists, in these years when the French Communist Party reigns on the left and where the shadow of De Gaulle, whose quality of democrat is still mocked, hangs over the right. “The SFIO also wants to keep away from two“ dictatorships ”: that of“ one man ”, and we know who, and that of a“ single party ”, and we can guess which one. ” Jacques Fauvet adds: “The Popular Front has definitely lost all seduction and all chance on the socialist side, but not the Republican Front, which remains open to all sincere Democrats. It does not seem that, in the mind of the SFIO, the Communists are of this kind for the moment. ”
The debate becomes particularly lively before the early legislative elections of January 1956. Faced with the rise of Poujadism, of which, for the record, one of the candidates and elected is called Jean-Marie Le Pen, the non-communist left and part of the radicals s ‘Allied around Guy Mollet, Pierre Mendès-France, François Mitterrand and the left-wing Gaullist Jacques Chaban-Delmas, in a republican front which took the lead and formed the backbone of the Mollet government. But this team of circumstances more than ideas will be shattered on his management of the war in Algeria. Jacques Fauvet follows his wanderings and his collapse.
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