The French Left and Regional Cultural Politics: Decentralization during the Popular Front

Following WWII, efforts to reconstruct a democratic French society involved widespread concern about cultural democratization. Given France’s long tradition of centralization, democratization necessarily raised the issue of cultural decentralization. Though historians have generally seen cultural decentralization as a post-WWII phenomenon, during the 1930s the Popular Front triggered an outpouring of attempts to decentralize French cultural life and foster antifascism outside Paris. A leftwing political coalition and grassroots antifascist movement, the Popular Front sought to mobilize the French people against the fascist threat and to inculcate the public with antifascist values through cultural politics. To spark a national movement encompassing the entire population, Popular Front activists strove to carry their cultural program to the cities of the provinces. This paper investigates efforts to overcome the Paris/Province divide, which undergirded the cultural antifascist movement.

A full picture of Popular Front cultural politics encompasses both Paris and the provinces; focusing on only one misses the important debate taking place between Parisian and provincial cultural actors. Parisian activists tended to view the provinces as culturally deprived and approached decentralization as the exportation of Parisian culture outward, attempting to control provincial culture. Provincial cultural activists envisioned strengthening regional cultural life and creating a federal structure with links between provincial cities as well as to Paris. Regional dynamics complicated the political message of Popular Front cultural activity. The parties of the French Left attempted to rework their relationship to regional identity, but this renegotiation ultimately failed. Regionalism became the purview of Vichy and the Right.