The Resignation of the First Popular Front Government of Leon Blum, June 1937

As the first year of Popular Front government drew to a close in the spring of 1937, widespread disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the Blum government's policies increased daily on the French left.' Still, none of the shocks experienced by the supporters of the Popular Front was so rude or productive of despair as that occasioned by the government's fall. Blum's abandonment of power left little hope that the highly unpopular policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War would be reversed, or that the pause on any new expenditures or reforms, decreed with much fanfare the preceding February, would give way as promised to a new period of legislative creativity. In these respects the pessimism of Blum's followers was to prove justified: although the Popular Front lingered on for more than another year under Radical direction (with the brief interlude of the second Blum government, March-April 1938), the period of legislative accomplishment came to a definitive end with the first Blum government's resignation. Yet apprehension for the future was only a part of the emotion engendered by the disappointing events of June 1937-many of Blum's supporters seemed as much troubled by the circumstances surrounding his departure as by the event itself. It is not, therefore, surprising that the motives behind Blum's resignation have remained a source of confusion and some historical controversy to this day

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