PART 1E
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left in the old party-organizations. The fi rst serious defeat of the
movement took place when, during the summer of 1936, the French
workers went into the street to claim
drs avions pour l'Espagne
and
went home with the 40-hours week instead, an ill-timed gift from the
Socialist government. At the very moment when they were once more
transformed into party members, confident and desiring nothing more
than representation of their economic interests, they lost their fight
against Fascism. How little, however, the old parties were able to
exploit rhe political vacuum created after the end of the Popular
Front, can be seen from the fact that the above mentioned breakdown
of the French party-system occurred immediately after its recovery
from the Popular Front experiment.
The Resistance may rightly be called the true heir of the Popular
Front. It took over not only the principle of proclaiming the people
(and not solely classes) the subject of politics, but it inherited the new
political enthusiasm which was expressed in the revival of such funda–
mental concepts of political life as justice, liberty, human dignity and -
basic responsibilities of the citizen. It inherited, too, the relative indif–
ference to all questions connected with mere class struggle, thus at–
testing to that remarkable and so far unexplained loss of so-called
class-consciousness which has been characteristic of all social strata
of pre-war Europe with the significant exception of the bourgeoisie.
This fact in itself was a decisive blow to a party-system that after all
had grown out of the actual division of the nation into classes and
had worked on the principle that the division along economic lines
is politically all-important. The furious opposition to the Popular
Fron~
and the less violent but not less deep-rooted distrust of the
Resistance by orthodox Marxists as well as the bourgeoisie, was, of
course, thoroughly characteristic. Both felt that this movement was
destroying the very basis of their political existence.
Although the Popular Front and the Resistance transcended the
framework of the nation from the very beginning, neither came for–
ward with a program embracing the entire world. The Resistance
movements, especially, had come to life simultaneously but fairly
independently in all European countries, and it was with the same
simultaneity and independence that they developed their ideas of a
federated Europe. They consequently tried to know one another, to
come to terms with one another, until they became like branches of an
inter-European movement, united by similar needs and identical ex–
periences. That they achieved such unity without uniformity under
the conditions of a German-occupied Europe shows how deeply they
must have felt that none of their problems-the pressing social ques-
