Popular Front (France) - The Popular Front, Sports, Leisure and The 1936 Olympic Games

The Popular Front, Sports, Leisure and The 1936 Olympic Games

With the 1936 Matignon Accords, the working class could enjoy for the first time two weeks holiday a year. This signaled the beginning of tourism in France. Although beach resorts had long existed, they had been restricted to the upper class. Tens of thousands of families who had never seen the sea before now played in the waves, and Leo Langrange arranged around 500,000 discounted rail trips and hotel accommodation on a massive scale. But the Popular Front's policy concerning leisures (otium in Latin) was limited to the enactment of two weeks holiday. If on the one hand, this measure was thought as a response to workers' alienation, on the other hand, the Popular Front gave Léo Lagrange (SFIO) responsibility for organisation of the use this leisure time, and of all aspects concerning sports. Thus, Lagrange was named Under-Secretary for Sports and the organisation of Leisure, a newly created post and a forerunner of the current position of Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports. Léo Lagrange's position was placed under the authority of the Minister of Public Health Henri Sellier.

Sports was an important question in 1936, as Fascist ideology had used it in order to make it a substitute of war and a propaganda tool for spreading militarist ideas in society. Furthermore, youth organisations such as the Hitler Youth or Benito Mussolini's Balilla and Avanguardisti, created in 1926 for boys and girls, prepared to entrance in the SS and in the fasci organisations. In Italy, Mussolini had assigned Renato Ricci, deputy-secretary of Education, the task of "reorganizing the youth from a moral and physical point of view", for which he sought inspiration from Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting.

The fascist conception and use of sport as a means to an end contrasted with the SFIO's official stance towards it "until the Popular Front". Before, it considered it as a "bourgeois" and "reactionary" activity, something which could be understood due to the social restrictions which weighted on the individual possibilities to take part in such actions: as economist Thorstein Veblen had put it in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), one first had to be a member of that "leisure class" to be able to take part in such activities. However, confronted with an increasing possibility of war with Nazi Germany, and affected by the scientific racist theories of the time, which had a currency which went beyond the fascist parties, the SFIO began to change its ideas concerning sports during the Popular Front. As shown by the hierarchy of the ministers, which placed the sub-secretary of sport under the authority of the Minister of Public Health, sport was considered above all as a public health issue. From this principle of relating sport to the "degeneration of the race" and other scientific racist theories, only one step had to be taken. It was done by Georges Barthélémy, deputy of the SFIO, who declared that sports contributed to the "improvement of relations between capital and labour, henceforth to the elimination of the concept of class struggle", and that they were a "mean to prevent the moral and physical degeneration of the race." Such corporatist conceptions had led to the neo-socialist movement, whose members were excluded from the SFIO on 5 November 1933, a few months after Hitler's accession to power. But scientific racist positions were upheld inside the SFIO and the Radical-Socialist Party, who supported colonialism and found in this discourse a perfect ideological alibi to justify colonial rule. After all, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936) a leading theorist of scientific racism, had been a SFIO member, although he was strongly opposed to the "Teachers' Republic" (République des instituteurs) and its meritocratic ideal of individual advancement and fulfillment through education, a Republican ideal founded on the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Although the SFIO had opposed sports as a "bourgeois" activity of the "leisure class", it changed attitude during the Popular Front first of all because its social reforms permitted to the workers' to participate in such leisure activities, and also because of the increasing risks of a confrontation with Nazi Germany, in particular after the March 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland, in contradiction with the 1925 Locarno Treaties which had been reaffirmed in 1935 by France, Great Britain and Italy allied in the Stresa Front. This new sign of German's revisionism towards the conditions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles thus led parts of the SFIO in supporting a conception of sport used as a training field for future conscription and, eventually, war.

In this complex situation, Léo Lagrange held fast to an ethical conception of sports which rejected both fascist militarism and indoctrination, scientific racist theories as well as professionalisation of sports, which he opposed as an elitist conception which ignored the main, popular aspect of sport, which should aim, according to him, for the fulfilment of the personality of the individual. Thus, Lagrange stated that "It cannot be a question in a democratic country of militarizing the distractions and the pleasures of the masses and of transforming the joy skillfully distributed into a means of not thinking." Léo Lagrange further declared in 1936 that:

"Our simple and human goal, is to allow to the masses of French youth to find in the practice of sport, joy and health and to build an organization of the leisure activities so that the workers can find relaxation and a reward to their hard labour."

Langrange also explained that:

"We want to make our youth healthy and happy. Hitler has been very clever at that sort of thing, and there is no reason why a democratic government should not do the same."