Popular Front (France) - The Popular Front and Cultural Policies

The Popular Front and Cultural Policies

Culturally the Popular Front forced the Communists to come to terms with elements of French society they had long ridiculed, such as patriotism, the veterans' sacrifice, the honor of being an army officer, the prestige of the bourgeois, and the leadership of the Socialist Party and the parliamentary Republic. Above all the Communists portrayed themselves as French nationalists. Young Communists dressed in costumes from the revolutionary period and the scholars glorified the Jacobins as heroic predecessors.

The Minister of National Education and of the Beaux-Arts, Jean Zay, proposed as soon as August 1936 a draft law concerning intellectual property right, based on a new philosophy which did not consider the author as an "owner" (propriétaire), but as an "intellectual worker" (travailleur intellectuel). Jean Zay voluntarilly located himself in the continuation of Alfred de Vigny, Augustin-Charles Renouard and Proudhon, who had opposed themselves to Lamartine during the 19th century, and defended the "spiritual interest of the collectivity". Article 21 of his draft divided the 50 years post-mortem protection period into two different phases, one of 10 years and the other of 40 years which established a sort of legal licence suppressing the right of exclusivity granted to a specific editor. Zay's draft project was particularly opposed by the editor Bernard Grasset, who defended the right of the editor as a "creator of value", while many writers, including Jules Romains and the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres, Jean Vignaud, supported Zay's draft. The draft did not succeed, however, in being voted before the end of the legislature in 1939.