Emmanuel Macron hopes the glamour of hosting the Olympics will distract the French from their divisive politics for a while, but the problems facing his centrist bloc have worsened following the snap general election he called to halt the advancing far right National Rally. The surprise winner in the election, the left-wing New Popular Front, is now the biggest group in the National Assembly. This hastily created alliance alludes to the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum that was elected in May 1936 – then, as now, France had a powerful, xenophobic, far right, deeply hostile to the values of the republic.
In a letter to the Irish Press, Andrée Sheehy Skeffington defended the new government against charges that it would implement an anti-Catholic programme that would result in the “spiritual disasters” that had befallen Bolshevik Russia and Spain. Blum, she noted, was not the “spokesman of the Communist Cause” but the leader of the Socialist Party. France’s far right previously planned a mass attack on the National Assembly, she pointed out, and the Popular Front demonstrated that socialists and liberals could unite to persuade millions of voters to elect an anti-fascist government. A French citizen, Sheehy Skeffington would not have been able to vote for the Popular Front – in 1936 women could not vote in France. When the parliament met for the first time after the election, feminists filled the public galleries and unfurled banners calling for women’s suffrage.
Owen Sheehy Skeffington, Andrée’s husband, wrote that Blum quickly introduced promised wage rises and paid holidays for workers. In his column in the current affairs magazine Ireland To-day, Owen observed that press coverage of France’s left-wing government was disproportionately alarmist. Much of the right-wing abuse directed at Blum arose from the fact that he was Jewish. While the far right in France posed an extremely serious challenge, Spain’s Popular Front government faced an army coup in July which became a civil war when Hitler and Mussolini immediately supplied aid to give the rebels a massive military advantage.
In a letter to the Irish Independent, Peadar O’Donnell, who had spent three weeks in Catalonia at the outset of the generals’ rebellion, wrote that the democratic government in Spain had challenged the landlords, the backbone of the mutinous officer caste. Gen Franco’s appeal to religious opinion, he stated, was merely a political tactic, in the same vein as Lloyd George’s appeal to save “Catholic Belgium” in 1914. Máirín Mitchell, the author of Storm Over Spain, informed Ireland To-Day readers that Spaniards had faced hunger, and sometimes starvation, in arid regions – “where the land is thirsty, the peasant is hungry”. Land reform was important for Popular Front supporters, along with tackling illiteracy. Kate O’Brien also wrote a book about Spain, Mary Lavelle. “I believe in the Spanish Republic and its constitution,” she asserted. It should prevail “for all our sakes”.
Hitler’s aggression continued, however, thanks to the appeasement of France and Spain. The Nazis’ systematic attack on Germany’s Jewish community during “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 – in the final weeks of the Spanish Republic – initiated a debate about aiding Jewish refugees. Francis Stuart, who later broadcast from Berlin during the second World War, wrote a letter to The Irish Times and argued that an appeal to fund “suffering foreigners” was ironic given the numbers living in poverty in Ireland. “True charity begins at home. In the parable of the Good Samaritan we learn that our neighbour is he who is nearest at hand.” Plans to help Jewish victims of Nazi violence were merely “gestures”, he contended, to “prove the humanitarianism” of Europe’s democracies. Letter writers took issue with Stuart. One wrote that sympathy for the unemployed, for example, should not “deter us from assisting those whose sufferings have been directly caused by the diabolical cruelty of their rulers”. Stuart confused the issue, another argued, by making a false antagonism between those who would help refugees and those who would lend a hand to the distressed on their doorstep. They were, frequently, “the same people”. A correspondent found Stuart’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan to be “very odd”. Most would read this parable as “teaching the lesson of the brotherhood of man, and our duty to help any who have been robbed and beaten and left by the wayside, without stopping first to ask whether or not they are Irish citizens”.
In an inspirational speech at the All-Ireland hurling final, GAA president Jarlath Burns reminded the xenophobes of today that they have no understanding of Irish history. Before he presented the Liam MacCarthy Cup to the Clare hurlers, he remembered the Irish diaspora whose ancestors had to flee famine and war. “We are thinking of you today.” He spoke for many when he said that “we thank the countries who took you in and gave you jobs”. Burns could have had Michael Considine in mind, a refugee from Spancil Hill in Co Clare who emigrated to the US in 1870 and wrote the famous ballad about an imagined return to his home place and his sweetheart. But he wakes up from his “vision” and realises that he is in California, “many miles from Spancil Hill”.