Like other popular fronts of the interwar years, (such as those in Germany, Chile, and Spain), in France Le Front Populaire [The Popular Front] was formed in response to the imminent threat of a Fascist takeover of the national government. Socialists, Communists, and other left-wing parties deferred their disagreements and mobilized as an anti-fascist coalition. Triggering the mobilization in France were the riots of February 1934, which followed scandalous revelations of government corruption. The movement against Fascism peaked in May 1936 with the leftist victory in the national elections, which brought into power the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, whose mandate lasted for just over a year, expiring in June 1937. The Popular Front was an alliance of left-wing movements, including the communist French Section of the Communist International [SFIC – Section française de l’Internationale communiste, also known as the French Communist Party, (PCF – Parti communiste français )], the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International [SFIO – Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière], and the progressive Radical-Socialist Republican Party [PR – Parti radical, originally: PRRRS – Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste]. The “victorious” elections lead to the formation of a government first headed by SFIO leader Léon Blum and exclusively composed of republican and SFIO ministers.

The Popular Front period unfolded against a backdrop of sharp political polarization and collective fear. The impact of the Great Depression, the ascendancy of international Fascism, particularly after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and strategic shifts on the part of Stalin and the Communist International in favor of Popular Front alliances combined to produce a re-evaluation of the intellectual’s role in the struggle for political and social justice. Antifascist intellectuals provided the French coalition with moral authority, prestige, ideological legitimacy, a rhetoric of hope, and a cultural effervescence in the theaters, cinemas, universities, and artistic associations. Left-wing artists such as Romain Rolland participated in or supported experiments in popular education: worker universities, agitprop theater, social cinema, and the proliferation of Houses of Culture. The cultural goal of the Popular Front was to “open the gates of culture”. It coincided with the tendency of French cultural life from the early 1930s: artists and intellectuals—especially the younger generation—forsook academic careers in favor of the political engagement of writing mass-market journalism or direct “field work”. The Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires [AEAR – Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers], with its extensive and prestigious membership was at the forefront of this movement. The move of French intellectuals out of the ivory tower and into the street was closely followed by Hungarian left-wing intellectuals—among them Attila József, who regularly discussed the latest writings by André Malraux and André Gide with his circle of friends.

French Communists in the Popular Front must be credited with “greatly and permanently enhancing the state’s administrative and financial responsibility for cultural life”, but their view of culture was extremely conservative: it was high French culture, as the surrealists found during their brief alliance with the PCF. Under the Popular Front, the remarriage of social revolution and patriotic sentiment was an extremely complex phenomenon. The right had to a certain extent forfeited its nationalist claims by expressing sympathy with Fascism: there was a French phrase: “better Hitler than Léon Blum”. The Stalin-Laval mutual aid pact, moreover, had directly contributed to the change of policy on the part of the PCF, and to the ex-surrealist Louis Aragon’s new-found, nationalist enthusiasm for “Réalisme socialiste, Réalisme français” [Socialist realism, French Realism].

But it was not only French intellectuals and artists who formed the culture of the Popular Front period. Paris was not only the art capital of the world at this time, but also a safe haven for artists fleeing their respective countries (such as Germany, Italy, Hungary, etc.), who organized and participated in the cultural life of the Popular Front, as well as documenting its major events. One of the most important cultural events of the period was the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life [Exposition international des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie moderne], which was intended to be a people’s festival, a real celebration of international culture. Instead, it became a power demonstration for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as a cry for help by the Spanish Republic.

The utopian impetus of the Front Populaire was broken by the realities of the mid-1930s. The Front Populaire saw its adventurous plans for social reform increasingly frustrated by a policy of non-intervention in Spain, internal strikes, the devaluation of the franc and the necessity for rearmament. The coalition fell in June 1937; Blum was reelected again in March 1938, but was only Prime Minister for a couple of months—at least, long enough to ship heavy artillery and other much needed military equipment to the Spanish Republicans. April 1938 saw the reinstatement of the centrist Édouard Daladier as Prime Minister—and Europe on the brink of the Second World War. The Popular Front coalition itself collapsed definitively in November 1938, two months after the signing of the Munich Accords that made war between France and Germany inevitable.

After the end of the First World War, the parliamentary regime of the Third Republic became the subject of increasing criticism, which targeted both its institutional dysfunctions and its inability to deal with new economic problems. This criticism grew even stronger in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, which caused great problems for all French social classes. Among the most discontented were the middle classes, the main supporters of the parliamentary regime. The coalition of the Radical Party [Parti radical, originally: PRRRS – Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste] with the Socialists [SFIO – Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, French Section of the Workers’ International], fell on 7 February 1934 following riots organized by the far-right leagues (such as Action Française, Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité Française and others) the night before. The February 6 crisis started as an anti-parliamentarian street demonstration but culminated in a riot on the Place de la Concorde, near the seat of the French National Assembly. The police shot and killed 15 demonstrators. The Radical-Socialist Camille Chautemps’s government had been replaced by a government led by his popular rival Édouard Daladier in January after accusations of corruption against Chautemps’ government in the wake of the Stavisky Affair and other similar scandals.

The electoral pact known as the Cartel des Gauches [Left Cartel] originally consisted of the Socialists  [SFIO] and the Social Radicals [PRRS], who formed an alliance for the 1932 elections. The Communist Party [PCF] ran its own campaign, following the directives of the Comintern. They accused the Socialists of social-fascism and opposed the subsequent center-left governments. However, major differences between the SFIO and PRRRS prevented them from forming a joint cabinet, leaving France governed by a series of short-lived cabinets formed exclusively of the six Radical parties. The support from extreme-right paramilitaries for the National Unity government alarmed the left, which feared that plans to reform the constitution would lead to the parliamentary government being abandoned in favor of an authoritarian regime, as had recently occurred in other European democracies. Thus, antifascism became the cornerstone of the Popular Front, a policy that was backed by the Comintern after 1935. Maurice Thorez, secretary general of the Communist Party [PCF], was the first to call for the formation of a “Popular Front”; and the rapprochement of the two major left-wing parties (the SFIO and the PRRRS) to the Communists raised serious concerns about Soviet influence in France. By no coincidence: the PCF, along with Thorez was closely following the Stalinist agenda and even the Stalinist imagery, as can be seen on the election poster of the PCF, on which Thorez poses with his son and wife as an ideal image of the working class family. The Propaganda Center of the National Republicans launched a campaign against the “valets de Staline” [Stalin’s servants], and depicted Stalin as the “barbare d’Orient” [Eastern barbarian], from whom only a nationalist coalition could save France.

In February 1934, Paris returned to street violence, which was believed to be a thing of the past. For several weeks, public spaces saw clashes between the extra-parliamentary right and the anti-fascists. However, the violence gradually gave way to symbolic clashes and demonstrations where all sides tried to show their strength in order to avoid having to use it. This change accelerated after the ratification of the anti-fascist unity pact by the Socialists and the Communists (July 1934). It found its strongest expression in the powerful demonstration of July 14, 1935, which was organized at the behest of the three constituent parties of the Popular Front, and the most important workers’ unions, the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail, General Confederation of Labour] and the CGTU [Confédération générale du travail unitaire, United General Confederation of Labor] and dozens of associations. The event was covered by many photographers sympathetic to the cause of the Popular Front. Among them was Hungarian-born André Kertész [Kertész Andor], who had been living in Paris since 1925. He was one of the main collaborators of the magazine Vu, a review created by Lucien Vogel on the model of the photographic magazines of Germany in Weimar.

In April 1936, to the chagrin of the far-right leagues, the Front Populaire won the elections. As Socialist leader Léon Blum became Prime Minister of France and the first socialist to hold that office, he formed a cabinet that included Socialists (SFIO), Radicals (PRRRS), while the Communists (PCF) refused to take any cabinet positions but supported the government. For the first time, the cabinet included three women in minor roles, even though women were not able to vote at the time, (France extended suffrage to women only in 1944). Blum became not only the first Socialist but also the first Jew to serve as Prime Minister of France. As such, he was an object of particular hatred from anti-Semitic elements. The nationalist campaign against Soviet influence also accompanied the reign of the Front Populaire. In its short life, the Popular Front government passed important legislation, including the 40-hour week, 12 paid annual holidays for the workers, collective bargaining on wage claims, and the full nationalization of the armament and military aviation industries. This latter sweeping action had the unanticipated effect of disrupting the production of armaments at the wrong time, only three years away from the beginning of the war in September 1939. Blum also attempted to pass legislation extending the rights of the Arab population of Algeria, but this was blocked by “colons”, colonist representatives in the Chamber and Senate.

The Popular Front government’s first major celebratory event was the demonstration held on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Paris Commune. The Front Populaire found its natural predecessor in the Commune and in all those intellectuals that the Commune cherished. The commemoration of the Commune had a long tradition in the French workers’ movement. Therefore, it is no coincidence either that the commemorative demonstration organized by the Front Populaire turned out to be the first major workers’ demonstration after the “victorious elections”. More than half a million workers marched past the spot where the Communards (the workers who briefly took power in the Paris Commune of 1871) were shot, “carrying red banners and wearing red flowers...,” demanding workers’ rights (40-hour work week, collective contract, paid holiday) that the Front Populaire had promised during the campaign, but had thus far failed to implement. The next major official national event, on July 14, was held already after the national strike-movement of May-June, which concluded with the victory of the workers. The traditional national holiday of the Third Republic was turned into a three-day event, centered around the celebration of the French people, the French Army and France itself. Like many of the events of the Front Populaire period, these festivities were documented by photographers sympathetic to the cause of the Popular Front. Hungarian-born Robert Capa [Friedmann Endre Ernő] and Polish-born David Seymour, or “Chim” [Dawid Szymin] both arrived in Paris in the mid-1930s and became closely associated with left-wing intellectual circles, and thus became the documenters of the Popular Front movement. They also worked together later during the Spanish Civil War (among many other common endeavors, including the foundation of the Magnum Photo Agency).

David Seymour (Chim) also documented the monumental workers’ strikes of May-June 1936, which were the hallmark of the working class’ popular uprisings that ultimately underpinned the movement’s success in France. The Popular Front’s program promised important reforms such as the 40-hour week but concentrated only on the nationalization of war industries and the banks. The suspicion of the masses—and their doubts about the willingness of their own leaders to implement the program—grew after the elections. In the last week of May and the first two weeks of June, a mighty wave of sit-in strikes was begun by the French working class. Beginning with the metal workers in Paris, all corners of France and all layers of the working class joined in—around three million people (including many women) joined the strike. The sit-ins were often organized in an almost carnivalesque manner: with dances and musical performances. The strikes concluded with the victory of the workers and the Accords de Matignon [Matignon Agreements, named after the Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the head of the government, where it was signed]. Signed on June 7, 1936, between the Confédération générale de la production française [CGPF – General Confederation of French Production], the CGT trade union and the French state, the accords constitute the “Magna Carta of French Labor” that guaranteed all workers the legal right to strike and to unionize; they were granted paid vacations (12 days), a 40-hour week, and the possibility of collective bargaining.

Before the victory of the Front Populaire, the left-wing intelligentsia in France were already concerned with the question of leisure; they organized different activities for workers, experimenting in popular education: worker universities, agitprop theater, social cinema, and the proliferation of Houses of Culture (The Mouvement des Maisons de la culture [Houses of culture movement]), which they used in their struggle against Fascism. During the Popular Front period, different organizations were set up to organize leisure and free time, but the newly found freedom of the workers through the institution of paid holidays led primarily to a huge growth in mass tourism. Some workers decided to use their first paid vacation to participate in the Olímpiada Popular in Barcelona—a Workers’ Olympics intended to counterbalance the Summer Olympics in Berlin, organized by the Nazi regime. However, they soon had to return to France, since the Barcelona Games were canceled because of the outbreak of the Civil War.

Since its creation in 1932 through its integration to the Mouvement des Maisons de la culture [Houses of culture’s movement] in 1935 and until the dissolution of the latter in 1939, the Association des Écrivains et Artistes révolutionnaires [AEAR – Revolutionary Writers and Artists’ Association] was one of the most significant literary and art platforms of the Popular Front. It was founded by communist intellectuals and fellow travelers according to Soviet directives as the French section of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, established by the Comintern in the Soviet Union in 1930. The AEAR was open to all left-wing forces in order to fight against war and Fascism on the cultural front. The manifesto of the AEAR, published in March 1932 in the newspaper L’Humanité, lays out the strategy to carry on this struggle. It had a vast membership that included, among others, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and André Gide. At the beginning, André Breton was also part of the organization, but left the group in 1933. Together with the Fédération Musicale Populaire (FMP), the organization played a key role in introducing Soviet music to France. Among other activities, the AEAR published the journal Commune. Commune was strongly involved in the mobilization of French intellectuals in favor of the Spanish Republic.

From the beginning of the 1930s, writer André Malraux campaigned against Fascism and Nazism. He delivered a speech at the first meeting of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires [AEAR – Revolutionary Writers and Artists’ Association], chaired by André Gide. Together with Gide, he traveled to Germany in January 1934 on behalf of the French Communist Party (PCF) to deliver a petition demanding the release of Dimitrov, accused of complicity in the Reichstag fire. Nevertheless, the two writers were received neither by Hitler, nor by Goebbels. In March 1934, Malraux joined the newly formed Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes [Monitoring Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals] and befriended the Soviet writer and journalist and writer Ilya Ehrenburg, with whom he traveled to the Soviet Union to attend the First Congress of Soviet Writers. At the congress, after hearing the exposés on Socialist Realism by Andrei Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky, Malraux delivered a speech in which he paid homage to the emancipation of the proletariat in the USSR, but expressed his fear that the principles of Socialist Realism would stifle literary creation. In June 1935, he was, along with André Gide, the most prominent French participant at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces in Spain, serving in and helping to organize the small Spanish Republican Air Force. Malraux’s participation in events such as the Spanish Civil War, and his political career after the war (he was France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs during de Gaulle’s presidency between 1959 and 1969) distracted attention from his important literary achievements and theoretical work.

Louis Aragon is simultaneously known as a key figure in the surrealist movement, and as a major socialist writer. He first rose to prominence as a leading figure in the Dada movement of the early 1920s, and in 1924, he became a founding member of surrealism, with André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Around the same time, Aragon became a fellow traveler of the French Communist Party (PCF) along with several other surrealists, and joined the Party in January 1927. This much-debated decision of the five leading surrealists, was a logical step for Aragon. He was less end less interested in the hidden movements of the mind and more and more obsessed with the hidden movements of society. In 1930 Aragon was sent to the Soviet Union by the PCF, to the Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov. On his return he published the poem Front rouge [Red Front], an ode to the USSR and to Marxism-Leninism. In another poem from this period, Feu sur Léon Blum [Fire on Leon Blum] he denounced the surrealist aesthetic and the reformists, which led not only to a break with his friend André Breton and the surrealists, but also to an official charge of incitement to murder. His work as a novelist and critic focused on exploring the theory and practice of Socialist Realism. Like Maxim Gorky, Aragon took the novel as his major vehicle. “The novel”, he argued, “is a machine invented by man for the apprehension of reality in all its complexity”. Without abandoning poetry, he began to write the monumental series of novels to which he gave the overall title Le Monde réel [The Real World]; the first volume appeared in 1934. While he became a major advocate of Socialist Realism, his interest in Marxism was not only rooted in literary considerations: Aragon began to write for the party’s newspaper, L’Humanité, and he would remain a party member for the rest of his life; his hardline attitude only faltered after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Apart from working as a journalist for L’Humanité, Louis Aragon also became one of the editors of the journal Commune, published by the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires [Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. As the foremost advocate of socialist realism in France, he took part in many debates about the social function of art, the so-called La Querelle de Réalisme [Dispute over Realism] in 1935–1936 being one of them. During the Second World War he joined the Resistance, both through literary activities and as an actual organizer of Resistance acts. After the Liberation, Aragon became one of the leading Communist intellectuals, assuming political responsibilities in the Comité national des écrivains [National Committee of Writers], and was elected, in 1950, to the central committee of the PCF. Through the years, he had been kept informed of Stalinist repression by his Russian-born wife, the poet Elsa Triolet, and so his political line evolved. As chief editor of the literary supplement of L’Humanité, the Les Lettres françaises, in the 1960s Aragon became engaged in a struggle against Stalinism and its consequences in Eastern Europe.

In 1935, Louis Aragon gave a course of lectures at the Maison de la Culture, published under the title Pour un Réalisme Socialiste [For a Socialist Realism]. Here he appropriated the Stalinist terms “Socialist Realism” and “engineers of the soul” and gave an account of his conversion from surrealism to Communism, following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1930. Following Aragon’s exposé of 1935, three debates were held at the initiative of the Communist Party, and two published in 1936 as La Querelle de Réalisme [Dispute over Realism]. In the context of the Front Populaire, the theme of realism was exploited in many different ways by plastic artists who emphasized, more than the precise content of the notion, the necessity of not being absent from the struggles of the present, of contributing to a policy of spreading and educating the people. The Party failed, however, in its attempt to adapt the principles of a Communist aesthetic in France, in spite of Aragon’s talent for propaganda and of the interpretation he gave of a “French realism”. Most artists rejected any united theory of creation, any attempt at subordinating art to a political concept, following the example of Fernand Léger, advocate of a “new realism,” reconciling the people with modern art.

The so-called Querelle du réalisme [Dispute over Realism] took anti-Fascism as a point of departure and examined the question of the reconciliation of realism and contemporary artistic practice in order to speak to, and reflect, the views of the masses. Senior artists such as Fernand Léger and Jacques Lipchitz participated, but the debates and accompanying exhibitions signaled the emergence of a generation of younger artists including Boris Taslitzky, Edouard Pignon and André Fougeron. Taslitzky exhibited the painting Commémoration de la Commune au cimetière du Père Lachaise en 1935 [Commemoration of the Commune of Paris at the Père Lachaise in 1935] at the Masion de la Culture, which recorded the annual workers’ march to the cemetery, and this was something of a companion piece to Les Grèves de juin 1936 [The Strikes of June 1936]. Both paintings announced his ambitions to make large scale works on proletarian themes. The sketch for The Strikes of June 1936 (in the Tate collection) shows the efficacy of a carefully focused realism and reflects Taslitzky’s admiration for the nineteenth-century realist paintings he studied at the Louvre. The finished canvas survived only until the German occupation of Paris, when it was destroyed by Nazis ransacking his studio.

From the 1920s on, Fernand Léger endeavored to find a satisfactory resolution of the conflict between his mastery of cubist high art and his desire that art be put to the service of all men, not just of collectors, connoisseurs, and the culturally privileged. The crux of this dilemma appeared during the so-called Querelle du réalisme [Dispute over Realism], where Léger opposed Aragon, stating that the greatest merit any social system can possess is to grant freedom to the creative individual. Unlike Aragon, Léger did not believe in a dogmatic Socialist Realism, instead, he promoted a “new realism”, which is based “dans la vie moderne même” [on modern life itself], on the influence of geometric, machine-produced products. “Speaking as an artist,” he encouraged people to liberate themselves socially and to seek cultural enlightenment, adding that “you will find us [the artists] at the end of the road to organize this hard-won leisure.” But he also added: “We [the artists] are present. The future belongs to you [the people].” In his efforts to make contemporary art more democratic and comprehensible to all viewers without resorting to the contemporary preference for Social Realism, and seeing the inherently social function of architecture, Léger began to embark on various collaborations with architects—for instance with Le Corbusier. He was calling for a rebirth of mural art: that of public buildings, such as stadiums, etc., which he considered the most democratic approach to culture. Léger joined the French Communist Party (PCF) on his return from the United States (where he lived during the war) in 1945. But again, as an internationally renowned artist of an older generation, he continued to work in his characteristic style, never broaching any “réalisme socialiste”.

Paris was one of the main centers for German exiles who sought refuge there from 1933. The city offered many opportunities for German-speaking artists to be active. In exile in Paris, the artists created a German-speaking cultural landscape. German exile newspapers and magazines such as the Pariser Tageblatt (later Pariser Tageszeitung) or the Freie Kunst und Literatur [Free Art and Literature] offered emigrants opportunities for publication. On the first anniversary of the book burnings, on May 10, 1933, the Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek [German Freedom Library] began collecting books that had been banned and burned in Germany. In addition, German exiles founded cultural associations in Paris, such as the Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller [SDS, Association for the Protection of German Writers] or the Kollektiv deutscher Künstler [KdK – Collective of German Artists]. (Similar organizations worked elsewhere in Europe, like the Oskar Kokoschka Bund in Prague, and the Free German League of Culture in London.) The founding of the Kollektiv deutscher Künstler by the painters Heinz Lohmar and Otto Freundlich—with further artist colleagues—took place later, in autumn 1935. The KdK organized film screenings and in 1935–36 successfully put together a rich program of public discussions focusing on current questions involving art in society, yet it does not seem to have been able to mount a collective exhibition. At the beginning of 1937 the KdK published Die Mappe, a selection of reproductions of works produced in exile by Max Ernst, Lohmar and others. The intention was that this would be the first issue of an art review, but no further issues appeared. The Kollektiv deutscher Künstler folded in Spring 1937, together with the Front Populaire. It was followed by the Deutscher Künstlerbund [DKb – German Artists’ Association] in September, which later renamed itself the Freier Künstlerbund [FKb – Free Artists’ Association] in May 1938. The FKb succeeded in presenting works by well-known emigrant artists to a broad public in the exhibition Freie deutsche Kunst [Free German Art] in November 1938, which was intended and perceived as a counter-exhibition to the contemporary Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition in Germany.

The International Exhibition [Exposition international des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie moderne], which opened in Paris in May 1937, was one of the most important cultural events of the Popular Front period. The massive spectacle was presented as a celebration of human achievement, but instead, it exposed the tensions and contradictions of the gloomy decade that ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. The two features that remained embedded in collective memory from this mega-event were the grim pavilions of Germany and the Soviet Union facing each other—a suggestive symbol of precarious international accord; and the Spanish Pavilion, housing Picasso’s Guernica, of the Spanish government then fighting for its life against the Nazi-backed rebellion of Franco. These images of aggression and resistance seemed to challenge the fact that the exhibition was dedicated to peace. The original purpose of the International Exhibition was to shore up Europe’s faith in civilization—the question of whose civilization was an entirely different matter.
          In the introduction to the exhibition’s catalog, Edmond Labbé, its chief commissioner wrote: “In a world on which the menace of the future weighs heavily, it has seemed for some time that civilization had begun to lose faith in itself, in its values, energies and duties. A kind of discouragement and lassitude has overrun people’s spirits, undermining the very basis of hope. And now here is the Exhibition, springing up suddenly, with a supreme will and momentum, rising to the sky like a great cry of confidence and order from the whole of humanity.” These dreams about a humanist awakening were severely crushed; and the Popular Front government also collapsed shortly after the exhibition opened.

The Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux [The Pavilion of the New Times], one of the most important at the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, aimed to show how new architecture is placed at the disposal of the French people to improve their daily life. In 1932, Le Corbusier heard the announcement of the proposed Expo and immediately issued an ambitious counter proposal, The International Exhibition of Modern Dwelling: the idea for a utopian city complex would have required the demolition of a vast part of historical Paris. When funding for his project failed to materialize, he offered several scaled down versions, none of which attracted the necessary funding. After months of jockeying for a more lasting edifice and a bigger budget, Le Corbusier finally accepted his partner Pierre Jenneret’s more realistic proposal for a large building with canvas walls. Inside would be what Le Corbusier called “une grand livre des images” [a big book of images]—pictures, plans, blueprints, and texts that promoted the architect’s vision of the utopian city of the future. Inside the pavilion, stands offered the opportunity to discover analyses of the “Functional City” intended to adapt to the current needs of the French while providing them with comfort and modernity.
During the so-called La Querelle de Réalisme [Dispute over Realism] Le Corbusier—as a painter—argued for an abstract, non-figurative position, more in keeping with the facts of contemporary materials, fabrication techniques, and the like. As he said, “Au sein de la production, I’art, dénommé abstrait, est concret. Le réalisme est au- dedans”. [Within the production, abstract art is concrete. Realism is within.” This inherent realism characterized the culture of the Popular Front period, where free artistic expression was coupled with a deep understanding of and preoccupation with the realities of everyday life.