Fifty years ago the vicious manifestations of fascism spawned by the severity of economic depression created the conditions for the birth of Popular Front coalitions in both Spain and France. The dynamic of the electoral pacts which triumphed at the polls, in February and May 1936 respectively, lay in the pressing need to bar the way to political reaction in the domestic arena. Across two decades the left and labour in Europe had been in retreat. This was true irrespective of the level of socio-economic development, from heavily industrialized societies to argrarian economies. From Saxony to Seville, political and economic conservatism by the early 1930s, imbibing deeply of the new aggressive ideologies of fascism, was embarked upon an assault on workers' interests as ruthless and premeditated as the reduction of the red forty-eighters' barricades. An integral part of the left's strategy in both countries constituted a drive for social and economic improvements. By these the left sought to advance and entrench the bounds of a reformist consensus. In an age where fascist and quasi-fascist leaders claimed to oppose the excesses of incipient revolution, whilst in fact setting about the destruction both of social and economic reforms and the parliamentary systems via which they had been hard won, the reforming content of Popular Frontism signified the left's move onto the offensive as its best means of defence – even of self-preservation.

Yet the mass mobilization which characterized both sides of the political divide in 1930s Europe highlights the uniqueness of the Popular Front experience in both Spain and France.