We have now completed our review of the crises which affected the Socialist Party in 1938 and 1946. All that remains is to compare their general features and to draw some conclusions from the comparison.

As we have seen, the crisis of 1938 occurred because of the reluctance of the SFIO's leaders to abandon the Popular Front or, more precisely, to end the alliance with the Radicals and have the party return to the role of qualified opposition which it had assumed before 1936. They took this position first because they wished to protect the reform legislation of 1936, which they feared might be repealed or watered down by a conservative government; secondly, because some of them, especially Léon Blum, were concerned about the deterioration of the international situation and the need to ensure an adequate measure of continuity and stability in French domestic politics; and finally, because they still hoped that the Popular Front could be given a new lease of life and a further programme of reforms carried through parliament. Their difficulty lay in justifying this policy to the party's ordinary members, who were still wedded to the view that, ideally, the party should avoid participation in the government of a bourgeois state and that, rather than compromise its principles by attempting to sustain an alliance which no longer served its purpose, it should retreat once more to the well-known ground of opposition.