3 Crisis and Collapse: The People’s Party in the Clash of Competing Conceptions of Mass Politics

Despite passionate pleas for the value of the people’s party in times of growing polarization and violence, party leaders of the Catholic and Socialist mass parties mostly continued to cherish their original identities and traditions. Especially under pressure it seemed as if they resorted to their early roots: defending the interests of their core supporters. This not only damaged the prospects of broader social coalitions that could foster a climate of social reconciliation. It also had substantial consequences for the ability of parties to compromise and govern with opposing parties. Fragile pragmatic alliances between Socialists and Catholics were replaced by antagonisms, which became bigger as the decade proceeded and government instability became endemic. The governments in Weimar Germany and Austria seldom lasted longer than a year, while the final administrations of liberal Italy had a lifetime of only several months. France hardly did better. Especially after the economic crisis in the late 1920s, the country suffered ‘extreme governmental instability’.¹ One administration in Paris even fell after barely a week.

After the previous chapter discussed the ability of parties to rally people from below and the inability to do so in a way that moved beyond their traditional support base of workers and Catholics, this chapter turns first to the other aspect in which Interwar mass parties failed to transform into people’s parties: seeing opponents as democratic equals rather than existential adversaries, striking difficult compromises with them, and taking on government responsibility. This inability to transform parties in the direction of compromise and collaboration was clear from the start, especially in Italy. But it became more pressing and widespread towards the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, when a deepening economic crisis and growing geopolitical tensions pitted parties against each other and raised the (electoral) costs of compromise further still. This boosted feelings of democratic fatigue, even among people and groups who had first, however reluctantly, supported the new democratic order. The willingness to compromise waned further when democracy was put most severely to the test, as instances of democratic collapse in Italy, Austria, and Germany testify. The people’s party seemed to have lost in a clash between competing conceptions of mass politics, in which either the mass party model (possibly allied in a Popular Front to defend democracy), or the authoritarian version of it in the guise of the Nazi and Fascist parties had brighter prospects.

The reluctance of parties to commit fully to a governing role in Interwar Europe counted especially for the Socialist parties. Most of them preferred ideological purity over the compromises inherent to government. The French Socialist leader Léon Blum captured the ambivalent feelings on governing of many Socialists inside and outside France. Blum was the son of a well-off Parisian entrepreneur and first made his name as a scholar and writer before, at the age of almost 50, he emerged at the top of his party. Blum always saw himself, in his own words, as a ‘referee’ between the reformist and revolutionary wings of the French Socialists.² He united both in his own person, acting as editor-in-chief of the party’s newspaper that directly spoke to militants, and as chair of the parliamentary group. Blum wanted at all costs to avoid another rift in party after the split with the Communists had cost the Socialists most of their funds, members, and officials.

This careful balancing act between revolution and moderation was a continuing challenge for Blum, especially when it came to the SFIO’s willingness to govern. Blum argued under what conditions Socialist participation in a government coalition was justified, making a distinction between the ‘conquest’ of power and the ‘exercise’ of power. The conquest of power was for Blum ‘revolutionary’, a ‘total take-over of power’ that ‘preceded the transformation of the regime of property’, or, in other words, the abolition of capitalism. It could only be based on a Socialist majority in parliament. But as such a situation was extremely unlikely, he also presented an alternative: the ‘exercise of power’. This was a strictly ‘parliamentary action’ with reforms inside capitalism rather than its abolition as their aim.³ But the SFIO would only engage in the ‘exercise’ of power if it was the largest party in a coalition. So while Blum claimed to explain when Socialist participation in government was justified, he actually spelled out mostly reasons not to govern. This should preserve the SFIO’s claim that they, rather than the Communists, were the only true working-class party of France. Throughout the 1920s, the SFIO rebuffed various offers of cabinet participation by the Radical Party, because allying with bourgeois parties was, in the words of Blum’s fellow leader Paul Faure, like ‘wasting your last bullet in a battle that would not even be yours and in which socialism would be discredited’.⁴

The French Socialist Party’s reluctance to govern with so-called bourgeois parties was emblematic for other major Socialist parties. They all adopted their own version of the ‘Blum doctrine’. The German Socialists showed this reluctance when they referred to Socialist participation in government after 1927 as merely a ‘tactical decision’. They were only willing to join the government if ‘its support among the public and in the Reichstag gives assurance that it will be able to achieve specified goals which are in the interest of the working class’.⁵ Similarly, the Austrian Socialist Party harboured growing misgivings about governing with the Catholics. Renner warned his party comrades that ‘this is absolutely not the moment to enter the government’, because ‘we will not allow that the blame for the total moral, political and economic collapse will be put on the shoulders of the social democrats’.⁶

The reluctance of parties to embrace taking on governmental responsibility reflected their reluctance to accept structural compromises. And because especially willingness to compromise was so vital for the viability of democracy, this was a major concern of contemporary observers. One of these observers was Friedrich von Wieser, a former Austrian Finance Minister, and the éminence grise of the famous Viennese school of economics. His hometown Vienna provided arguably a perfect window on the diverging fortunes of democracy in Europe. The former grandiose metropolis of the multinational Habsburg empire was reduced to the status of capital of a juvenile and increasingly flagging republic. The increasingly violent polarization between Socialists and Catholics and its shaky parliamentary institutions were perhaps emblematic for the situation in Italy before 1922, and for contemporary Germany, and, to some extent, France as well. But, Von Wieser noted, it contrasted sharply with the more muted political climate in the Low Countries or Scandinavia. Von Wieser concluded that this contrast had little to do with formal rules of the game alone. With the notable exception of Britain, almost all of Europe lived under parliamentary government with universal (male) suffrage with an electoral system of proportional representation. So, he argued, the explanation for the difference in democratic stability lay not in the rules of the game, but in the behaviour of its players: political parties. In many unstable democracies, he noticed, ‘leaders and masses are not sufficiently mature to build true “state parties”. They have not overcome the type of the interest party.’⁷

The concern for the absence of parties that somehow managed to overcome their pre-1914 traditions as anti-system forces was broadly shared among political observers in the 1920s. They deplored the mass party that saw itself as the spokesperson of a narrowly defined group of people with the same religion or social class and they juxtaposed it with the ‘state party’ that allegedly governed with the best interest of the nation at large at heart. For some, like Von Wieser, this sentiment revealed a certain nostalgia for pre-1914 politics in which the power of the state was controlled by a small elite, a ‘state party’, indeed. This guaranteed governmental stability. Even though in the age of mass democracy, an elitist ‘state party’ was obsolete, its quality of providing government stability should somehow be preserved. Even if they did not use the term people’s party, this implied that the party-state required parties that governed democracy in a cohesive way by striking deals with opponents were badly needed to turn the tide.

One of the most articulate advocates of this view was still Preuß. Preuß was widely considered the father of the Weimar constitution and he served as interior minister during the German revolution. After 1919, he retired from the political frontline and worked as a legal scholar. He remained, however firmly committed to the defence of the constitution, and was active for the same Reichsbanner organization to which Sollmann also rallied. Preuß continued to write about politics and to air his concerns about the problems of the Weimar republic. He blamed parties for failing to live up to the requirements that mass democracy put on them. He also held the pre-1914 mass party tradition responsible for this. Preuß argued that regimes before the War might have been far from democratic, but they provided governmental stability. Mass parties were relegated to opposition and could therefore evade responsibility; they had ‘influence without responsibility’.⁸ They could exist just ‘for their own sake’, because ‘in the authoritarian regime, the opposition by matter of principle cannot govern’.⁹ He blamed the instability of the Weimar republic on the fact that parties failed to overcome this attitude. But his analysis could be applied much more widely. It counted for the Socialist and to a lesser extent Catholic parties of Germany and Austria. But it is easy to see that it also counted for countries without an authoritarian regime before 1914, such as Italy or France. Here, too, the mass parties failed to live up to the expectations which the new system put on them, and this was problematic because as ‘the parliamentary system is completely focused on political parties, political parties must be completely focused on parliamentary government. They are no longer there for the sake of themselves, but only instruments to build a parliamentary government’, Preuß concluded.¹⁰

The frustration of Preuß with the failure of parties to provide cohesive government and to meet the requirements of the party-state reflected comments of contemporaries elsewhere. Just before the Fascist March on Rome, Ambrosini also blamed the problems of the party-state in Italy on the failure of Socialist and Catholic parties to build a stable government despite their recent successful efforts to make parties the centrepiece of the democratic order. He remarked that ‘the public and the same politicians who voted for the [electoral] reform did not understand its consequences’, namely that the postwar reforms ‘do not represent only a change of electoral procedure, but a profound innovation of the concept of political representation and the functioning of the parliamentary regime…political parties become, or tend to become, the core of political and parliamentary life’.¹¹

There were plenty of outright and outspoken critics of the new democratic order, who often had authoritarian ambitions. But dissatisfaction with democracy seeped in more widely. Also among Catholic and Socialist politicians their traditional ambiguity about the ultimate value of parliamentary democracy resurfaced now that its problems became much more prevalent, and the optimism of the immediate postwar era quickly evaporated. This ambiguity towards parliamentary institutions thereby proved to be another pre-war tradition that was hard to erase, and further complicated the forging of compromises for parties within the framework of increasingly feeble parliamentary institutions.

This counted certainly for some prominent Socialists. The French Socialists, and their general secretary Paul Faure in particular, displayed a profound dislike for the rules and institutions of parliament. At every congress, party members pointed critically to the danger of compromising with the ‘system’ and despised the way political elites were allegedly detached from ordinary citizens.¹² They even adopted a motion that stated that any rapprochement with the government ‘will not have the slightest success. The SFIO will remain a party of the class struggle and of opposition’.¹³ The SPD, in turn, on the one hand presented itself as the guardian of the Weimar constitution and displayed its dislike of any revolutionary pretensions (Ebert hated revolution ‘like sin’, he once admitted and very much saw himself as the personification of the Grand Coalition that had brought the Weimar Republic to life).¹⁴ But on the other hand, the tendency of leading SPD politicians to distinguish between ‘real’ and mere ‘bourgeois’ democracy, as they had done before 1914, persisted. They still emphasized that ‘democracy belongs historically and sociologically to the working class’.¹⁵ Along the same lines, the Austrian Socialists played a semantic game on their commitment to the same parliamentary institutions that they had designed only a few years before. Echoing the SPD, they stated that ‘we aspire to take control of the republic, not with the aim of overcoming democracy, but with the aim of making democracy into the service of the working-class’. Meeting in Linz in 1926 for their annual party congress, the party adopted a new programme that declared that ‘the history of the democratic republic is the history of a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and working class over the control of the republic’. Collaboration between the two was impossible, ‘because of the contradictions of capitalism’. If its bourgeois enemies thwarted the construction of a socialist society after a Socialist election victory, the party would launch a ‘counter revolution’ as it would then be evident that ‘the working class can only conquer the state by means of a civil war’.¹⁶ The Socialists soon prepared for this. While the Christian Socials reinforced ties with the paramilitary Heimwehr movement, the Socialist defence organization was ‘militarized’ into a paramilitary unit and soon numbered almost 100,000 members.¹⁷ They all had the duty to ‘protect the party and other proletarian organizations’. In times of danger, they should ‘march as quickly as possible’ to the several arms depots that the league possessed, as the instructions for its members stated.¹⁸

Such ambiguity about the ultimate value of parliamentary institutions fed reluctance towards seeking compromises with opposing parties. As democracy, in this view, centred on the ability of parties to mobilize their supporters and strengthen their sense of social or cultural identity, compromise was seen as a sign of weakness. This conviction was prevalent among Socialists in Germany and Italy, also when their democracies were already on the brink (or over it). Benito Mussolini became prime minister in October 1922 at the head of a coalition between Liberals, Nationalists, Fascists, and two PPI-ministers who joined on a personal title. But because PPI was deeply divided and the Catholics and the PSI still held a parliamentary majority between them, especially Turati argued that the PSI should ally with the PPI to try and oust Mussolini.¹⁹ Turati talked about ‘a common ground not just of defence but of constructive action of democratic energies’ that PPI and Socialist politicians shared and that they should use to contest Mussolini.²⁰ While as the party’s founder Turati’s voice still carried weight, most of the PSI could not overcome its traditional rejection of governing in a bourgeois setting. They believed that greater working-class resilience was the best response to fascism. The leader of the PSI accused Turati of betraying the working class by proposing to govern with the Catholics, while ‘we, rather than ceasing to be socialists, continue to be ourselves…. Collaboration would change us into a social democratic party. Joining the government means being caught in the bourgeois net.’²¹ Turati and his followers were expelled from the PSI.

The situation in which the SPD had to decide how to reconcile its ultimate commitment to the working-class with taking government responsibility in a time when the Nazis mobilized against democracy was arguably even more difficult. Suffering a trauma after its punishment at the polls in 1920, the SPD had promised only to return to government if it could start an ambitious social reform programme. But when the SPD emerged victorious at the 1928 elections the window for such a programme had already closed. The Communists and Nazis made inroads at the elections resulting in a deeply divided parliament. The SPD’s only option was a so-called Grand Coalition with moderate liberals and the Centre Party. Amid the economic slump of the late 1920s, the SPD’s coalition partners then proposed cuts in the duration and coverage of a landmark unemployment insurance which had only recently been adopted. This had repercussions inside the SPD too, precisely because with soaring unemployment, social security was for them more badly needed than ever. This pitted Socialists who emphasized government responsibility against those who called upon the party to remain faithful to its working-class roots and ideals.²² Ever more Socialists argued that only by returning to their roots could the SPD turn the tide, regain popular support, and stem the rise of Nazism. The editor of the SPD-magazine Vorwärts wrote that if the SPD faced the choice between taking government responsibility or staying true its working-class constituency ‘our decision would be in no doubt. The party would have to act on the principle that “party and government are two, but party and trade union movement are one and indivisible”’.²³ Such views became stronger once the SPD felt constrained to support, or ‘tolerate’ a government led by Centre Party-politician Heinrich Brüning as the only alternative was a government that included the Nazis. One influential voice asserted that the only way to ‘overcoming the Nazis and the fascist danger [is] by a radical alteration of the previous course of the Party. This would mean a policy which pays no heed to coalitions, but campaigns directly for the proletarian demands, as the only means to overcome the crisis and unite the masses around the banner of Social Democracy.’²⁴

The same dynamic of moving away from the centre was visible among Catholic politicians. Although he had previously rejected the idea, Sturzo considered that some form of collaboration between PPI and PSI might be needed to avoid a Fascist grasp of power. He met regularly with Turati over the course of the summer of 1922 to explore such opportunities. Sturzo found some support for his views inside the PPI, for instance with his eventual successor Alcide de Gasperi, who argued that ‘no one could deny that the entrance of a party as numerous and strong as the Socialists in constitutional life would be of great historical importance…and would make the work of reconstruction easier’.²⁵ However, the majority of the party moved in the other direction, towards opening up to the possibility of some form of understanding with Mussolini’s movement. Moreover, the Vatican also moved quickly against any such initiatives, prohibiting the local clergy from being active as militants for the party.²⁶ By the autumn of 1922, the right wing of the PPI supported the idea of ending the perpetual government instability by supporting a coalition government led by Mussolini. Sturzo appealed to his party fellows to ‘untie’ themselves from Mussolini, as he called it, before it was too late. He denounced the Fascist regime with its ‘absolute conception of the deification of the nation and the state’.²⁷ But this was to no avail. Mussolini’s government moved forward with the introduction of an electoral law that should enable him to perpetuate his rule. In the crucial vote, most PPI MPs abstained while others voted in favour. Sturzo was forced to resign as party leader.

The shifting stance of the PPI showed that the growing suspicion to parliamentary democracy and deeply seated anti-Marxism also lived among those who had actively contributed to the installation of democratic institutions. The Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel was a scholar and priest who turned to politics in the final days of the First World War and played an important role in the transition from empire to republic as minister in Renner’s first government. After the break between Christian Socials and Socialists in 1920, he dominated Austrian politics of the decade, as the undisputed leader of the Christian Social Party and long-time Chancellor. But his affection for democracy did not grow on him during his time in office. When the Austrian republic celebrated its tenth birthday, Seipel found that there was little reason for celebration. He argued that people cherished too high expectations of democracy in 1918 as they projected ‘whatever possible hopes on the word democracy in our state’. It was now clear that all that remained was ‘disenchantment’. As with other political Catholics, criticism on political parties occupied a prominent place in his explanations for this sudden change of sentiment. He even argued that popular dissatisfaction with democracy would be greater ‘the stronger the position of parties in a democracy is’.²⁸ Party leaders and functionaries were not directly responsible to the people and cared for their own interests. This counted in particular ‘when the party is not actually a party, but an economic organization or representation of a class’.²⁹

Thus, the Christian Social Party went increasingly in authoritarian directions, fuelled by the polarization with the Socialists. Seipel’s successor and former party fellow Engelbert Dollfuss made use of the political deadlock to suspend parliament and prepare a new constitution which should turn Austria into an authoritarian Catholic state where elected representatives were replaced by cultural, religious, and economic representatives. Dollfuss’s assault on the constitution was the backdrop of the start of the short Austrian Civil War between Socialists and Catholics.³⁰ After securing victory, Dollfuss’s government banned his competitors, executed leading Socialists, and imprisoned others, including Kreisky and Renner.³¹ He then continued with his controversial plans for a new constitution, which was adopted symbolically on the 1st of May 1934. He thereby not only challenged the Socialist monopoly on the meaning of Labour Day, but also made the ratification coincide with a new concordat between Vienna and the Pope to give a Catholic halo to his regime.

In this way, anti-Marxism, lingering misgivings regarding parliamentarianism, and anti-party sentiments formed a toxic cocktail on which many political Catholics now projected authoritarian solutions.³² This was also visible with many Centre Party politicians, among whom feelings of dissatisfaction with the Weimar republic and everything it stood for grew quickly after the failure of the Grand Coalition with the SPD. One prominent Centre Party politician remarked that year that ‘everyone feels the weakness and impotence of our system of government. I have had the opinion for a long time that the parliament is not able to solve our domestic problems. If it were possible to have a dictatorship for ten years, I would wish for it.’³³ After 1930, the Centre Party practically governed alone, first with Brüning, who aimed for revision of the constitution in an authoritarian direction and a sharp reduction of state spending.³⁴ He increasingly sought solutions for the problems of government outside parliament, most of all in the presidential emergency powers that the constitution provided for. Many conservative politicians, inside and outside the Centre Party, believed they could end the factious politics and harness Hitler by bringing him into government. This would also provide a bulwark against the perceived assertiveness of the Socialists and Communists, whom they feared might soon join forces now that the SPD veered further to the left. Centre Party leader Kaas stated that ‘there are 12 million Germans in the Right-wing opposition and 13.5 in the Left. The Left could unify at any moment, and it is going to be a long, cold winter. The NSDAP must be brought into government now.’³⁵ This then happened in January 1933, and just as the PPI before, the Centre Party was with a mix of bullying and false promises lured to support Hitler’s assault on the constitution.

Of course, the reluctance of Socialists and Catholics to work together to defend democratic institutions was not the only cause of the democratic breakdown in Italy, Austria, or Germany. Many other factors, both more short-term and long-term, both domestic and international, were at play. And there were many other actors who bore responsibility, in the first place, of course, the Fascists and Nazis whose attack on democratic institutions inside parliament and on the streets was ruthless. But the inability of the Socialists and Catholics to forge structural compromises played a large role too. Instead of moving to the centre, mass parties went further to the margins, feeding the growing polarization and governmental instability which preceded the Fascist March on Rome, Dollfuss’s assault on the republican constitution, or Hitler’s take-over of power. As such, this tendency of the Catholic and Socialist mass parties towards mutual distrust, reluctance to embrace government responsibility, and aversion to compromise revealed longer traditions suspicious of parliamentary democracy and a narrow conception of the role of parties in the political process which prioritized ideological purity over compromise.

The take-over by Mussolini in Italy was initially regarded as an exception that could be ignored (of course not for far-right groups willing to emulate his March on Rome elsewhere).³⁶ But by the time democracy collapsed in Germany and Austria, there was growing alarm among politicians in other Western European countries that the destruction of democracy there might be replicated elsewhere. Mass politics seemed to take the shape of a virulent and increasingly violent clash between mass parties in their either class-based or authoritarian-nationalist fashion, with the latter now having the upper hand. In any case, in this clash, the model of the people’s party seemed to be losing out, squeezed by more radical alternatives.

In the face of the rise of fascism and Nazism Catholic and Socialist Party leaders outside Germany, Italy, and Austria reconsidered their strategies. Political Catholics in Belgium and the Netherlands had initially veered to the right as a response to the economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s. But ultimately, and in contrast to the Centre Party, they confirmed their commitment to parliamentary institutions. In Belgium, after some of those were initially tempted by far-right groups such as the Rexists, they declared that the Catholic party there had ‘never been a confessional party. Its mission is not of a religious, but a political character’.³⁷ The Roman Catholic State Party in the Netherlands increasingly stressed that it was concerned with public welfare and well-being and the general interest, rather than only with Catholic rights and slowly opened up to collaboration with the Socialist Party.

The left also debated intensely how to confront and stop the rise of authoritarian regimes across Europe. Their new strategy pointed not in the direction of broader-based people’s parties but confirmed the model of the mass party deeply rooted in the working classes. However, in contrast to before, they did realize that democracy required collaboration between different classes—and therefore between opposing parties—to be sustained and defended in the form of what was called a Popular Front. It was particularly prominent in France and Spain, fuelled there by the fear of the quick take-over of power by Hitler but also stimulated by polarization in Paris and Madrid itself. In Spain, left- and right-wing coalitions alternated quickly after the adoption of a democratic constitution in 1931. But while the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)’s agenda of far-reaching social reforms and anti-clerical measures raised high expectations among workers and peasants, it alienated more moderate republican forces such as those belonging to the Radical Party.³⁸ The right-wing coalition turned back the clock on reforms after winning elections in 1934, showing how little consensus there existed among the country’s political elites in an atmosphere of growing strikes and violence. In France, the extra-parliamentary far-right grew increasingly bold, most visible in the rise of colonel François de la Rocque and his Croix-de-Feu movement of war veterans. The fears for such movements reached new heights in February 1934, when nationalist groups launched a violent assault on parliament leading to lethal clashes with the police.

The events in both countries of 1934 were then the trigger for the left to rethink its strategy. The construction of Popular Fronts not only with Socialists, but also with previously despised ‘bourgeois’ parties became the official line of the Communist International, resulting in Popular Front coalitions in Spain and France of Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties. The idea that the Popular Front could be the answer to the crisis of democracy witnessed a moment of hope with their election victories in Spain and France and the formation of Popular Front governments. France had its first Socialist prime minister, as Blum forged a coalition with the Radicals that could count on support of the PCF in parliament. His government is most of all remembered for an impressive set of social reforms which introduced the forty-hour work week, paid holidays, and a system of wage negotiations that gave trade unions recognition and more power (also to curb a massive strike wave that gripped the country after the Front’s election victory). And Blum’s administration moved quickly too to defend France’s democratic institutions, for instance by outlawing the paramilitary movements such as the Croix-de-Feu.

However, this optimism did not last. Spain quickly saw a military coup which triggered the Spanish Civil War and in which the Popular Front faced Franco’s army. Blum’s government failed to provide military support to the Popular Front in Spain, which turned into a theatre of the European-wide conflict between democracy and dictatorship. After some initial successes, the Popular Front was on the losing side in the Civil War from 1937 onwards and increasingly deeply divided internally. These divisions were also visible in the French government. Radicals felt increasingly uncomfortable in the government that prided itself on its progressive credentials and with two staunchly working-class parties. They soon urged Blum to make a ‘pause’ with his programme of social reforms.³⁹ But the Socialists had to moderate their views too.⁴⁰ Even in a government that had his own Socialist signature, Blum continued to downplay expectations towards militants.⁴¹ He told party members that ‘we exercise power, we have not conquered it’, reminding them of the distinction he made earlier. And he was careful to distinguish the party from the government, telling them that:

the Party must not imagine for a single minute that its life will henceforth be concentrated and absorbed in government action. No! The party accepts a mandate, charges comrades to execute it, but continues with its own life and mission, and none of this should be weakened, on the contrary!⁴²

Blum’s efforts to keep his government together were in vain. After 1938, France was stuck again with the same kind of Radical-led governments of the past with their ever-shifting majorities.

The legacy of the Popular Front as an alternative to the people’s party in an attempt to defend democracy was therefore mixed, especially in France, where it was not defeated on the battlefield but in parliament. As democracy was torn apart by polarization, the Popular Front underlined how important alliances across party lines were in its defence. But the Popular Front struggled to produce an alternative vision of how democracy might be transformed to avoid polarization in the first place. Its backbone was still the compromise between the Communist and Socialist mass parties which did not move beyond their traditional conception of class- (and mass-) based politics, even if, for the moment, they forged a pragmatic alliance. The idea of a Popular Front had a brief revival in Italy after the Second World War, but elsewhere it was dead by the end of the 1930s, defeated in Spain, disempowered in France, and ditched everywhere else by the Communists after Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939.

The quick rise and fall of Popular Fronts showed how difficult it was to defend democracy in the 1930s. But its sudden rise in popularity also illustrates how the conception of the people’s party lost out against other and seemingly more attractive models of mass politics that were explicitly based on the notion of the mass party rooted in a single subculture and social group—even if these aligned temporarily for a greater good. However, the model of the people’s party seemed to lose out too against another competing conception of mass politics which also explicitly invoked ‘the people’. Almost all countries saw the emergence of movements, parties, and leagues that claimed to overcome the ills of party democracy by promising to abolish it all together. The various movements of the radical right in Europe displayed an enormous heterogeneity, which later fuelled debates about what extent they were, or were not, part of the same Fascist family. However they were called, they played an important, and in some countries crucial, role in weakening democracy, as they openly displayed their dissatisfaction of party democracy and prided themselves pugnaciously on their anti-party identity. But the paradox was of course that some of these movements turned into genuine parties themselves, like the Rexist movement in Belgium or the Croix-de-Feu in France, which became the French Social Party after Blum outlawed it.⁴³

Whereas the anti-party rhetoric was part of their playbook, it was apparently only a small step from the refutation of parties to the conviction that only their own party should be allowed to exist, because only they allegedly represented the nation as a whole.⁴⁴ Indeed, what all these movements had in common was that they claimed to represent the people in its entirety against parties that deliberately only represented a section of them. Or, in the words of one of the French leagues, they stood ‘above the interest of a single group’ and instead intended to ‘gather all those who put the salvation of France above everything else’.⁴⁵ In other words, from their perspective, the problems of party democracy could only be overcome by a party which superseded all other parties and represented the nation as a whole. Therefore Neumann called them mass integration parties of an ‘absolutist’ kind.⁴⁶

The most powerful of these movements were, of course, the Fascist and Nazi parties. Their leaders and intellectual cheerleaders maintained that the NSDAP and PNF represented no sections of the people, but the people as a whole. They claimed that their parties were actually people’s parties. The Italian Fascist Dino Grandi captured this spirit by claiming that ‘fascism is not a party and does not want to be a party. It stands above all parties and captures all of them in a fantastic synthesis’.⁴⁷ The PNF congress concluded that ‘the Fascist Party is not a fraction of the Italian people, but the nation itself that is politically active.’⁴⁸ The Fascist Party drew support from different social groups in the elections of the early 1920s. Later, when it had established its dictatorship, its rule depended on more than coercive force alone. In its so-called ‘years of consensus’ the regime’s rule was at least partly based on the ability of the Fascist Party to appeal to workers, civil servants, middle-class urban dwellers, and industrialists alike.⁴⁹ Also the NSDAP attracted voters from diverse backgrounds and was as such the first party able to break through the sharp divisions that marked German politics since the end of the nineteenth century. It was a ‘catch-all party of protest’ with a broad social base that to some extent mirrored the German electorate. It caught votes of workers as well as businessmen, protestants as well as, although somewhat less, Catholics, city dwellers as well as people from the countryside.⁵⁰ The Nazi and Fascist parties were able to break electorally through some of the strict social boundaries that characterized Interwar politics. For these reasons, also some historians have also labelled these parties, and especially the NSDAP, ‘people’s parties’.⁵¹

Although they had a more varied support base than parties that started from a strict working-class or religious basis, the Nazi and Fascist parties contrasted with the people’s parties that emerged in postwar Europe—or those that were propagated by people like Sollmann, Sturzo, and Branting before. First, and most obviously, their claims of so-called ‘voluntary consensus’ and the ‘general interest’ were of course part of their propaganda. In their search for power, they suppressed, harassed, and beat down opponents, intimidated voters at polling booths, set fire on opposing party newspaper offices and not seldom plotted (and executed) political murders of opponents.⁵² When they took power, they instigated the suppression of political opponents forcing them into exile or locking them up in prisons, and concentration camps. The PNF or NSDAP gave a whole new definition to the notion of the party-state. From a party-state, or, to follow the original German term Parteienstaat, in plural, the new regimes became one-party regimes, where, at least in intention, the difference between state and party all but disappeared.⁵³

Second, many protagonists of the idea of the people’s party, both before and after 1945, intended that it should not be defined in exclusionary terms, certainly not nationalist or ethnic ones. It should in theory open to everyone, citizens from all walks of life and whatever class, creed, or profession. But the dictatorial parties were by nature exclusive. This was most obviously in the case of the NSDAP, with its exclusionary and ethnic notion of the German nation, excluding Jews and others considered by the regime as ‘non-Germans’ or even ‘sub-human’. Similar trends were visible in Italy, also before the adoption of its racial laws there in 1938.⁵⁴ The PNF might claim to represent the entire nation, it was exclusionary to all of those that the regime pushed to the margins of society. The politics of racial extermination that their regimes practised were foreshadowed by the exclusionary basis on which these parties were established. Other than post-1945 people’s parties, which stood open to all ‘working people’, meaning in principle anyone, or praise Christianity as a ‘universal’ value that welcomed anyone, these parties were not open to the people as a whole, but had an exclusive, and exclusionary, notion of it, based on an ethnic and radical form of nationalism.

By the end of the 1930s, the future of democracy in Western Europe looked dim. For the moment, authoritarian forms of government and the party model on which these were based, in all their varieties, seemed to have much brighter prospects. After the principal Catholic and Socialist mass parties had failed to broaden the social basis of their support in the 1920s, they had also struggled to forge lasting compromises with opponents and provide much-needed government stability in the following decade. This was also, or perhaps especially, the case when democracy seemed existentially threatened, which pushed party elites towards the margins rather than the centre of the political field. The potentially disastrous consequences of the absence of compromise and a more general feeling of lacking a sense of responsibility that stretched beyond narrow party interests were often highlighted by contemporary observers. But it was most deeply felt by some of Interwar Europe’s most prominent politicians. Blum was deeply aware of this problem. In a treatise called The reform of government, published when he came to power in 1936, he explained that:

there is no political stability without a minimum level of party organization…there are parties in France, and even too many of them, but most of them lack coherence and consistency. They form, dissolve and reform according to the changes of parliament, they are subject to fragmentation, they are wrecked by personal rivalries, they lack discipline, and, above all they miss consistency in their positions and programmes.⁵⁵

But this was perhaps not the worst problem, because political stability depended also on what he called ‘a minimum of morality in the action of parties’. France lacked a ‘constitutional opposition’, one that was constructive, had a sense of responsibility and could compromise and:

that has the right to challenge the government in power but does not have the right to fight with bias, on every turn, on every occasion, all the measures that it proposes. It does not have the right to refuse the government the measures that it would itself propose if it were in power instead.⁵⁶

This was an important observation for many reasons. Written at the beginning of Blum’s time in office, it was already an accurate prediction of the fate of his own Popular Front government, where party-political considerations of the Communists, Socialists, and Radical parties eventually prevailed. But it was also an observation that counted for the political situation in general in many European countries in the 1930s. Here, especially as the future of democracy looked ever dimmer and party democracy (and the parties that supported it) was more severely and more principally contested, parties became ever more closed in themselves and concerned with their own interests and approval ratings. Rather than moving to the centre they moved to the margins, and rather than compromising with opponents they increasingly saw those opponents not as democratic rivals, but existential threats. This delegitimized democratic institutions and provided scope for anti-democratic rivals to exploit their vulnerabilities.