The Passions and the Interests

On the night of the shock election victory of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), Parisian leftists did what they always do on special occasions: they rallied in huge numbers in the capital’s Place de la République. Amid a sea of faces, flags, and fists punching the air, one chant in particular stood out for its deeper historical resonance: ¡No pasarán!, or “They shall not pass!” The slogan is Spanish, not French. It’s closely identified with the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and it ricocheted around the world after Dolores Ibárruri, the Spanish Communist leader better known as “La Pasionaria,” delivered a legendary speech in July 1936 calling on Spaniards to resist the fascist military rebellion.

While the slogan is often credited to Ibárruri, she did not coin it. That honor belongs to the many thousands who marched through Paris on February 12, 1934, six days after a swarm of right-wing militants rioted outside the Chamber of Deputies. This was the day, as historian Joseph Fronczak shows in his excellent book Everything Is Possible, that the slogan “took hold in antifascist discourse — the day when it became, instantly, the core promise that antifascists made: to themselves, to each other, to the world.”

In Fronczak’s telling, this moment was the founding act of the Left as we know it today: “a collectivity inclusive of multiple ideologies and parties and organizations and movements, a collectivity reaching easily over national and other such boundaries.” It was, in retrospect, the founding act of what became France’s Popular Front government of 1936. By adopting the cry of ¡No pasarán!, the jubilant crowd of July 8 crossed a national boundary, and a temporal one too. The NFP and its supporters…