For Jacques Doriot, as for many of his generation who made the political leap from left to right, the formation of the Popular Front government in 1936 was an event of crucial importance. Following his meteoric rise through the ranks of the French Communist Party during the 1920s, Doriot had broken with the party cadres in the spring of 1934 over Moscow's insistence on a ‘class against class’ policy, arguing, along with many of the French left, that the first priority was a common front against fascism in Western Europe. Some months later, the PCF would follow him down the same road, but by then Doriot had been denounced for his defiance of party discipline and had finally been expelled from the party in the summer of 1934. Historians differ in the explanations they offer for this act of deliberate defiance. Was Doriot turning his back on his communist roots through a conviction that the party was dangerously wrong, through a genuine commitment to the cause of a ‘front commun’? Or was his action motivated rather by his vaulting ambition and irritation with the stubborn refusal of the party leadership to deviate from Moscow's view of the world? Whatever the reason, the outcome is not in question. By 1936 he had established his own political party, the Parti Populaire Français, and had started his drift into an extreme and often brutally anti-democratic political discourse – the drift which would lead him to extremes of collaboration and to enthusiasm for the Légion des Volontaires Français in the Vichy period.