‘Le temps des loisirs‘: thus ran an article in the communist magazine Regards in 1938. The theme was not novel: with the introduction of paid holidays (congés payés) and the forty-hour week in June 1936, ‘leisure’ (loisirs) had become the catchword of the age. One of Blum's most remarked-upon appointments was that of Léo Lagrange to the new post of under secretary of state for the organization of sport and leisure. Defending his government in 1942, Blum referred to his pride that ‘through the organization of work and leisure’, he had brought ‘a ray of light into difficult lives’. As the Popular Front becomes increasingly sanitized by history, the congés payés loom ever larger as its supreme achievement. The photographs of crowds waving from departing trains have become as much a symbol of 1936 as the barricades have of 1968.

With its first legislative act, therefore, Blum's government left the domain of politics and entered that of legend. In doing so it achieved a fundamental aspiration. Unlike ‘planism’, the other strategy which claimed to offer resistance to fascism in the 1930s, the Popular Front centred its defence of democracy around the parliamentary Republic. Not the least of its aims, therefore, was to provide a mystique for democracy in an era susceptible to other myths, to reinvigorate the republican idea in France. That this should be attempted in the field of leisure was particularly significant since most contemporaries recognized that the ‘organization of leisure’ was something in which the fascist states had been pre-eminently successful. Even the Communists could refer admiringly to the achievements of Nazi Germany.