On the rue de Varenne, at the entrance of the Hôtel Matignon, office of the prime minister, uniformed Gardes Mobiles snapped into salute at the arrival of Maurice Gamelin, the French army's chief of staff and inspector-general. It was 10 June 1936, four days since the Chamber of Deputies had invested Léon Blum's government by a 174-vote majority, confirming the electoral triumph of the Popular Front. Just two nights earlier, in these Matignon offices, Blum had concluded the tense negotiations for an economic and social settlement which ended the strikes and factory occupations that had crippled French industry since mid-May. This had been a nerve-stretching but exhilaratingly successful first three days for what Blum called his ‘exercise of power’. Resistance to the left and its reforming government seemed in disarray. ‘A large number of entrepreneurs’, Gamelin reflected, ‘had lost their heads and panicked …’. The conservative parties licked their wounds and opened their post-mortems on defeat. With business bosses as cowed as the political right, the only possibility for repressing the workers' carnival seemed to lie with the army. Perhaps the greatest unspoken question in France that turbulent May was whether the military would cohabit with the Socialists.

The doubts hung heavily as France's most distinguished serving officer strode through the Matignon courtyard to meet Blum. Gamelin noticed the calm prevailing inside the offices, sharply contrasting with the continuing tension outside, product of what the general later decried as ‘the criminal demagoguery of the “Popular Front”’.