The failure of the Popular Front government of 1936–1937 was at least two-fold: from the national standpoint it was able neither to formulate a foreign policy of anti-fascism nor to bring France out of the economic crisis; from the narrower political perspective it was unable to prevent a growing sense of disillusionment and recrimination among its constituents. Both aspects have received increasing attention from historians in recent years, although not always with sufficient regard for the extent to which the two problems might be separable. Greater intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republicans, for example, might not have saved the Spanish Republic, but even so would have gone far toward satisfying Blum's constituents and blunting communist criticism of his government. Abandonment of the forty-hour week, on the other hand, while adding to the deceptions of the left, might have permitted the achievement of the economic upturn upon which the hopes of the Popular Front ultimately rested. Spain and finances – war and economics, the twin chief concerns of western civilization in our century as A. J. P. Taylor has facetiously suggested – are the issues in terms of which most analysts of Blum's double failure have proceeded. But there is another which may have been equally important, and which appears to have been of greater significance in the eyes of contemporaries. This was the question of the relationship of the Blum government and the French administration. The increasingly blurred distinction between politics and administration characteristic of contemporary Gaullism, as well as the rigidity and resistance to innovation typical of the crisis-prone French bureaucratic style, suggest in any case a re-evaluation of the recent past in terms what Michel Crozier has aptly called “the bureaucratic phenomenon”.

The popular front strategy, by which the French Communist party (PCF) came to mean a tactical alliance of the left including the Socialists and the left-leaning elements of the petty bourgeoisie represented by the Radical party, was pursued only briefly by the PCF in the 1930s, from 1934 to 1936. This is ironic, since it is by the slogan of the Front Populaire that the period of the 1930s in French history was to be subsequently known and remembered. The popular front was actually a transitional strategy between the famous (or infamous) “Third Period” of Comintern history from 1928–34, characterized in France by the class-against-class policy, and the policy of Front National, in which the PCF pursued a policy of alliance with anyone, including the right, against fascism at home and abroad. The PCF launched the national front in August 1936, and although the slogan did not catch on and was withdrawn, the party pursued that strategy for the remainder of the period until the war. But it was the popular front that would be remembered as having resulted in a wave of social legislation following the Blum government's assumption of power in June 1936 and which has ever since become a point of reference for the PCF. The wage increases, rights to unionize, paid vacations, forty hour week and nationalizations remain accomplishments for the party, to be built upon in each successive experience of participating in, or supporting the French government.