The discourses on the problems of unemployment and leisure revealed that many on the Right and on the Left shared the values of the “civilizing offensive.” Unemployment they solved by putting the jobless to work building roads to improve traffic circulation, apartment houses to lodge workers, and automobiles to move the masses. The unions and parties of the Popular Front found the answer to the issue of leisure in organizing healthy and wholesome activities. The Left defined unemployment and leisure as problems whose solutions would be found in the development and construction of a city of habitations à bon marché and of productive factories from which workers could commute to specialized leisure areas. In this sense, the Left’s views on leisure meshed with its vision of the working class as devoted producers and potentially salubrious consumers. It reduced the working week so that the unemployed, who were supposedly eager to work, could obtain jobs and increase their buying power. Leisure for the workers had value not just for its own sake but also to make the class better producers in the workplace. Like some sectors of the patronat, the CGT, SFIO, and PCF argued for the restorative powers of loisirs.

At the same time, the leaders of the Left were genuinely moved by labor’s new right to leisure. In a well-known speech at the Vichy regime’s show trial at Riom in 1942, Léon Blum described what he perceived as one of his major accomplishments:

I did not leave my office very much…but when I did and crossed the Parisian suburbs, I saw the roads lined with old jalopies, motorbikes, and tandems with working-class couples wearing matching sweaters. It all showed that the idea of leisure awakened in them a natural and simple style, and I had the sense, in spite of everything, of having brought sun and light into dark and difficult lives. We not only took workers away from the bars and provided them with more opportunity for family life but gave them hope for the future.^[102]

Discounting Blum’s repetition of leftist rhetoric on alcoholism and the family, we can nonetheless agree that workers did become very attached to the Popular Front’s reforms granting a shorter working week and paid vacations. This desire to reduce worktime produced difficulties for the coalition. The Popular Front was trapped between its productivist promises to the nation and its consumerist constituents. Parisian workers did not show their gratitude to the Left for its advanced social legislation by working harder and producing more efficiently. Although at Renault resistance to work decreased before August vacations, it increased in the fall, after the first summer vacations had ended. Despite the restorative discourse of the Left, alcoholism did not decline in Paris and may have become more pervasive. Paralleling their lack of subordination in the workplace, many Parisian workers, like their Barcelonan counterparts, continued to use their free moments in ways that both union officials and employers condemned.

Ironically, it was the workers’ attachment to the reduced working week, perhaps the major reform of the Popular Front, that helped disrupt the unity of the leftist coalition and greatly contributed to its downfall. The Popular Front was popular because of its expansion of leisure, and it was hardly surprising that its end was provoked by the workers’ actions to resist more worktime.