ABSTRACT
The issue became acute in July 1936, when the Spanish colonel Francisco Franco began a military rebellion against the left-oriented Popular Front government of republican Spain. Blum's initial impulse was to lend aid to the Spanish government, the Loyalists, but the risk of war this policy implied incurred the hostility of many French Radicals for whom the Spanish Popular Front was too leftist. The Munich is included left-wing pacifists35 percent of Socialists supported a pacifist resolution at the 1938 party congress and moderates who considered that France could not afford another bloodbath on the scale of the first war. By June of 1937, the Blum ministry's difficulties, especially its inability to control the economic and financial crisis, had fatally undermined the high hopes with which the Popular Front government began. Part of the Blum government's economic difficulties stemmed from the rapidly deteriorating international situation. Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland had tilted the military balance toward a rapidly rearming Germany.
