The French Popular Front was a coalition of left-wing political parties (Communists, Socialists, and Radicals) united through a common desire to combat fascism and improve the living conditions of France's workers. Between 1935 and 1938, the ideology of the Popular Front, largely informed by that of the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF), exerted tremendous influence on the cultural life of the French nation. Many cultural and musical organizations heeded the Popular Front's call for broad-based anti-fascist solidarity among intellectuals, artists, and the working class. In the realm of culture, this translated into multiple initiatives designed to bring art to the masses and to encourage the proletariat to become more active in the cultural life of the nation. / Sympathetic to the Popular Front's larger political aims, a number of French musicians and composers became affiliated with the Communist-sponsored Maison de 1a Culture and its affiliated musical organizations, the most prominent of which was the Federation Musicale Populaire (FMP). They participated in the administrative, cultural and intellectual life of the FMP; they took part in conferences, wrote articles on the theme of "music for the people," and were advocates for the organization within French musical life at large. Furthermore, these composers wrote works for government-commissioned events, for amateur groups, and for spectacles designed for mass audiences. / Some of the FMP's most prominent proponents (Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger) were former members of Les Six, a group that had been particularly interested in borrowing music derived from "popular" sources like the music hall and the circus following World War I. This study argues that the aesthetic approach of Les Six, which found support in FMP presidents Albert Roussel and Charles Koechlin, was reinvigorated during the Popular Front for a much more clearly defined political purpose. While the general interest in "popular" sources was still maintained, composers at the FMP now sought to integrate folklore and revolutionary music into their works "for the people" in an attempt to create and underline cultural links between workers and intellectuals---a compositional approach for which this dissertation coins the expression "populist modernism." / This study, the first book-length examination of French musical culture in light of Popular Front politics, concentrates on some of the period's most significant populist modernist works and draws upon contemporaneous journalistic coverage and archival documents that in many cases have hitherto never been the object of musicological study. The research shows that in 1936, following an initial infatuation with the genres and styles of socialist realist Soviet works, French left-wing composers developed a more inclusive view of what constituted music "for the people." Composers continued to write music indebted to politically resonant popular sources like folklore and revolutionary songs, but they also drew upon these genres in works (like the collaborative incidental music for Romain Rolland's Le 14 Juillet) that employed modernist compositional techniques. Though this approach was most obviously felt in the numerous works composed for organizations like the FMP, populist modernism also emerged in works performed at the Theatre de l'Opera-Comique and the 1937 Paris Exposition. By cutting across musical genres as well as institutional and social contexts, populist modernism emerges as the dominant aesthetic trend in French music during the years of the Popular Front.

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