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This chapter examines the historical importance of the Fédération républicaine, the largest party of the parliamentary Right in twentieth-century France, and its dominant nationalist wing. Founded in 1903 by the Right wing of the moderate republicans, the Fédération républicaine had subsequently become increasingly clerical and nationalist. Under the leadership of Louis Marin, known for his extreme nationalism, the party grew in popularity due to the re-making of Catholicism in combination with broader social and political developments. The party called for the union and mobilisation of all Catholics around a programme of social conservatism within a Christian society, and used a populist discourse – supported by Catholic women and workers – to counteract the ‘danger’ posed by socialist and feminist movements. The chapter suggests that the Fédération républicaine's populism was repeatedly eclipsed by its basic distrust of the masses. It considers the decline of the party and the persistence of Catholic nationalism.

The chapter introduces the early modern problem of sovereignty as a crisis of representation. Focusing on the dual – philosophical and theatrical – deposition staged in Shakespeare's Richard II and the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations, the chapter demonstrates how the concept of sovereignty relies on its representational representaitonal structures and forms, including, above all, the notion of a sacred “body.” Together with Shakespeare's foundational play on the problem of political theology, Suárez's metaphysical writings not only provide the terminological groundwork for the concept of sovereignty in the early modern period, but they also continue to speak to us about some of its modern forms and fantasies.

This chapter addresses the spectacular and massive nature of the architecture of the films themselves—that is to say, the way in which the crowd functions metaphorically as a building block of social cohesion. The stories being told by leftist militant filmmaking of the Popular front are analysed as a spatialized discourse where the crowd becomes a living construction. The portrayal of the worker as individual and member of the mass is crucially cinematographic: militant films cast their spectators as extensions of the films’ worlds. Furthermore, the visual rhetoric of these films opens avenues of insight into the spatial representations and politics of more mainstream products of 1930s cinema culture, such as Julien Duvivier’s La Belle équipe.