He’d been right. By the start of 1936, the Popular Front was ready to fight an election. A month ago, at the start of May, the Popular Front had won, and Léon Blum, the Jewish leader of the Socialist Party, was prime minister of France.

When Le Sourd had been asked if he’d like any government job, Max had assumed he would accept. But his father had surprised him.

“There’s something more important for me to do,” he’d said. And despite his age, he’d thrown himself into another, feverish round of activity. Meetings with important union men, visits to factories: for three weeks Max hardly saw him. But when he did, his father always said the same thing.

“Now is the moment, Max. Strike while the iron is hot. Everything is possible, if we act fast.”

His father was right. All over France, from plant to plant, strikes started breaking out as workers, bolstered by the thought of having a socialist government, began demanding all rights: a forty-hour week, paid holidays, wage increases. As Jacques had also predicted, the key was Paris, and by late May he could point out triumphantly: “Thirty-two thousand workers have occupied the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt. Every big engineering works around Paris is out on strike now. That’s another hundred thousand men. The workers of the Bloch aircraft factory out at Courbevoie are with us.”

A few days ago, there were two million Frenchmen out on twelve thousand separate strikes.

The part of the Champs-Élysées where they were standing lay less than halfway down from the Arc de Triomphe, just above the Art Nouveau glass houses of the Grand and Petit Palais. The triangle of streets that lay between this section and the River Seine was becoming known as the Golden Triangle, the Triangle d’Or, for as well as the American Cathedral church and the recently built Hotel George V, it was home to some of the richest people and most elegant enterprises in the city.

It wasn’t an area that Jacques Le Sourd would normally care to visit. But today he had come there, for the satisfaction of seeing it all shut down.

They crossed the Champs-Élysées. As they walked between the trees on the avenue’s northern side, Jacques glanced at his son with affection.

If he’d taken a long time to find a wife, his marriage was a happy one. He’d met Anne-Marie when he was forty and she was twenty-five, when she had come to work for the Socialist Party. He hadn’t thought of her as anything but a young colleague at first. But as he’d come to know her a little better, he’d been astonished by her direct and uncompromising mind. He’d never known any woman like her.