The Communist Party had been, before this vote, a main supporter of the People's Olympiad. Nevertheless, several French sportsmen decided to boycott the Berlin Olympic Games anyway, and go to Barcelona where the People's Olympiads were scheduled to begin on 19 July 1936. Each stop in the train stations were the occasion of popular and joyful demonstrations, with people singing "The Internationale". However, on the eve of the opening ceremony, General Franco's military "pronunciamento", declared from Spanish Morocco, started the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). After having left the under-secretary's department, Lagrange then became president of the lay Committee of the youth hostels. With the 1939 declaration of war, although a deputy, he voluntarily joined the military command, before being killed on 9 June 1940 in Évergnicourt by shrapnel. Lagrange, who was opposed to professional sports and was against their development in France, had been:  Quotation from some of Léo Lagrange's speeches:  At the same time, Fascism was instrumentalizing sports for a militarist end, while the SFIO had denounced it as a "bourgeois" and "reactionary" activity. That is, until the Popular Front, when it began to use it as a military and patriotic preparation, in anticipation of a conflict with Nazi Germany. Some SFIO members were not immune to the scientific racism discourse of the times. Thus, Georges Barthélémy, SFIO deputy, could declare that sport contributes to the "improvement of relations between capital and labour, henceforth to the elimination of the concept of class struggle," in a perfect corporatist conception. Barthélémy also considered sport as a "mean to prevent the moral and physical degeneration of the race." In this light, as well as in the modern professionalisation and mediatization of sports, Léo Lagrange's conception takes all its sense, both in opposition to his times and in its modernity.