Léon Blum

French politician

• Born: April 9, 1872
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: March 30, 1950
• Place of death: Jouy-en-Josas, France

Blum was responsible for the adoption of landmark social and workers’ rights legislation, including the forty-hour workweek, the right to collective bargaining, and the right to paid vacations, that has permanently affected French economic and social life. He was elected prime minister of the first Popular Front government, an electoral coalition formed out of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Socialist parties in France, and served as head of the French provisional government.

Early Life

Léon Blum (lay-ohn blewm) enjoyed a happy and healthy middle-class childhood. His father, an Alsatian Jew, was a successful manufacturer of silks and ribbons. The Blum family placed a premium on reading and education, and they expected Léon to become a writer or lawyer. His early education took place at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, where he studied philosophy under Henri Bergson. He studied for two years at the École Normale Supérieure before being enrolled in law school at the Sorbonne in 1891. He earned his law degree with highest honors in 1894. Shortly thereafter, Blum passed the appropriate examination and became a civil servant for the Conseil d’État; his principal tasks included drafting legislation for the state and settling the claims of private individuals against the state. During a civil service career that lasted twenty-six years, Blum rose to the top rank of maître de requětes (solicitor general).

Blum’s intellect, however, drove him well beyond the practice of law. He frequented the literary salons of Paris and by his early twenties he was recognized as a key figure in the literary world. From the age of nineteen, he became involved with the enterprising, durable, and pretentious La Revue blanche, a journal in which all forms of art were discussed and analyzed. Blum served as the journal’s literary critic from 1894 to 1900, when he was succeeded by André Gide. He then wrote drama criticism for Comoedia, La Petite République, and Le Matin and contributed articles on law and literature to other publications. Blum’s best work on literature and society was Stendhal et le Beylisme, published in 1914.

While a student at the École Normale Supérieure, Blum was introduced to socialist thought by the school’s librarian, Lucien Herr, yet it was only in the wake of the most intense stage of the Dreyfus affair (1898-1899) that Blum became actively interested in politics. Through Herr, he met Jean Jaurès and quickly became an apostle of the great socialist leader, sharing his vision of a unified socialist movement in France.

The outbreak of World War I and the assassination of Jaurès in July, 1914, persuaded French socialists to end their traditional boycott on governmental participation. Blum accepted an invitation to become chief of staff in the ministry of public works, where he remained until 1917, when he resigned in protest over the government’s denial of permission for French socialists to attend an international congress in Stockholm. Shortly thereafter, Blum published Lettres sur la réforme gouvernementale (1918), in which he analyzed French governance and expressed the need to give the prime minister executive authority. By the end of World War I, it was clear that Blum would pursue a career in politics. He was drawn, at the age of forty-seven, to active political life at the moment when Jaurès’s dream of a unified Socialist Party was about to be shattered by the revolutionary events of 1917-1919.

Life’s Work

Early in 1919, Blum was made chair of the executive board of the Socialist Party and elected to the Chamber of Deputies. At that time, the party was split between those who wanted to emulate the Russian Bolsheviks and join the Third (Communist) International and those who, like Blum, believed in the republican, liberal, reformist socialism of Jaurès. Blum’s view was in the minority at the annual Socialist Party congress at Tours in 1920. The majority voted to join the Third International and to expel dissidents such as Blum. They adopted the name of French Communist Party and took over the machinery and treasury of the old Socialist Party.

Blum remained an authentic spokesperson for reformist socialism. To him fell the enormous task of reconstructing the party, financing it, and winning mass support away from the communists. Blum’s political philosophy was based on a distinction between the “conquest of power,” the “exercise of power,” and “participation” in a nonsocialist government. The first was the revolution itself and could occur only when the socialists took over the state and put their programs into place. The exercise of power, however, could occur only if the socialists became the largest party in the chamber and were invited to form a government. This possibility justified working legally within the constitutional framework.

Blum, however, adamantly opposed participation in a nonsocialist government, which he could justify only in a national emergency. He thus declined an invitation to join the government in 1924 and maintained this stance into the mid-1930’s. Denounced by some as a doctrinaire theorist, Blum believed that he had to avoid appearing as an opportunist. He was successful. In 1920, the Socialist Party had been left with only 30,000 members as opposed to 130,000 for the Communist Party. By 1932, the socialist strength was more than three times that of the Communists. The rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the violent tactics of domestic right-wing organizations during the mid-1930’s made it desirable for the left-of-center parties to close ranks. In January, 1936, an electoral coalition known as the Popular Front emerged among the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Socialist parties. Elections in May and June, 1936, produced an overwhelming victory for the Left, and on June 4, Blum became premier of France’s first Popular Front government.

The Popular Front was greeted immediately by a wave of demonstrations and strikes among French workers and trade unionists. Blum immediately invited representatives of the unions and employers’ organizations to meet together in his official residence, the Matignon Palace. The result was the Matignon Agreements, by which workers agreed to end the strikes and return to work. In exchange, they won recognition of their right to be represented by unions and to collective bargaining over wages and working conditions. With the domestic turmoil assuaged, Blum pushed the Popular Front program through the legislature in little more than two months. The major pieces of legislation, destined to have a permanent impact on French national life, provided for the following: a forty-hour workweek, paid holidays, a central marketing organization for grain, a public works program, reform of the Bank of France, nationalization of the armaments industry, and dissolution of armed fascist-style leagues.

It was in foreign policy where the coalition among the leftist parties began to collapse. No issue proved more troubling to Blum than the Spanish Civil War. General Francisco Franco began the military revolt against the Spanish Popular Front government in Madrid in July, 1936, barely a month after the French Popular Front had been installed. The cornerstone of Blum’s foreign policy was solidarity with Great Britain. After consulting with the British, Blum decided to follow their lead by observing strict neutrality, or nonintervention, in the Spanish Civil War even when it became apparent that Germany and Italy were violating their pledges of nonintervention by sending military aid to the Franco rebels. Frequently denounced as typical of Blum’s nonactive intellectualism, the policy of nonintervention was not one that Blum desired but rather one forced on him by circumstances. His immediate reaction to the outbreak of the civil war had been to aid the Spanish loyalists with war matériel and money. The Radicals, however, opposed involvement in Spain. In addition, British leaders let it be known that if war erupted between France and Germany over the Spanish issue, England would not feel bound by its earlier guarantees of French security. Blum’s only choice, therefore, was nonintervention, since party solidarity was necessary to launch the Popular Front social program.

As the conflict over Spain intensified, the Communists and the left wing of the Socialist Party grew more dissatisfied with the policy of nonintervention. In addition, a serious financial crisis resulted in devaluations of the franc in 1936 and 1937. The crisis forced the prime minister to ask the legislature for emergency powers. When these were denied by the senate in June, 1937, Blum resigned, thus putting an end to the one-year rule of his government. The government fell largely because of weaknesses inherent in the French political system, which Blum had analyzed about twenty years earlier in Lettres sur la réforme gouvernementale the lack of executive authority and the dependence of the government on unstable party coalitions.

In the succeeding Popular Front government headed by the Radical Camille Chautemps, Blum served as vice premier. Chautemps resigned on March 12, 1938, following Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Austria. Once again Blum was asked to form a government. Unsuccessful in building a broad-based coalition, his cabinet rested solely on the Socialist/Radical alliance. It was clearly a transition government, and it remained in power for only three weeks. With Blum’s second resignation, the Popular Front era came to an end in France.

Although Blum had been unenthusiastic about military expenditures, his first term in office had witnessed the highest level of appropriations for national defense in the peacetime history of France. However, his detractors on the Right accused him of misappropriation. He was subsequently brought to trial by the Vichy regime in 1942 and accused of squandering the nation’s military resources, thus leaving France unprepared for war. The trial was blatantly unfair, and Blum used the opportunity to embarrass his accusers with an eloquent defense. The record shows that he became convinced after Germany’s absorption of Austria in March, 1938, that war was likely and that France must be prepared. He therefore offered his support, in the interest of national unity, to the more conservative government of Édouard Daladier. When World War II began in September, 1939, Blum supported its vigorous prosecution; after the defeat of France, Blum was among the minority in the National Assembly who voted against turning over all power to Marshal Philippe Pétain. The Vichy regime retaliated by taking Blum into “administrative custody.” His trial resulted in imprisonment, first at Bourassol in France and then, from March, 1943, until the liberation, at Buchenwald in Germany. During this period of captivity, Blum wrote one of his most moving books, À l’Échelle humaine (1945; For All Mankind , 1946), which, despite his personal circumstances, brims with optimism and hope about the future.

Blum’s last experience of exercising power came in late 1946 and early 1947. It was a moment of parliamentary crisis. The constitution of the Fourth Republic had been voted but had not yet come into operation. The leaders of the largest parties to emerge from the elections of 1946, the Communists and a Roman Catholic faction, were unsuccessful in forming a government. In this unpromising situation, Blum was asked to take office for one month, until the constitutional framework could be set in motion. His cabinet was composed entirely of socialists. With such a thin base of support, Blum harbored few illusions about what could be accomplished. The last Blum government succeeded in temporarily halting price rises, but Blum’s efforts at governing were hamstrung by the same party irresponsibility that had contributed to the collapse of the Third Republic.

Following his final resignation, Blum retired at the age of seventy-five to what he loved best solitude and books. He died at his home in Jouy-en-Josas on March 30, 1950. The public mourning on the Place de la Concorde in Paris and the flood of condolences from around the world provided eloquent testimony that Blum was indeed one of the preeminent men of twentieth century France.

Significance

Blum first made his name not as a politician but as a literary critic and man of letters. His subsequent political career can be understood only in relation to the beliefs and standards of this intellectual youth. Through his education, Blum acquired a sense of moral rigor and an appreciation of intellectual honesty and consistency qualities evident in his published work but which frequently clashed with the compromises necessary in the political world. In 1936, for example, he was forced to abandon his moral inclination to aid the Spanish Republic in its struggle for survival against General Franco to save the political coalition necessary to pass the Popular Front’s social and economic reforms through the French legislature. These reforms including the forty-hour week, the right to collective bargaining, and the right to paid vacations stand as Blum’s most important political achievement. His moral rigor was again challenged in 1946, when he was compelled to abandon his admiration for Charles de Gaulle as a resistance leader in a dramatic confrontation with the general over the nature of postwar French democracy. Blum’s career is a classic example of the dilemmas to be faced by an intellectual with his qualities of mind in the compromising and dissembling world of politics.

Bibliography

Alexander, Martin S., and Helen Graham, eds. The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. This book is a collection of essays, many of which are useful in understanding the Popular Front phase of Blum’s life.

Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930’s. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Brendon analyzes historical events in seven countries to provide a better understanding of the causes of World War II. Chapter 14, “Léon Blum and the Popular Front,” provides information about Blum and France in the 1930’s.

Colton, Joel G. Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. This is a full-scale political biography of Blum that treats the literary years before 1914 only as a prologue to his career in politics. It is especially useful for the period from 1936 through World War II and contains a full bibliography.

Dalby, Louise Elliott. Léon Blum: Evolution of a Socialist. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963. This study concentrates on the development of Blum’s political thought from anarchism to Marxism to humanist socialism.

Dreifort, John E. Yvon Delbos at the Quai d’Orsay: French Foreign Policy During the Popular Front, 1936-1938. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973. Although the author focuses on the foreign minister of the Popular Front, this book is especially useful for understanding Blum’s ideas on the formulation and practice of foreign policy.

Joll, James. Three Intellectuals in Politics. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961. This volume contains an interesting short analysis of Blum’s career with an emphasis on the travails of an intellectual in political life. Blum’s career is compared with those of Walther Rathenau in Germany and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Italy.

Judt, Tony. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Reprints of three lectures that Judt delivered at the University of Chicago, including “The Prophet Spurned Léon Blum and the Price of Compromise.”

Lacouture, Jean. Léon Blum. Translated by George Holoch. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. This translation from French concentrates on the political side of Blum’s life. Unlike earlier biographies, however, such as those by Colton and Joll, which portray Blum as a nonactive intellectual beset with indecision, Lacouture depicts Blum as a “realist” concerned with the safety of his party and country.