52
BLUM, LÉON
Supérieure on a scholarship and subsequently received a doctorate in law and philosophy from the Sorbonne. After working several years as an attorney for the Conseil d’Etat, a high administrative court, Blum became politically active during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer wrongly accused of espionage. He then adopted the ideas of Jean Jaurès, founder of the French Socialist Party, and joined the group in 1902. Thereafter he unequivocally committed himself to the Enlightenment principles of justice, equality, and humanity. For nearly a decade Blum moved within intellectual circles, gaining fame as an accomplished literary and social critic. In the early days of World War I, his friend and mentor Jaurès was assassinated and Blum succeeded him as head of the Socialist Party, dutifully serving through the war years as part of the Union Sacré, a national unity government involving all political factions. In 1919 Blum gained election to the Chamber of Deputies, but the following year he indelibly left his imprint on national politics during the 1920 meeting of the Third Socialist International. More than two-thirds of the French socialists voted to break away and join the Communist Party controlled by Russian revolutionary VLADIMIR LENIN but, in an eloquent diatribe, Blum denounced violent revolution as the path to dictatorship. He also strongly reaffirmed French socialist principles of freedom and democracy. Afterward he took the remainder of the now greatly weakened Socialist Party and commenced a slow rebuilding process. Over the next 15 years Blum served as leader of the opposition and emerged as one of France’s most eloquent and socially conscious politicians. Given his great popularity, he had been invited to form a coalition government with various leftist groups, including communists, but he refused to serve in any regime where the socialists were not dominant. By the mid1930s Europe was trembling from the onset of fascism, and right-wing riots in Paris convinced Blum to assemble a broad, left-wing coalition government. In concert with communists, socialists, and non-leftist radicals, he formed a popular front against fascism, winning a coalition majority in June 1936. Blum thus became France’s first socialist prime minister and also the first Jewish chief executive. In this capacity he embarked on a revolutionary program of social and labor reform, including a 40-hour workweek, paid vacations for workers, nationalization of the Bank of
France, and government control of the arms industry. However, while promulgating such sweeping reform he stoked the ire of industrialists and the right wing. Worse, when Blum refused overt aid to leftist Republicans during the Spanish civil war for fear of alienating Great Britain, he greatly angered communists and socialists in his own administration. The government became paralyzed, and when the Senate refused to grant Blum special financial powers, he resigned after only a year in office. In 1938 he would briefly reprise his role as prime minister, but with few tangible accomplishments. Moreover, he failed to initiate a significant rearmament program to counter the growing menace of ADOLF HITLER’s Nazi Germany. When World War II commenced in 1939, Blum had returned to the Chamber of Deputies. Here he became one of only 36 deputies to vote against granting PHILIPPE PÉTAIN special powers to rule unoccupied portions of France following Germany’s victory in May 1940. The pro-Nazi Vichy regime then arrested Blum and put on a show trial in Riom on February 19, 1942, charging him with failure to prepare the nation for war. However, Blum defended himself and his actions brilliantly and the court was summarily adjourned. The former prime minister was then shipped off to the Buchenwald concentration camp with many other French Jews until American troops rescued them in May 1945. After the war, Blum tried to rebuild the Socialist Party as a counterweight to the newly invigorated communists, whom he still despised. He also became prime minister a second time to lead an all-socialist caretaker government that ushered in the Fourth Republic in 1947. Blum, now a respected elder statesman, then negotiated with the United States over a reduction of war debts before resigning from office in January 1947. To the end of his days, Blumremained an impassioned and articulate spokesman for his own unique brand of “socialism with a human face.” He died suddenly in Paris on March 30, 1950, France’s most influential left-wing politician of the early 20th century. Further Reading Blum, Leon. For All Mankind. New York: Viking Press, 1946. Gallagher, M. D. “Leon Blum and the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of Contemporary History 6, no. 3 (1971): 56–64.