The Weakness to be Human

...He would perhaps not have gone into politics at all if his hero, Jean Jaur??s, had not been assassinated on the eve of World War I, creating an intellectual gap in the leadership of the Socialist party and a feeling in Blum that he was meant to carry on the dead man's work...

...War is evil...

...He had hoped to create a sense of national unity in France...

...But the way to his resignation, to the disintegration of the Popular Front mystique, was paved with the bitter choices he had to make in foreign policy, choices that made Blum almost as unpopular on the Left as the Right...

...According to Fran?§ois Mauriac, Blum was "the most lucid critic of his time...

...Colton does not miss the irony: "Dressed impeccably with gloves, gaiters, and an ever-present breast-pocket handkerchief-'the revolution in pearlgray gloves,' L?©on Daudet once sarcastically called him-Blum was hardly a figure to appeal to proletarians or lead a revolutionary party...

...Laval called it off when Hitler got uneasy...

...This dogma also accounted for Blum's reluctance, until about the time of Munich, to admit the necessity of rearming...

...He returned to France a respected ghost and spent the last five years of his life lending his name to the idea of European unity, and distrusting both de Gaulle and the Communists...

...Britain and France, he said, should have prevented, by force if need be, Hitler's accession in 1933...

...Its program was vaguely defined, however, with the result that the bourgeois feared it was The Revolution, while workers and many intellectuals hoped it was...

...At the end of the War Blum was in Dachau...

...One can imagine how another course might have averted the world war...

...Professor Colton is hardly as brilliant or diverting as some other commentators on Blum have been...

...It was this "weakness" that had made Blum the wrong man...

...In 1920 the French working class movement divided between the Communists, who took their orders from the newly-installed Bolsheviks in Moscow, and the Socialists, who refused to be dictated to or to become conspirators...

...Since Blum was perhaps the most controversial and, as far as many of the French were concerned, most disliked politician of his time, extreme judgments on him are understandable...

...Yet Blum did rebuild his party, mixing labor and white-collar support...

...the Spanish Civil War divided the country still more deeply and destroyed the unity of the Popular Front...

...As for Blum, he wanted to achieve the minimum aims without splitting the country...

...But Blum, alert and eloquent at 70, turned what was planned to be a show-trial against the Republic into an expos?© of Vichy's stupidity and vindictiveness...

...the non-intervention policy in Spain and the sacrifice of the Spanish Republic meant abject surrender and humiliation on his country's own doorstep...

...Ma torture," Blum called Spain...

...The concept of class war, indeed most of Marxism, both Jaur??s and Blum considered a figure of speech...

...What makes this new work by a liberal American scholar welcome, is that in it careful research and an awareness of Blum's shortcomings coexist comfortably with a basic sympathy for the man and his objectives...

...Rather than going into exile or underground, he stayed in public and opposed both the Armistice and Vichy...

...War cannot engender anything noble and good...

...He ought to have lived in some other time when evil was not promoted with such passionate intensity...

...The tragedy lay in his lofty ambitions for France...

...by 1930 it overtook the Communists in membership...

...they sent their money abroad, and the French economy, already moldy, was panicked...

...Colton makes himself be hard on Blum for this: "That Blum suffered deeply because of Spain does not excuse him...

...But he lived when he did, and his epitaph, as Professor Colton suggests, can be taken from Machiavelli: "A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good...

...Blum was an honorable anachronism...

...nevertheless his book is a fair-minded, useful study of the democrat who was, unfortunately, not the right man to have led France at a crucial time...

...The subtitle warns that this will not be a complete biography...

...Arrested, he was placed on trial, accused of so demoralizing the country with reforms when he was in power in 1936-37 that he was responsible for France's defeat...

...Colton is mainly interested in Blum the political figure, and Blum did not emerge as that until rather late...

...his conduct during the War cannot be...

...One can agree with Colton, and add that Blum's was less a failure of nerve than a principle misapplied...

...Under pressure from Britain, and with the threat of civil war in France should he intervene, Blum checked his natural impulse, withstood the outrage of Communists and many Socialists, and kept out of Spain...

...Blum in the '30s deserves to be criticized...

...Jaur??s, a bourgeois intellectual like Blum, had formulated a peculiar sort of Socialist faith made up of equal parts of humanism, economic justice, patriotism, and nonviolence...

...Colton explains objectively and in detail the frustrated career of this extraordinary coalition, which aimed to suppress domestic Fascism, offset depression with an economic new deal, and pacify Europe by disarmament...

...While pushing through reforms that Colton rightly calls "basic and overdue" (collective bargaining, 40hour week, increase in minimum wage), Blum insisted "we are working with complete loyalty within the framework of present institutions...

...When he almost simultaneously became a member and a leader of the French Socialist party in 1919, at the age of 47, he had already had successful careers as a literary critic and lawyer...

...When, particularly as a Jew, he thought of what Europe had become, he had passing moments of uncharacteristic gloom...

...a Colonel de Gaulle with notions of armored divisions might have served the Republic and Europe better...

...The bourgeois did not believe him...

...Of himself he wrote, "It is a great weakness to be human: ruthless indifference is a great source of power...

...When war was a possibility he was guided by Jaur??s' advice, "Every time that we can avoid war we must avoid it...

...He had hoped that France might lead Europe toward peace with dignity and honor...

...Harassment from capital brought Blum down after a year...

...Reviewed by EDWARD GROSSMAN Assistant editor, "Harper's" Magazine Books about L?©on Blum have tended to fall into three categories: the crude and unfriendly (by Blum's Fascist and Communist enemies), the unfriendly and sophisticated (by his far left-Wing critics, notably Colette Audry, writing under the imprimatur of Sartre's "Temps Modernes"), and lastly the memoirs lost in admiration (composed by Blum's co-workers and disciples...

...Blum found himself leading a weak party, for thousands of workers defected to the Communists...

...Still he called his Socialism "revolutionary...

...and in 1936 the Popular Front, a coalition of non-Rightist parties including the Communists, chose Blum Premier of France...

...The Fascist insurrection there against a sister Popular Front government raised the dilemma whether to aid the Spanish republicans, as they were pleading, or keep out, trusting Hitler and Mussolini to respect the international agreement on non-intervention...