On the Quality of Leon Blum

...History never bent to his will...

...A watershed in so many ways, the Affair severely weakened the powerful tradition of Left-wing anti-Semitism in France, thus freeing Blum eventually to become head of the '30s Popular Front government for which he is today remembered...

...The experiment did not last long...

...In May 1936, the coalition won the national elections, and in June Blum, to everyone's surprise, became the first Jewish head of France's first Leftist government...

...Waiters & Writing ON THE QUALITY OF LEON BLUM BY BARRY GEWEN Actor in an age that included Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, de Gaulle, and Roosevelt, the French Socialist leader Leon Blum can hardly be said to stare down at us from the heights...

...Ironically, this congenital conciliator first stepped into the spotlight as the spokesman for a divisive minority faction, the branch of the Socialist Party that, at the Tours Party Congress in 1920, refused to go over to Leninism and Moscow's Third International...

...Blum's relations with de Gaulle were complex, to say the least, but the objections he raised to the General's authoritarianism could be the starting point for a modern Leftist's critique of the technocratic meritocracy currently being hailed in some quarters as the society of the future...

...So impressive, so prescient, was the speech Blum made opposing the French Bolsheviks-Lacouture describes it as a "symphony"that his comments deserve to bequoted at length: "Socialism is not a party confronting other parties...

...Brilliantly, courageously, he turned this judicial farce into an indictment of the Vichy regime, until the Germans caught on and terminated the proceedings...

...The Bank of France was reorganized to dilute the power of its 200 largest shareholders, and a grain board was created to stabilize farm prices...

...The Socialists and Communists joined forces, together with the middle-class Radical Party, to form the defensive alliance known as the Popular Front...

...anyone desiring a precise, nuts-and-bolts analysis of the government's economic policies will have to look elsewhere...

...As such, it was a party of freedom of thought...

...But there was an economic component to the government's failure as well...

...Moscow demands the complete and radical purge of everything that the Socialist Party has been up to now...

...Jean Lacouture's Lion Blum (Holmes & Meier, 571 pp., $39.50), first published in France in 1977 and now available here, is a sympathetic, readable account of a moral hero whose steady decency and reasonableness shine through the swirl of madness and blood...

...Questions of productivity, growth and exchange rates gnawed at Blum and his ministers...

...Probably no one other than Blum could have kept the coalition together for as long or as effectively as he did...

...The Communists denounced him as "the man of the destruction of working-class unity in Tours...

...Lacouture gives over a major portion of his biography to the trial, quoting lengthy portions of Blum's arguments...

...Early in his career he declared:" No thoughtful Socialist is unaware that Marx's metaphysics is mediocre, nor that his economic doctrine breaks one of its links every day...

...With the collapse of France in 1940, Blum was arrested, jailed, convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment by Petain, and then tried...

...There is a categorical opposition, a contradiction, between what has been Socialism and what will be Communism tomorrow...

...His brave self-defense made Blum a national Resistance hero, the counterpart within the country to the Gaullist voice in London...

...At the same time, his Jewish heritage narrowed the range of political choices available to him, blocking off the nativist low-road trod by many of his countrymen...

...It is the entire working class...

...Our party was therefore a party with the broadest possible membership...

...Blum himself once remarked: "My revolt against injustice is as old as my consciousness...

...During his short 1938 tenure, he introduced the concept of economic planning, with proposals for a tax on capital and currency controls...

...whoever no longer accepts it will have to leave...

...Assuming there is an elsewhere to look: In the author's defense, one might observe that if he had the ability to explain what Blum should have done, he could probably get a job as finance minister in any one of a number of modern industrial nations, including the United States...

...Among the crimes he was charged with was instituting the 40-hour week, "which gave the working class a taste for less effort...

...at the top, there is a central committee on which everything must depend, a kind of military command formulated on high and transmitted from rank to rank, down to the militants and the sections....In your party you want not only men who are inclined to act together but men who have committed themselves to think together: your doctrine is fixed once and for all...

...Whether he was even a Marxist is open to question...

...A series of historic reforms established the 40-hour work week, paid vacations and collective bargaining...

...If he had a firm position, it was as a centrist of the Left, and he spent much of his long career struggling to maintain unity in a movement that seemed to live to divide...

...Francois Mauriac, a former opponent, wrote: "He belongs to that very small number of beings whose life, when one considers it from the outside, seems to be a slow rise, a constant march toward perfection...

...No matter...

...Ne varietur...

...We are convinced that at this moment there is a more pressing question than knowing whether Socialism will or will not be united...

...Its object is to bring together, through their common class interests, the workers of all countries...

...his mother was a woman who pursued justice, in the words of one of her sons, "to the point of melancholy...

...Whoever does not accept it cannot join your party...

...One magazine snarled about the "rape" of the countryside by "the filthy paws of the secular monster," adding: "whoever has not decided to open his veins in a warm bath or to flee to an Egyptian monastery, will have nothing left but to take a rifle and some cartridges and shoot down as many as he can of the tyrants who are as dangerous as German barbarians, to unleash an internal revolution, even if it is bloody...

...Yet if one were to take a lantern to the period between the two World Wars looking for the proverbial "good man," a model of behavior in a time of overwhelming troubles and approaching calamity, the search could end with him...

...Lacouture, who devotes about one-quarter of his book to the year of the Popular Front, is quite good at explaining what went right with it...

...What will the new party you wish to create be like...

...Born in Paris in 1872, Blum grew up one of those secularized, assimilated Jews who substitute ethical passion for the loss of God...

...and after the War the two men defined the contours of sensible politics in France...

...In detailing what went wrong, he achieves mixed results...

...Comparisons with the New Deal leap to mind, and in fact Blum was one of FDR's greatest admirers...

...In the language of the day, Blum went on to voice his support for revolution, illegal action, and the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...His father, a wealthy textile merchant, was a fervent supporter of the French Republic...

...Lacouture has little to say about these troubling, difficult issues...

...Doctrinal disputes were foreign to Blum's nature...

...Blum's political problems are set forth clearly and convincingly: With the Communists on one side of him and the Radicals on the other, he was walking a tightrope, while the government itself "walked a tightrope between civil war and international war...

...Blum's beliefs flowed from the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution...

...It is the statement of a deeply committed democrat, socialist and humanist, a man who stood at an intellectual crossroads and unerringly chose the proper path...

...Not counting a brief period following the War, Blum was in office for only a year...

...As Lacouture points out, much of the speech would scandalize Francois Mitterrand's Socialists...

...Jean Jaures, the brilliant revisionist leader of the French Socialist Party who was assassinated in 1914, taught Blum to equate socialism with humanism, and the Dreyfus case turned him into a political activist...

...A second Blum cabinet, formed in March 1938, fell even faster, surviving less than a month...

...We are convinced, in our very depths, that while you go off on your adventure, someone must stay to guard the old house...

...Still, he managed permanently to change the face of French society...

...By September the government was on the ropes, torn apart by policy disputes over the Spanish Civil War, and within a year it was out of power...

...It is the question of knowing whether Socialism will or will not exist...

...Morality, not Marx, brought Blum to socialism...

...He was not outsize...

...Blum died in 1950, and was granted a state funeral...

...In many respects Blum's reforms were more far-reaching than Roosevelt's, because France was a more class-ridden society than the United States...

...After a Popular Front minister successfully pressured the railroads into offering a reduced vacation fare so that working-class families could get out of the cities, the Right exploded in vituperation...

...Other Popular Front allies, including some who would later become Fascists, called for more central planning to cope with the chaotic conditions of the world depression...

...Instead of the popular will taking shape in the rank and file and rising from level to level, your system of centralization entails the subordination of each organism to the organism hierarchically above it...

...And Blum himself was obliged to endure scurrilous anti-Semitic attacks in the Assembly...

...A devaluation rankled many of the Radicals...

...One misstep meant defeat or worse...

...Where Blum could not unite the Left in the '20s, Hitler and the threat of fascism in France could in the '30s...