Léon Blum

Léon Blum (born April 9, 1872, Paris—died March 30, 1950, Jouy-en-Josas, France) was the first Socialist (and the first Jewish) premier of France, presiding over the Popular Front coalition government in 1936–37.

Blum was born into an Alsatian Jewish family. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure, he proceeded to study law at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1894 with the highest honours, and thereafter he made his name as a brilliant literary and dramatic critic. The Dreyfus affair brought him into active politics on the side of the republican Dreyfusards, and his close association with Jean Jaurès, whom he greatly admired, eventually led to his joining Jaurès’s French Socialist Party in 1904.

Blum was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1919. His first task was to reconstruct the Socialist Party after the split of December 1920, when the Communist section of it won a majority at the party’s Congress of Tours and so inherited the party machinery, funds, and press. Blum ranks in history as the maker of the modern French Socialist Party and of its chief journal, Le Populaire. He led the opposition to the governments of Alexandre Millerand and Raymond Poincaré and in 1924 supported Edouard Herriot’s Cartel des Gauches (Radical coalition), though refusing to participate in the ministries of Herriot and Aristide Briand. In the elections of 1928 the Socialist Party won 104 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, but Blum himself was defeated. A year later he was returned for Narbonne, which also returned him in 1932 and again in 1936.

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After the right-wing demonstrations in Paris of February 1934, Blum worked for solidarity between Socialists, Radicals, and all other opponents of Fascism. In 1932 he had developed a Socialist program of pacifism, nationalization of French industry, and measures against unemployment. These efforts contributed to the formation of the electoral alliance of the left known as the Popular Front, which in the elections of April and May 1936 won a large majority in the Chamber. Blum, its chief architect, became premier as leader of the Popular Front government of June 1936. He was the first Socialist and the first Jew to become premier of France. His government introduced, against considerable opposition, the 40-hour workweek and secured paid vacations and collective bargaining for many workers; it nationalized the chief war industries and the Bank of France, and carried other social reforms. Its most intractable problem was national defense against the growing power of the Rome-Berlin axis, and its policy of “nonintervention” in the Spanish Civil War was denounced as appeasement. Blum’s plans to establish effective state controls over private industry and finance aroused bitter hostility among French business leaders, who refused to cooperate with his government, and it was at this time that sections of the right wing adopted the ominous slogan, “Better Hitler than Blum.”

In June 1937 Blum resigned after the conservative majority in the Senate refused to grant him emergency decree powers to tackle the country’s financial difficulties. Modified Popular Front governments were formed by Camille Chautemps, in which Blum served as vice-premier, and by Blum again in March 1938. He refused office under his successor, Edouard Daladier.

In October 1940, after the French collapse in World War II, Blum was indicted by the Vichy government on charges of war guilt, and in February 1942 he was brought to trial at the court of Riom. The powerful defense put up by Blum and his codefendants so greatly discomfited the Vichy authorities and so irritated the Germans that in April the hearings were suspended indefinitely, and Blum was returned to prison. In the closing days of the war, Blum and other high-profile prisoners were transferred from the Dachau concentration camp to a hotel in the Tirolean countryside, where they were ultimately freed by Allied forces in May 1945.

After the liberation of France, Blum emerged as one of France’s leading veteran statesmen, and in the spring of 1946 he negotiated a U.S. loan to France of $1.37 billion for postwar reconstruction. In December 1946 he formed a monthlong “caretaker government,” the first all-Socialist French ministry, pending the election of the first president of the new Fourth Republic. Blum retired from public life in January 1947 but served as vice-premier in André Marie’s ministry of August 1948. He lived in retirement thereafter at his estate at Jouy-en-Josas.

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