What I Am Reading: "Léon Blum" by Jean Lacouture

Let me get this part out of the way first: I did learn a lot about Léon Blum from this biography; however, with the benefit of hindsight, I might have picked a different one. Written by a French author and translated, it does little handholding of a reader who might not be familiar with French political or historical references. I learned a lot about subjects I was already passingly familiar with but could be lost when encountering something new. I know there is a more recent academic biography (Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist by Pierre Birnbaum) that, among other things, seeks to redress the lack of attention paid to Blum's Jewish identity in previous bios. Without having read that book, I might recommend that someone start there, and I might pursue it if I ever need more Léon Blum.

Anyway, that aside, this biography did teach me a lot. English-language histories of France aren't always easy to come by, so it was nice to be able to dive into a subject only lightly covered in other things I've read. Léon Blum was a socialist intellectual who served as the Prime Minister in the Popular Front (a coalition of the Socialists, Communists, and middle-class left Radical Party) from 1936 to 1937, and again briefly in 1938. Prior to this, he served a long apprenticeship as a Dreyfus-era intellectual and a protégée of theorist Jean Jaures, helping Jaures to organize the fragmented socialist movement into a single political party in the early years of the 20th century (while also writing book and drama reviews and a treatise on women’s sexual liberation). As a figure of moderation, Blum came to lead the Socialist party in the chaotic 1920s, fighting to maintain unity while also opposing Moscow’s agenda. The party spent much of this time grappling with the question of whether they should participate in government, with Blum’s hairsplitting eventually providing them with an intellectual rationale to do so. After the rise of the Fascist threat in the early 1930s, the Communist Party agreed to sublimate their revolutionary goals to fight the common enemy, and joined the Socialists and Radicals in a combined left-wing platform. The Popular Front government went on to win a majority in the 1936 election. Unexpectedly, the Socialists won the most seats, and Blum thus went on to organize the government and become Prime Minister.

His government was remembered domestically for its successful pro-labor policies, including implementing the 40-hour workweek and paid vacation time, allowing the working class to partake in French culture to a greater extent. However, Blum is also an important figure in international relations in the run-up to World War 2. The Spanish Civil War broke out immediately prior to his ascension, and many on the left clamored for intervention on behalf of Spain’s own Popular Front government. Blum’s government adopted a posture of official neutrality after the bourgeoise Radicals and the British government refused to support intervention. According to Lacouture, some in Spain viewed the continuance of a Blum government as an important objective, and would rather that he stay in power but neutral rather than having his government replaced by a hostile one. They thought that the insurrection would be defeated quickly, and a Blum government was more useful in the long run. There is also some thought that Blum and the Socialists could have been more useful by resigning in the face of nonintervention and pressuring the government with an unequivocally interventionist stance, which I found to be interesting. I read this book because I wasn't sure what to think of Léon Blum, whether he operated effectively in the face of Fascism. I have always been influenced by the argument I first read in Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War, which is that the Spanish Republicans were caught in a negative feedback loop whereby the political parties who could secure outside armaments and supplies wielded greater influence; therefore the Communists were the most influential because they secured weapons from the USSR, which led to the Western democracies being less likely to assist, due to their fear of Communism. Thus, I look at the issue with a bias against the policies of the French and British governments. After the Nazis and Italian Fascists supported Franco in defiance of international nonintervention treaties, Blum’s government allowed supplies to flow from and through France.

Other than Spain, disagreements over which helped bring down his first government, Blum receives criticism (which Lacouture acknowledges) for clinging to pacifism and disarmament until the hour grew late. He did eventually reverse himself; though it was in his second government, which did not last long enough to effect meaningful change. In the diplomatic field, he drew closer in alliance to the British, which mean that he had to heed their Spanish veto. France did not have much credibility in Europe in the ‘30s, after having given up the Rhineland to Germany without a fight, so efforts to strengthen alliances with smaller powers were also unsuccessful, as was Blum’s to maneuver Mussolini away from his alliance with Hitler. He proposed an ambitious rearmament and economic centralization plan that was defeated in the Senate, and subsequently resigned. Events moved rapidly after that, and from his position outside of the government, he opposed the Munich agreement, and supported the government during the war. Voting (but not speaking) against Petain's seizure of power after France's rapid defeat, he was arrested by the Vichy government.

This led to arguably Blum's finest hour, as he was able to turn the tables on his prosecutors in the Riom show trial. This trial went poorly enough that the Nazis told the French to call it off; when Vichy France was taken over, Blum was sent as a political prisoner to Buchenwald. Against his own expectations, he survived this ordeal, and (to make a long story short), took his place after the war as an elder statesman of France. He served briefly as an interim Prime Minister during this period, in 1947, where he had the dubious honor of presiding over the first short fired in the Vietnam War, if we count the French portion. Despite believing de Gaulle to be the man of the hour during the war, he largely opposed him during the Fourth Republic. He played a role similar to the role of his old Popular Front: he tried to defend democracy against threats from the Gaullist right and the Stalinist left. He left parliament after being defeated for a fourth premiership, refusing to accommodate the Gaullists in order to gain power. He died in 1950, writing to the end.

It's tough to decide what to think of Léon Blum. On one level, the results speak for themselves: the defeat of the Spanish Republicans in the absence of support, the rapid fall of France during the war, the failure of the parliamentary Fourth Republic. On the other hand, he was presented with perhaps an impossible challenge, with only a divided French society at his disposal, seemingly incapable of rising to the challenge of Fascism. He led a divided left, with coalition allies with their own agendas and desire for power and a Socialist party that had many internal divisions of its own. Lacouture stresses the importance of the philosophies that Blum embodied through his political career: for one, he was a Marxist willing to work within the system, and believed that Socialists could exercise political power without simply using it as a tool to help bring about a revolution ASAP.  There was not a dichotomy in his mind between revolution and evolution. Second, and as a consequence of that, he was willing to sacrifice some of his ideological agenda to defend the democratic system, so that the workers could have a say in their government.

The book itself, as noted, was challenging in sections. Other sections were done very well: Lacouture quotes Blum's publications and speeches at length, which is not a writing best-practice but gives a decent feel for the man. He transcribed an interview with one of Blum’s old constituents, discussing his campaign style at home in the district. As an organizer, I enjoyed that. He also likes to quote the parliamentary record, mostly in service of demonstrating the toxicity of other French politicians, and the insults and anti-Semitism that Blum had to put up with continuously. This, plus the discussion of some minor points of controversy during Blum's government, led me to reflect on how ephemeral some of our political scandals are; those that create headlines (for newspapers then, for fundraising emails now) usually end up being utterly inconsequential in the larger thread of history. People opposed, even hated Blum for reasons that seem staggeringly unimportant now. Fortunately for historians like Lacouture, Blum ran his newspaper for decades, and thus provided plenty of material of his own to digest and analyze. Lacouture is clearly aware of his status as a tertiary source, as he quotes not only contemporary opinions on Blum, but the analyses of earlier historians. He is pro-Blum, perhaps even an apologist, but presents a fairly even-handed history, as far as I can tell.

PIERRE COT

This is the first book in a brief series I am embarking on to cover French history in the WW2 period. The figure I think of as linking these books together is Pierre Cot, a Radical Party politician who served as Blum's Air Minister. Cot, who has no biography in English, was on the left of the Radicals, and supported intervention in Spain and an alliance with Russia. He secretly shipped French warplanes to the Spanish Republicans, in defiance of some of the Blum government's stated nonintervention policies. There is a fun scene recounted where he and Blum attended a meeting for an noninterventionist agreement while a squadron of planes elsewhere embarked for Spain; Blum knew that each time Cot received a note, another plane had taken off, and dragged the meeting out long enough to cover all of them. Cot's covert Spanish support is how I first discovered him, as an aside in a Wikipedia article. Most of Cot’s minor appearances relate to his Spanish activities, though he also shows up briefly as an anticolonialist in the Fourth Republic.

Normally I wouldn't have given much of a thought to the position of Air Minister, but I happened (while reading the book on Zeppelins) to reread "The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama," a paper that, despite the very specific topic, has a lot to say about the image of the aviator in the interwar period (admittedly in the US). As the literal height of technological advancement, the aviator represented an ideal of technological progress and mastery of the world, which had implications for the conceptualization of the built environment, among other things. There is a brief segment on the aviator as the commanding ubermensch, and it is not a leap to draw the line from here to fascism, perhaps through (or at least with a detour to) Lindbergh. Indeed, along with the Army, the French Air Force was cited as being very right-wing, despite some of Cot's efforts at personnel changes. He's not a central figure of the book, but Cot is one of the (several) interesting members of Blum's cabinet. His continuing importance in my reading pile, though only as a secondary "character," will become clear.