The “Blum Phenomenon”
Léon Blum. Humanist in Politics.
by Joel Colton.
Knopf. 512 pp. $10.00.
At a time when Laborites and Socialists in France are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Front Populaire, there has arrived from America the first biography of Léon Blum to be written by a historian. It is not surprising that this notable work should come from the United States: not only has the science of history enjoyed a more prodigious development in America than in France, but Léon Blum himself has remained personally popular among broad layers of American public opinion. This popularity is chiefly notable among Democrats, for whom Blum represents a kind of French Roosevelt (an identification which would have made the head of the French Socialist party very happy, for he did in fact nourish the hope of doing for France what Roosevelt is credited with doing for his own country). Then there is the American Jewish community, which is grateful to Blum for having, at a decisive moment, openly supported the State of Israel. And lastly, Blum maintains a certain reputation among those trade unions which still represent elements that are not only liberal but more or less permeated with the ideals of socialization, and, in a more general way, among average Americans who find three of their strongest convictions united in the figure of Blum: anti-Fascism, anti-Communism, and optimistic idealism.
Joel Colton tells us he worked for ten years on his biography of Blum. This is easy to believe when one considers the volume of information he has collected, and the difficulties engendered by the fact that hardly any unpublished manuscripts were available to him, aside from the documents gleaned from the personal papers of André Blumel (Blum’s chef de cabinet) and of Robert and Jeanne-Léon Blum. It is known that, during the Occupation, Blum’s private records were moved by the Nazis from Paris to Germany. A German document which was among the evidence presented at the inquiry prior to the Nuremburg Trials, and which referred to a portion of the Blum papers, leads us to believe that these records were at least examined, if not thoroughly analyzed, by the Nazis. After the war, however, they were no longer to be found. Possibly they were destroyed during an air raid, but it is also possible that they were transported by the Gestapo to its Silesian hideout, and subsequently seized by the Soviets; in the latter case, they would now be deposited—or, I should say, drowned, buried under tons of other documents—in Moscow. Recently, the Soviets have begun to return such documents to important French deportees (without, of course, giving any precise details, at least not publicly, about how they came to be found), and we may hope that the Blum papers will be among those unearthed in the future.
In any event, deprived of unpublished manuscript sources, Colton had no choice but to plunge into the sea of material written by and about Blum. He has done this with exceptional conscientiousness, treating an immense mass of information accurately and in a dauntlessly methodical spirit. There is not a single aspect of Blum’s political personality which Colton has not located, classed, integrated, and interpreted. Consider, for example, the difficult subject of Blum’s policy of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War. As Colton points out, Blum insisted until the end of his life that only by such a policy could there have been any hope of preserving both the Spanish republic and a state of peace. Colton sets forth a meticulous account of Blum’s activity between the 20th and the 25th of July 1936, including his visit to England—scheduled before the outbreak of the Spanish affair—where the French Premier was given all kinds of advice pointing toward caution. Although it appears that the English did not issue an ultimatum, “there is no doubt that he [Blum] left London deeply troubled by the mood of the English officials, and shaken in his determination to aid Spain, even though he was not yet ready to abandon his original project.”
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The opposition unleashed in France on July 23 came not only from the Right, which was represented by newspapers like L’Echo de Paris, and Le Jour, but—what was much more painful to Blum—from a number of Radical representatives and ministers as well. Jules Jeanneney, president of the senate, reminded Blum that several months earlier, in March, when France’s direct, immediate security had been threatened by the affair with Germany over the left bank of the Rhine, the country had hesitated and finally yielded; it would therefore be preposterous to embark now on a policy which might conceivably lead to a “war for Spain.” “All of us here,” Jeanneney added, “are certain that, should affairs in Spain give rise to any complications in Europe, England would not follow us.”
All in all, it took three successive cabinet meetings and several turns of fortune before French policy toward Spain became irreversibly committed to non-intervention. According to Colton, the major factor in this decision was not Blum’s reliance on the English (“While he was a Vichy prisoner during World War II, Blum tended to discount the dependence upon Britain as a decisive element”), but the domestic threat of civil war. Blum was well aware of the potentially dangerous split in French opinion: “I fear that half of France would not follow me.” Colton concludes his analysis by emphasizing the fact that Blum, as a disciple of Jaurès, thought he ought never to act as if war were inevitable: as a result, he found it unacceptable to run the risk of touching off, as a preventive measure, a defensive war against Fascism, as the Communists had urged him to do.
Colton’s treatment of this episode in Blum’s career is typical of his method throughout Léon Blum, Humanist in Politics. By analyzing each problem in its rich complexity, and by distinguishing clearly among the various forces at work in a given situation, Colton is able to assess with considerable precision both the short- and the long-range consequences of Blum’s actions, and to achieve a perspective from which to make competent and reliable historical judgments.
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And yet, having finished this book, having added considerably to my knowledge about Blum—his behavior, the different stages in his life, his virtues, his greatness, his defects, his failures—I have the uneasy feeling that I still have not learned anything new about who Blum was, what sort of man and politician, and what I ought to think of him. In the riddle of these accumulated facts, I can manage to find neither any meaning nor any integral organization. Is this the historian’s fault? Partly, it is. I do not blame Colton’s “total data” approach: it is very well executed and in some ways indispensable. Nor may Colton be faulted for the way he handles individual facts within this mass of information. But his treatment of Blum as a whole reveals a number of important shortcomings.
Colton devotes thirty-five pages of his book to the period in Léon Blum’s life up to 1914; eighteen pages to the period from the war to the split in the unified Socialist party (1914-1920); thirty-seven pages to the period extending up to the establishment of the Front Populaire (1920-1934). This amounts to a total of ninety pages for the entire period preceding Blum’s accession to the office of chief of state. On the other hand, 175 pages are devoted to the period from the failure of the Front Populaire to Blum’s death (1938-1950). This reckoning reveals, as I see it, a profound imbalance. One can certainly understand that Colton should be especially interested in describing the trying times when Leon Blum showed himself to be admirably brave, firm, and lucid; he had, after all, irreproachable eyewitness testimony concerning the years of World War II, the trial at Riom, Blum’s imprisonment, deportation, illness, and old age; and he may have borne in mind Blum’s own phrase, “Illness teaches serenity, like prison or old age; and I have not missed any of these schools.” But this does not alter the fact that during those years of suffering, in which he showed himself to be a figure commanding our respect, Blum was only pursuing faithfully a path he had previously proposed to take. His greatness then was to persevere, not to innovate. And so it seems out of proportion to devote to this later period the meticulous attention which Colton has deemed it necessary to do. By contrast, the pages devoted to the long formative years before Blum entered politics are doubly disappointing, both because there are so few of them, and because Colton seems to have forgotten one of the most remarkable details of Blum’s career: he did not enter politics until the age of forty-two.
It is perhaps his slighting of this significant fact which also leads Colton to suggest that Blum “always considered himself an amateur in political matters.” That statement appears to me to be absolutely incorrect; it was not Blum who thought of himself as a dilettante, but his opponents. On the contrary, it seems to me that once he had agreed to assume political responsibilities—first as leader of his party and then as head of the government—Blum devoted himself to his task with an energy and consistency which were not always justified by the mediocrity of French political life at that time.
Why, then, in 1914, did Blum abandon a thoroughly satisfying life as a government official and respected literary critic? Two factors conspired to lead him to this decision, factors which are related but which caused a shock to different areas of his moral and political conscience: the death of Jaurès, and the war.
During the first ten years of the century, Blum had not, to be sure, been a stranger to the French socialist movement: he had attended the solidarity congress and had, moreover, edited a history of French Labor and socialist congresses. But at that time, following the lead of Jaurès, whom he considered an illustrious leader and with whom he felt a close personal tie, Blum was content to put his technical skill as an experienced jurist at the service of his party; having no political ambitions, and agreeing completely with Jaurès’s thought, goals, and methods, Blum did not feel compelled to “play politics.”
But Jaurès vanished tragically, and then World War I broke out—a war which, by Blum’s own admission, created a turmoil in his innermost being. The fantastic wave of patriotism which, during the first days of August 1914, swept all the energies of the French people along in its wake, carried away Blum as well. Exempted from military service because of his extreme nearsightedness, Blum became chef de cabinet under the socialist minister, Marcel Sembat; the die had been cast.
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Because he neglects to deal adequately with these early events, it seems to me that Colton is partially responsible for the fact that, despite his enormous efforts, one derives from this book no clear idea of Blum’s personality or work. Ultimately, however, we must also acknowledge the peculiarly elusive nature of his subject. The “Blum phenomenon,” like the “Jaurès phenomenon,” is one which stubbornly resists analysis or confident conclusions. One can be both convinced and puzzled, admiring and unsure, approving and dissatisfied. Whereas in the case of Lenin, for instance, the biases are clear, the strategic and tactical intentions evident, and the gains and losses open to definite assessment, for Jaurès as for Blum the tally of good and evil, credit and debit, is difficult to establish and always arguable. This is so, perhaps, for two main reasons.
The ideas, first of all, which Blum continued to hold about Marxism and socialism, the role of politics in social life, the historical process, and the rhythms and forms of economic mutation, were ideas he had inherited and which he shared with everyone who had been immersed in the climate of the Second International prior to 1914. Also, throughout his entire political life, he had to withstand the challenge to those ideas being posed by the Bolshevik version of socialism. In fact, it was only after Blum died in March 1950, that the world was at last permitted to learn officially and incontestably that the man who had delivered the Tours address had not been completely wrong: socialism’s appointment with freedom had indeed been missed in the Soviet Union.
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A second reason for the complexity of the “Blum phenomenon” was undoubtedly the unappeasable taste for extremism manifested at that time by the French political sensibility, or at least by the sensibility of the opposition in France, for whom it was long a dogma that no major structural change could be accomplished except by methods that were not only revolutionary but revolutionary in an immediate, direct, and global way; that nothing—especially not the eloquence of facts—could impinge on the rights of ideological coherence and general philosophy. In this case, too, historical irony has willed that the capacity of French politics for extremism should be exhausted only after Blum’s death: in the 50’s and 60’s France has finally discovered the virtues of pragmatism and flexibility, while retaining the inner presence of a “grand design” as a source of energy and renewed vigor. But historical irony is cruel: now that France is at last offering opportunities to the type of socialist which Léon Blum represented at such an unfavorable time, it seems that this type of man has disappeared, or at least that France is no longer aware of the existence of the few who remain.
