Jewish Biography: Leon Blum, Natural Socialist

By Alex Gordon

HAIFA, Israel — After the defeat of the Hungarian and Bavarian revolutions in 1919, European socialists differed from their Soviet counterparts. Before the establishment of the “socialist camp” in Eastern Europe, the percentage of socialists among Jews in Europe was small, but the percentage of Jews among socialists far exceeded their percentage in the population of their countries.

The hero of the essay, Léon Blum, three times Prime Minister of France, is a Western-style socialist. In 1901, Blum wrote: “The collective impulse of the Jews leads to revolution; their criticalism (I use the word in its most sublime sense) inclines them to the negation of every idea, every traditional form that does not agree with the facts or cannot be justified by the intellect. The Jews throughout their long and unhappy history have been strengthened by the hope of ‘imminent justice,’ they have been convinced that one day the world will be governed according to reason; one law will be established for all, so that everyone will get what he deserves. Is this not the spirit of Socialism? It is the original spirit of this race.” He considered Jews to be “natural socialists” and believed that their destiny was to lead humanity to the triumph of socialism. In 1902, Blum joined the Socialist Party of France and became a friend of the party’s leader, Jean Jaurès.

Famous socialists are often born into capitalist families. Léon Blum was born in Paris on April 9, 1872, into the Jewish family of a wealthy Alsatian silk manufacturer. At the age of four, he was placed in a private boarding school, and in 1882 ̶ in the prestigious Lycée Charlemagne. He was a representative of the “golden” youth, belonging to an elite that was embarrassed by its prosperity and concerned about the situation of the people. After receiving an education at the Higher Normal School, he began studying law at the Sorbonne and graduated with honors in 1894.

Until 1919, Blum worked as a lawyer, at the same time engaging in literary activity. Among his writings are New Conversations between Goethe and Eckermann (1901); On Marriage (1907), and Stendhal and Baylism (1914). He became an expert on the work of Stendhal (Henri Bayle). Leon Blum, a young lawyer and civil servant, believed that the state should implement the Great Revolution’s principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity” in the case of his family’s fellow Alsatian and countryman, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Recalling his state of mind during the Dreyfus affair, Blum wrote: “I do not think I have experienced a greater shock in my whole life.”

After the conclusion of the Dreyfus affair, one Jew remained an unyielding patriot of France and a faithful servant of its army. It was the unjustly convicted, not guilty of anything but love for the French homeland, Alsatian Jew, demoted captain of the French army Alfred Dreyfus, a prisoner for many years, the most famous Jewish defendant after Jesus, slandered as none of his countrymen and after rehabilitation made to the rank of major of artillery. Fighting bravely on the front lines of World War I, Lt. Col. Dreyfus was the greatest patriot of France and its army, which humiliated him, slandered him, and destroyed his military career, family life, and health. It was the army that launched the campaign against Dreyfus that became the most important antisemitic action in Europe between the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s pogroms and the World Wars.

After the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus on October 15, 1894, Blum’s life changed. He was not yet a socialist, had not yet come to the conclusion that Jews were “natural socialists.” The opinion then on the agenda of the French nation was: the Jews are “natural traitors to the fatherland.”

After the rehabilitation of Dreyfus, Jewish disillusionment with the case was enormous. The emancipation introduced by the French Revolution proved to be unreliable. France was split into two camps, Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Reflecting on the Dreyfus affair, on the aggression of the anti-Dreyfusards, Blum puzzledly asked: “What drove them to do this? What drove them? Even today, 35 years later, when I reflect on the past with a mature, cold rationality, it seems to me that I still do not have some of the elements of an answer to this question.”

The anti-Dreyfusards were driven by antisemitism. Blum writes: “For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, in ‘those two agonizing years’ of struggle for the freedom of one man convicted on false charges, ‘All other life in the country seemed to stand still.’ It seemed as if in these two years of moral confusion, of real moral civil war […] everyone was concerned with only one problem: in personal feelings and in interpersonal relations everything was strained, turned upside down and spilled out. […] The Dreyfus affair had become an interhuman conflict, smaller and more protracted than the French Revolution, but hardly less pathetic.”

In 1935, Blum wrote Memories of the Dreyfus Affair. He left a testimony about the attitude of the French Jews toward Dreyfus’ accusation of treason: “The Jews accepted the Dreyfus accusation as final and just. They did not discuss the Case among themselves: they did not raise the question, but rather fled from it. A great misfortune happened to the Jews. They accepted it without saying a word and expecting that time and silence would level the impact of events. […] The general feeling could be expressed in the formula: “This is something in which the Jews should not interfere.” […] They showed patriotism, touching patriotism, respect for the army, trust in its heads. […] There was a selfish and timid precaution, which could be characterized with even harsher words. The Jews did not want to believe that they had to defend Dreyfus because he was a Jew. They did not want to be attributed attitudes on the basis of race or because of solidarity. Most of all, they did not want to defend another Jew, so as not to supply fuel for the antisemitic passions that were running rampant.”

Theodor Herzl drew a national lesson from the Dreyfus affair: the indictment of an entire people on the example of one Jew necessitates the creation of a Jewish state. Blum’s conclusion in 1935: despite his understanding of the Jewish spring of the libel, the main point of the Dreyfus case, in his view, was that one innocent man was unjustly convicted: “The unfortunate must be set free, truth must prevail.” Blum supported Jaures’ statement that “socialism is the supreme assertion of individual human rights.” Jaurès’s support for Dreyfus, which distinguished him from his leftist associates, made the Socialist Party appealing to Leon. Blum’s focus is the grief of an innocently convicted man; Herzl’s focus is the grief of an innocently convicted nation. Blum is the lawyer-defender of the innocently convicted, the socialist-defender of the oppressed in France, Herzl is the liberator of the Jews from cases like Dreyfus in their country.

Blum was a particular socialist-patriot. In 1900 he wrote: “There is no one among serious socialists who doubts that Marx’s metaphysics is mediocre and that his economic doctrine is every day refuted by time.” He rejected Marx’s contemptuous approach to nations and fatherland. Three years after the October Revolution was accomplished in Russia, Blum vehemently attacked “the Moscow system which represented terrorism,” […] “They use mass terror not as a last resort, not as a measure for the defense of public safety, but as the chief instrument of government.”

A doctor of law at the Sorbonne and an ardent supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution, he decided to leave literature and law and set out to transform France for the victory of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” The death of Jaurès in 1914 and disappointment with the policies of then-Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau prompted Blum to embark on the path of political struggle. In 1919 he became chairman of the executive committee of the French Socialist Party and a member of the Chamber of Deputies. He opposed the Socialist Party’s joining the Communist International, became the party’s leader, and led the Socialist faction in Parliament.

In 1936, Blum formed a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and Radicals, the Popular Front. It won a major victory in the 1936 elections, and Blum became prime minister. Historian, journalist and Resistance member Geneviève Tabouy describes the newly elected prime minister this way: “Léon Blum created a sensation. None of the ministers and delegates present had imagined that the current leader of the largest political French labor party was so different from Jean Jaurès! Instead of being a tribune inflaming the masses, the head of the Popular Front turned out to be an elegant man with an intelligent face, with a soft voice, with a restrained passion, who inspires a special respect for himself thanks to his flexible and inquisitive mind and brilliant culture.” He was prime minister of France from 1936-1938. Shortly before taking over the government in 1936, Blum was attacked by “right-wing” militants. The assailants dragged him out of his car and beat him to a pulp. He later wrote, “I now understand what it means to be lynched.” The rise of Blum in the 1930s was a striking phenomenon, an anomaly rather than the norm. France had a tradition of anti-Dreyfusards.

In 1936, the nationalist Charles Morras, an academician stripped of that title for supporting Marshal Pétain, called Blum’s rise to power a victory for the “Jewish gang.” The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who lived in France, wrote: “Antisemitism is on the rise even in France, the country most imbued with humanitarian ideas, where it was defeated after the Dreyfus affair. There is a growing number of Frenchmen who cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that Léon Blum is a Jew, even though he is one of the most honest, idealistic and cultured political figures.”

Blum opposed the 1938 Munich Agreement on the partition of Czechoslovakia. Blum’s government fell in 1938 in part because of strong opposition from industrialists and financiers and lukewarm support from communists who denounced his policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Blum feared that involvement in the Spanish Civil War might lead to civil war in France itself.

In December 1938, at a Socialist Party conference, he called for strengthening the country’s defense capabilities. He was supported by almost no one – most politicians were against increasing the defense budget, considering it an aggressive foreign policy. The farsightedness of the former prime minister became evident when it was too late – the Nazis had invaded France.

On October 3, 1940, the Vichy administration issued the anti-Jewish Decree on the Jews. This monstrous decree did not arouse much resistance in the country. There was little reaction to segregation, apartheid in France. The Nobel Prize winner in literature, André Gide, “defender of justice” and “ruler of minds,” remained silent. He did not follow the example of his famous compatriot and colleague Emile Zola. The anti-Dreyfusards triumphed over the Dreyfusards 35 years after their defeat in the process of the century.

On March 29, 1941, the Vichy government created a General Secretariat for Jewish Affairs. On June 2, 1941, the French authorities decided to deport Jews who did not have French citizenship to transfer camps, from where they were transferred to Nazi death camps. The slogans “Death to the Jews!” heard during the demotion of Captain Dreyfus 45 years before became a guide to action for French collaborators. There were no more Dreyfusards in France.

When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Blum, a Jew and socialist, refused to leave the Republic. When the National Assembly convened in Vichy, he was one of 80 deputies who voted against granting dictatorial powers to Pétain. Blum had been held under arrest since September 1940. The Vichy government labeled him a perpetrator of the war and put him on trial. Speaking before the tribunal, Blum said: “I do not think you can eliminate Jews from French history and public life. We have shared and firmly defended the democratic and republican ideals of our country since the Revolution of 1789. We French Jews are not going to give up our heritage.” In April 1943, the former prime minister was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was held for two years. In May 1945, American troops liberated him. His brother René died at Auschwitz. Blum was head of the provisional government of the Republic from December 1946 to January 1947.

Blum’s view that Jews are “natural socialists” contradicted the natural and popular view that they are “natural capitalists.” Right-wing antisemites saw Blum as the embodiment of Jewish radicalism, while many on the left criticized him as a secret agent of the Jewish bourgeoisie. One-third of the Parisian bourgeoisie were Jews, and it was a popular left-wing belief at the time that Jews controlled the government’s finances. Blum was also disliked by French aristocrats. He considered himself a “natural democrat,” but he was perceived as a “natural dictator.”

After World War II, Blum became the target of criticism by left-wing and right-wing antisemites in a country that had recently extradited its own and foreign Jews to the Nazis. The right reproached him for “abandoning lofty ideas that demanded self-sacrifice” and for seemingly aiming to transform the country into a “society of insurance companies.” The left (mostly Communists) for his inconsistent commitment to socialist ideals. Political opponents on the left, especially Communists, considered him a renegade. Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party, called him a “cunning politician,” a “master of slander,” a “traitor” who buried the great cause of the Popular Front to please his “capitalist friends.” For the Right, Blum was a hated figure as a Jew and a socialist.

From time to time, Blum returned to literature. André Gide, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, had been friends with Blum since his youth, visited him at home, and helped him in his literary endeavors by editing his individual works. In early 1940, Andre Gide published a diary, which he kept for 40 years. It turned out that the coryphaeus of French literature was not only a personal enemy of Blum, but also an ardent antisemite. The famous writer, “ruler of the minds” of the French “progressive” left, wrote that the “outsiders” in France (meaning Jewish writers) do not and cannot have the right to be called French writers. He included Blum in the list of the “disenfranchised,” even though all of his works were written only in French….

“Natural Socialist” Léon Blum “naturally” provoked antisemitism on the right and left. He and other French Jewish leaders underestimated French antisemitism on both the right and left wings, but in 1947, thanks to Blum’s efforts, France voted at the UN to partition Palestine and create Israel. He died on March 30, 1950. His biographer Pierre Birnbaum described Blum as a “state Jew” who capitalized on the universalist and egalitarian values of the post-revolutionary French state […] to win emancipation through public service. He characterized Blum’s political outlook as “universalist,” for the latter saw no distinction between “Jewish” and universal problems.

Blum was the head of the French Zionist Union. He saw no contradiction in this and in a speech in 1929 he told his audience: “I am a Zionist because I am a Frenchman, a Jew and a supporter of socialism, for the present Jewish Palestine is an unprecedented and unique combination of the oldest human traditions with the most daring and recent search for freedom and social justice.” Unlike Dreyfus, Blum was aware that he was a Jew, did not hide his nationality, did not renounce the people. Knowing the famous prisoner’s alienation from the Jewish people, Blum ironically remarked, “If Dreyfus had not been Dreyfus, he might not have been Dreyfusard.”

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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.