On December 27, 1894, thousands of spectators braved the winter chill and massed outside the main courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris. They gathered to witness the humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer just convicted of passing secret documents to Germany. Through a fence, they saw Dreyfus standing in full dress uniform before a line of soldiers. They watched a Republican guardsman strip the epaulets and buttons from Dreyfus’ tunic, and break his sword in two.
As Dreyfus left the courtyard, the onlookers shouted abuse at him—to their eyes, he was a traitor who had sold out France to the hated Boche. It did not matter that Dreyfus hated the Germans as much as they did, and had joined the army to liberate his native Alsace from German occupation. It did not matter that Dreyfus professed his innocence, and that the evidence against him was shaky and circumstantial. What did matter was that Dreyfus was a Jew—and for the jeering crowd and millions of other Frenchman, that was proof enough.
Léon Blum, a young lawyer and civil servant, thought otherwise. He believed Dreyfus had been denied a fair trial by the French Republic—a government bound by law to treat its citizens equally, be they Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. As Blum advanced from post to post in the French state, to eventually become the first Jewish leader of a major European power—Disraeli was a baptized Anglican—Dreyfus’ mistreatment remained a touchstone for him, a reminder that politics must "move from the injustice done to an individual to social injustice more broadly."
Blum is the subject of a new biography by Pierre Birnbaum, the first to be published in English for some time. The book has two aims: to explain Blum’s importance in French history, and to acknowledge the centrality of Blum’s Judaism to his political career.
Birnbaum, a professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, succeeds on both counts. Léon Blum is lively, elegant, and concise. But its thematic structure—which skips around in time—can be a headache. So too can Birnbaum’s occasional lurches into the groves of academe—"[i]t was in a sense the realization of the Saint-Simonian project of which Lucien Leuwen dreamed" —which will be indecipherable to lay readers.
This is a shame, because Blum should be of great interest to everyone, not just intellectuals. Born to a wealthy cloth merchant in 1872, Blum excelled at school and eventually received degrees from the Sorbonne and Paris Law Faculty. His education made him part of the Republic’s meritocratic elite, and Blum spent his pre-political career as a clerk, and then a judge, at the Council of State, France’s "highest administrative law body."
As Birnbaum implies, it was Blum’s melding of his intellect with social graces that launched him out of the bureaucracy into politics. While working as a lawyer, Blum moonlighted as a critic for literary journals and mingled in the highest circles of Parisian intellectual life. Between reviews of Poe, Dickens, and Tolstoy, Blum sparred with Proust (a contemporary and frenemy) and wrote a then-scandalous book, On Marriage (a "paean to love, desire, physical pleasure, and liberation of the instincts"). His somewhat belated support for Dreyfus made him part of an elite political tribe that included Jean Jaurès, a parliamentary deputy and leader of the Socialist Party.
Blum believed Jaurès’ claim that "socialism [was] the supreme affirmation of individual rights." The logic went something like this: socialist policies saved the poor from poverty. Free from crippling want, they could then participate in the democratic processes of the Republic. As Birnbaum astutely observes, Jaures’ appeal to individual rights resonated strongly with Blum, in large part because of the Dreyfus Affair. Many Frenchmen sought to deny Dreyfus his rights solely on the basis of his ethnic background. This was anathema to Blum, both as a Jew and as a lawyer, and Jaurès’ support for Dreyfus—in opposition to some of his leftist compatriots—made the Socialist Party quite attractive to Blum.
So, Blum joined it, and in 1919, left the Council of State to run for a deputy’s seat. He won—and revealed that his socialism came with a twist. A fervent patriot, Blum rejected Marx’s disdain for nations and nationhood. Blum’s nationalism caused him to forcefully attack newly formed communist parties in France, and the USSR itself. In 1920—a mere three years after the October Revolution—Blum inveighed against "the Moscow system," which
conceive[d] of terrorism not only as an ultimate recourse, not as an extreme measure of public safety . . . not as a vital necessity for the revolution, but as a means of government.
For Blum, socialism would be French and Republican. And, under Blum’s leadership, the Socialist Party remained just that—independent of international communism and a defender of the French state. But the 1920s and 1930s were not a good time for social democrats. Communism had great appeal in France, as did a mix of right-wing ideologies. The latter gained newfound support in the 1930s. The far right had nothing but contempt for the Republic, and sought to replace it with a powerful king or military strongman.
With this potential disaster in mind, Blum broke with his early denunciation of the communists and joined with them to form a Popular Front in the 1936 elections. Birnbaum handles this about-face as gracefully as an admirer of Blum can, by pointing to events that justify it. The right not only launched verbal attacks on Blum—its press, gutter and otherwise, hurled anti-Semitic vitriol throughout the campaign—it actually attacked him: he was brutally assaulted by a right-wing mob in Paris.
Even so, Blum’s legitimation of the communists—the Popular Front won, making Blum prime minister—is hard to swallow today. Blum’s new allies wanted to destroy democracy just as much as his right-wing enemies. The lesson of Blum’s choice is that men, when faced with desperate options, often sacrifice principle to forestall a fate that could be worse.
Alas, Blum’s cabinet, which governed from 1936 to 1937, did little to prevent the terrible fate of 1940 from coming to pass. Birnbaum does not address the Popular Front’s distrust of the army and refusal to increase defense spending or arms production at this crucial period. While Blum didn’t share the reflexive anti-military attitude of some of his colleagues, he and his government must bear some of the blame for the disorganized condition of French forces at the start of World War II.
France’s fall to the Nazis placed Blum in great danger, but he refused to leave. He voted against the grant of sweeping powers to Marshal Pétain, and voiced his support for General de Gaulle. Soon after, the Vichy regime arrested Blum and put him on trial. Birnbaum’s account of the proceeding is gripping. Blum represented himself, proudly proclaimed his status as a socialist and a Jew, and stated:
You can of course condemn us. … I do not think—this may seem boastful—that you can eliminate us from the history of this country. … We stand in what has been this country’s tradition since the French Revolution. We did not disrupt the legacy, we did not break the chain, we welded it back together and made it more secure.
The government deported Blum to Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned for two years. American soldiers freed him from captivity in May 1945, and Blum remained politically active in liberated France until his death in 1950.
With anti-Semitism ascendant in France once more, Blum’s life could not be more relevant. The universalist values he espoused—that Jews can be French as much as any other ethnic and religious group—is the heart of everything the French Revolution stood for, and what the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy so shamefully betrayed. And it is the spirit Manuel Valls, the current prime minister, recently invoked when he said: "[I]f 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure."