Who remembers Leon Blum? Yes, the man of the Popular Front, of the forty-hour week and paid holidays. The man with the drooping mustaches, with his big hat and his spectacles placed on his nose. On the left, nowadays, it is easier to dispute the heritage of a Jaurès or a Mitterrand. Take the stairs that lead to the first floor of the Socialist Party headquarters in Ivry-sur-Seine, and you will come across the bust of the former and a few posters glorifying the latter. Blum, he is more rare there. However, it was to invoke it that Mitterrand wore the same felt hat and red scarf in 1971; Laurent Fabius will also try it, and even Jean-Luc Mélenchon when he was still at the PS. Pale imitators.
Political memory is cruel in that it selects its figures very unfairly. Blum is one of those forgotten by political history, those neglected by a national novel excessively influenced by Gaullism. “He is a victim of what the collective memory has wanted to retain of the two periods in which he lived, says Milo Levy-Bruhl, political philosopher, specialist in socialism and Blum. The interwar period, first , which collective memory only determines by the yardstick of its outcome: the defeat of 1940, then the war. The other period is the Fourth Republic, of which we retain only the black General de Gaulle and who persists.”
The man behind the CNR
Neglected, too, because Jewish. Léon Blum could not become a figure of reference in French politics because part of the pre-war public opinion – anti-Semitic – hardly changed its opinion about him in the post-war period. The anti-Semitic attacks he suffered remained strong after the Liberation, and even after his death in 1950. In the 1930s, he was the target of Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet and other future collaborationists. “It is as a Jew that one must see, conceive, hear, fight and bring down the Blum”, writes the first. They are the same ones who invent a hidden fortune, say that his real name would be Léon Karfukelstein. A lie that persisted even in the pages of the Petit Larousse which, in 1960, wrote in its vintage, in the word “Blum”: “Léon Karfunkelstein, dit Léon.” His son will take the iron to court, and will have the dictionary withdrawn from the bookstores.
Even the Communists have had the skin of his memory, claiming the paternity of the National Council of Resistance. “However, the CNR is the culmination of a programmatic reflection of the left begun in the 1930s, of which a very large number of measures already appeared in the program of the Popular Front (nationalisations, salary increases, the status of the press). The intellectual influence of Blum on the CNR is major to the point that Daniel Mayer, one of his most faithful friends, will become Minister of Labor and Social Security”, continues Milo Levy-Bruhl. And it was in his jail in Puy-de-Dôme where the government of Pétain locked him up that the same Blum wrote in 1942 to some socialist comrades, as well as to De Gaulle, on the need to imagine a common program from the Liberation.
lost souls
Last May, when Mélenchon signed the Nupes agreement with the other left-wing parties, the rebellious believe that 1936 resonates. And one wonders even in The Obs : “Mélenchon in Blum’s costume?” View of the mind. If the forces of the left united in the 1930s, it was above all against the progression of fascism in Europe. Conversely, the logic of the Nupes was that of union for endogenous reasons: to avoid disappearing and to ensure a presence in the second round of the legislative elections, when the RN continues to strengthen its bastions.
It is this Blum that the journalist and producer Philippe Collin narrates in “Blum, a heroic life”*, an exciting podcast from France Inter. A series that meets with an unexpected triumph given the modest place it occupies in our collective memory. As if the souls lost on the left, those who refuse to choose between social democracy and left populism, between Holland and Mélenchon, saw in this disappeared socialist, committed reformist and intransigent republican, a solution for better days.
*Léon Blum, a heroic life (1872-1950), a France Inter series, signed Philippe Collin and produced by Violaine Ballet. 9 episodes of 60 minutes. Available on the Radio France app and podcast platforms.