Léon Blum

André Léon Blum (French: [ɑ̃dʁe leɔ̃ blum]; 9 April 1872 – 30 March 1950) was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister of France. As a Jew, he was heavily influenced by the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century.

Blum was a disciple of socialist leader Jean Jaurès and became his successor after Jaurès' assassination in 1914. Despite Blum's relatively short tenures, his time in office was very influential. As Prime Minister in the left-wing Popular Front government in 1936–1937, he provided a series of major economic and social reforms. Blum declared neutrality in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) to avoid the civil conflict spilling over into France itself. Once out of office in 1938, he denounced the appeasement of Germany.

When Germany defeated France in 1940, Blum became a staunch opponent of Vichy France and was tried (but never judged) by its government on charges of treason. He was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp and after the war resumed a transitional leadership role in French politics, helping to bring about the French Fourth Republic, until his death in 1950.

Blum was born in 1872 in Paris to a moderately prosperous, middle class, assimilated Jewish family in the mercantile business. His father Abraham, a merchant, was born in Alsace and moved to Paris in 1848. Blum's mother, Adèle-Marie-Alice Picart was born in Paris, but her family likewise originated in Alsace. Blum's mother observed Orthodox rituals faithfully, but his father was less religious, being only seen in the synagogue on the high holy days. Blum came from a family that very much identified with the republic, and as a child he attended the public funeral services of defenders of French republican values such as Léon Gambetta in 1882 and Victor Hugo in 1885. He came to identify with the universalism of French republicanism, which portrayed France as an especially enlightened nation that was leading the rest of the world in the right direction, and where French civilization was open to all who were willing to embrace the French language and culture regardless of religion, ethnicity, and race. Blum himself was not especially religious, but was always very proud to be Jewish and frequently affirmed his Jewish identity when subjected to anti-Semitic insults. Blum was more influenced by the rationalistic and anticlerical ideas of the French Enlightenment than by Judaism. Blum always saw himself as both French and Jewish, and he took a special pride in the heritage of the French Revolution, which for him marked the beginning of a civic and secular society in which religion did not matter. He wrote that as a Jew he belonged "to a race which owed to the French Revolution human liberty and equality, something that could never be forgotten".

Blum first attended the Lycée Charlemagne, but was so successful academically that he was transferred over to the Lycée Henri-IV, the favored school of the elite. Blum entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1890 and excelled there, but he dropped out a year later, entering instead the Faculty of Law. He attended the University of Paris and became both a lawyer and literary critic. Starting in 1892, he became the critic for La Revue Blanche magazine, where he reviewed works by Anatole France, Pierre Louÿs, Jules Renard and André Gide. His reviews made him famous in Parisian intellectual circles, where he became known as a reviewer with interesting and provocative views about the state of modern French literature. He also contributed poetry to the magazines La Conque and Le Banquet. Blum was greatly influenced by Stendhal whose novels he loved, and he was to become one of the world's leading experts on Stendhal whom he often wrote about. As a young man, he affected the style of an aesthete "dandy" and was an associate of the writer Marcel Proust. Proust did not have much respect for Blum as a writer, whom he dismissed as "mediocre". Blum was usually dressed as a dandy in the salons of Paris, wearing an expensive suit, top hat, gloves and a monocle. His way of dressing led to the young Blum often being denounced as a homosexual, with the poet Charles Maurras calling Blum "the maiden" in one of his poems. Throughout his life, Blum was always subjected to accusations that he was gay, but it appears that the effeminate style that he fancied in his youth was more of an act of youthful rebellion.

Blum described himself as "a vulnerable and fragile being, 'like a girl in a novel', an overtly delicate plant". To rebut the charge that he was too "soft" and a homosexual, Blum sought to prove his "strength" by engaging in duels with rivals. In 1896, Blum married Lise Bloch at the Grand Synagogue of Paris. He was initially convinced of the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus who had been convicted of treason for Germany in 1894, but in the late summer of 1897 Lucien Herr convinced Blum that Dreyfus was innocent and as an intellectual with influence he had the duty to take a stand in favor of Dreyfus. Starting in September 1897, Blum became deeply involved in the Dreyfus Affair, where he resolved to "restore the innocent man's good name". Blum was in contact with Georges Clemenceau, who served as the lawyer for the newspaper L'Aurore and Fernand Labori, who served as the lawyer for Émile Zola, writing legal briefs for both Clemenceau and Labori. Blum attended the trial in 1898 of Zola for his letter J'Accuse...! published in L'Aurore. Blum tried to recruit Maurice Barrès, whom he called "my guide" and "my teacher" to French literature to the Dreyfusard cause, and was greatly hurt when Barrès told him he was an anti-Dreyfusard. Blum described himself as "almost in mourning" when Barrès rejected his appeal, and instead wrote the article "The Protest of the Intellectuals" condemning the "Jewish signers" who championed the cause of Dreyfus. The Dreyfus Affair marked the beginning of Blum's interest in socialism, which promoted internationalism and secularism. Blum became convinced that antisemitism was largely the work of the Catholic Church and the upper classes, and socialism in France would end antisemitism forever. Despite all of the passions created by the Dreyfus Affair, in 1899 he wrote he had no fears of "a Saint Bartholomew's Day of the Jews", writing that pogroms were possible "in Poland, Galicia, or Romania or maybe in Algiers, but not in France".

Between 1905 and 1907 he wrote Du Mariage a highly controversial (for the period) and much talked about critical essay about the problems with traditional marriage as envisioned in the late 19th century, with its religious and economic background and strong stress on women remaining virgins until their marriage day. Blum stated that both men and women should enjoy a period of "polygamic" free sex life in order to experience a more mature and stable relationship during later married life: “For both men and women, the life of adventure must precede the life of marriage, the life of instinct must precede the life of reason”

Unsurprisingly he was targeted by the then-powerful Catholic Church in France, in the wake of the turmoil caused by the separation between church and state implemented by Émile Combes in 1905. Far right and royalist politicians and agitators, and most preeminently Charles Maurras, were incensed, and pelted mostly anti-semitic insults and public outrage at Blum, famously dubbing him "le pornographe du Conseil d'état" as Blum was by then a counsellor of this institution. Although Blum's views are nowadays accepted and mostly mainstream in many developed countries, the book remained an object of scandal long after WWI and the shift to the emancipation of women. On 14 October 1912, Blum fought a duel with swords with a rival theater critic Pierre Weber, which ended with Weber surrendering after Blum wounded him.