MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
FEW statesmen of recent years have obtained such tributes as those which have been evoked by the death of Leon Blum. His life-long friend, Edouard Herriot, in a splendid funeral oration, in which he referred to his undeviating courage and his deep compassion, adjourned the National Assembly as a sign of mourning. In England we have honoured his memory as that of one of the firmest friends we ever had ; and in truth Leon Blum would always preach to his countrymen the precept which Talley- rand somewhat belatedly recognised : "Remember always to keep on England's side." In the United States he has been acclaimed, and with some reason, as one of the very few Frenchmen who understood the American Idea. In Belgium the Press has hailed him as "a Prince of the French mind." And even in Italy the Chamber suspended its sitting as a mark of honour. For the student of politics and personality it is interesting to consider why Leon Blum, who was not after all a very permanent statesman, should be regarded with such general veneration. His great year of office, between June, 1936, and June, 1937, during which he introduced holidays with pay, collective contracts and above all the forty-hour working week, was not, perhaps, the finest hour of European Socialism. His caretaker Government at the end of 1946 did not last more than a few short weeks, and although he served for a time as Vice-Premier in 1948, he was almost immediately forced to resign his position under pressure from his own party. It may be true that his year of office at the time of the Popular Front did exercise a salutary effect upon French political development and that it may even have averted, or at least postponed, a proletarian revolution. It may be that his articles in the Populaire did much to animate and focus France's somewhat exhausted faith in republican institutions. _ The final verdict will probably be that Leon Blum was less important as an active force in politics than as a widely pervading influence. In what did that influence consist ?
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I never had the privilege of Leon Blum's friendship: but I did have the advantage of being slightly acquainted with him over a long period of years. I can recollect two different impressions, the disparity between which may perhaps be tempting me (since such are the tricks which memory plays us) to exaggerate or over- emphasise the contrast. The first time that I met him was in 1909, when I was a student in Paris—very young, very shy, and much excited by-the intellectual effervescence of what seemed to me (and sometimes still seems to me) the Athens of our ay.. I would be invited occasionally by Jacques Emile Blanche to visit him in his studio at Passy, and I would sit in a dark and humble corner, _ listening with awe to the conversations which I heard. On one such Sunday evening the discussion turned upon the Jardin de Berenice of Maurice- Barres, a book for which I had an ardent admiration which I was far too timid to express. There was a thin man there, who, in sentences of great precision, criticised the style of Barres as being Teutonic rather than Latin, suggestive rather than well ordered. "The French language," he said, "does not lend itself to the discursive or the picturesque." This was Leon Blum, who at the time was writing literary articles for the Revue Blanche and Gil Bias. He was polite, lucid, conciliatory, but resolutely convinced. His manner of speaking, the small taut gestures with which he punctuated and scanned his phrases,lad soinething of the governess about them ; his enjoyment of his own fluency was as unconcealed as that which, in later years, so astonished me in other literary heroes, such as George Moore : .he chose his words with that almost feline tentativeness which I subsequently admired in Edmund Gosse.
* * * * • In 19191 met him again, when he was a recent deputy, but already regarded as the acknowledged leader of the Socialist Party. His flat was situated at the very prow of the island, so close to the Seine that at certain hours the reflection from the passing water would cause small ripples of light to dance across the yellow volumes with which his room was lined. He was still slim and affable ; he was still discriminating in his search for the precise word. But he seemed to have acquired a sharper authority, a wider scope. His gestures had become ample, sweeping, in a way rotund. As other guests entered the room he would shake hands with them while glancing sideways, having in so short a time acquired that curious blend of assiduity and casualness which is the distinctive manner of the Palais Bourbon. He was still the man of letters, the Normalien, the Conseiller d'Etat ; but one was conscious of a stronger purpose, a new imperative, which almost, but not wholly obliterated that touch of femininity, which I had noticed ten years before. His charm, the varied lucidity of his conversation, remained unimpaired ; but he had become impressive ; it was as if Edmund Gosse had startlingly acquired the status and manner of Leader of the Opposi- tion. He had entered politics when he was but little less than fifty years of age : yet within a few weeks he had asserted his personality and had become, at a bound, an elder statesman. What, I asked myself, was the inner force which had enabled him to achieve so rare a transformation ?
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It is customary to assert that Leon Blum was forced into politics by a series of important accidents. It was the Dreyfus case which first diverted his attention from literary to political criticism. The murder of Jaures in July, 1914, forced him into prominence and opened for him the road to leadership. His opposition 'to Monsieur Poincares policy in the Ruhr, while it earned him much momentary unpopularity, designated him as the acknowledged spokesman of the opponents of all reactionary measures. When in February, 1936, he was dragged out of his car and beaten up by a gang of cagoulards, he became the recognised martyr of the anti-Fascist front. When at the time of Munich, he was invited to express his opinion of that surrender, he answered with the two lapidary words, "Shameful relief." That reply, in its sharp integrity, aroused many a qualm of conscience. His opposition to the armistice and his arrest 'by Vichy affirmed his reputation as an unflinching patriot ; it was the incisiveness of his defence at the Riorn -trial which, more than anything else, induced the Germans to call off that disgraceful indict- ment. His internment at Buchenwald, his eventual release by the Allied armies, the temperate but unanswerable evidence which he gave at the trial of Marshal Petain on July 27th, 1945, all these events did certainly contribute to the creation of the Leon Blum legend. It was on the latter occasion that he described the arrest of the deputies embarked on the S.S. as "that truly abominable act." But it would be wrong to regard these events and statements as mere accidents. His conduct when faced by these chance contingencies was the- expression of a nobly integrated character in which were equally blended a fierce hatred of social or political injustice, immense moral courage, great integrity, and deep compassion.
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The path of the intellectual Socialist is strewn with many boulders, and his flesh will be lacerated by many brambles. Both by those who realise his fastidiousness, and by those who resent it, he will be suspected of insincerity. However deeply he may believe in social democracy as the only modern antidote to a new totali- tarianism, he will be accused by the one sidp as an accessory to the destruction of the things they care for, and by the other side as seeking to avert class war. Leon Blinn believed in 1936 that it was not impossible to canalise the insurgence of the proletariat by directing it into ,constitutional channels. It is too early yet to assert that, even for France, this was a fallacious theory. Yet the example of Leon Blum will remain as an encouragement. "Je suis," he once wrote, "un penseur moral." It was this that gave him what Edouard Herriot described as "his magnificent and courageous consistency."
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