(See front cover)
So to contrive that Bolshevik Russia and Republican France should somehow be linked in close mutual accord has become a ruling passion with the wealthy No. 1 Socialist of France, that exquisitely cultivated Jew and famed rabble-rouser, M. Léon Blum. From rostrums as various as the curbstone of a Paris slum and the tribune of the Chamber, long-nosed, stringy-haired M. Blum has clarioned: "Socialism is my religion!" Last week he lay in bandages, "put to bed for his religion" by Royalist youths, who thus brazenly described the outrageous beating they gave Socialist Blum when his appearance as a bystander at a Royalist funeral procession incensed them (TIME, Feb. 24). This attack—and enemies of Léon Blum charged he was not really hurt but is dramatically "exploiting a few scratches"— threatens to figure largely in the coming French Chamber and Senate elections for which Parliament will adjourn Friday, March 13.
Last week, although Blum's body had been bedded, the spirit of Blum was the strongest personal force in the Chamber of Deputies, thrusting for ratification of a military pact of mutual assistance between Russia and France. In fact Socialist Blum was so much in the hair of Premier Albert Sarraut that the Paris topical weekly Aux Ecoutes cartooned the Premier as a dog covered with fleas, each flea having the face of Léon Blum (see cut, p. 19). Exclaimed Aux Ecoutes, accurately reflecting the dilemma in which French politicians found themselves last week: "Abominable though the Soviet regime is—so abominable that only the Hitler regime appears equally abominable—we think the pact must be ratified. ... In 1914, but for our alliance with Russia, we should have been vanquished."
"Dirty Dog." Nineteen months old was the still unratified Franco-Soviet Pact last week, but its every aspect became freshly vivid in one of the Chamber of Deputies' stormiest fortnights of debate before the issue narrowed to a vote.
The pact dates from the "Save-France Cabinet" formed after the Stavisky bloodshed by beloved onetime President Gaston ("Papa Gastounet") Doumergue. Suddenly recalled by duty from retirement to the dirty job of Premier, "Papa" Doumergue chose as his Foreign Minister, venerable Louis Barthou, who proceeded to surprise all Europe by showing even more energy than such young sprigs as Anthony Eden.
It was M. Barthou's theory that to try to please everyone was nonsense and that the enemy of France is always going to be Germany. Launching swift efforts to strengthen old French alliances against the Reich and forge new ones, venerable but vivacious Louis Barthou had a glorious time dashing from capital to capital. In Geneva he sat down with Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovitch Litvinoff and negotiated the terms of an Eastern Pact of Mutual Assistance between France and Russia to which Germany and Poland were invited to adhere (TIME, Sept. 24, 1934) The pact amounted to an agreement that, if any Eastern European State burst out of its frontiers, the others would join in squelching it. Adolf Hitler refused to have anything to do with such a pact, and Berlin's influence in Warsaw made Poland turn it down.