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Obviously with a feeling in the pit of his stomach, Foreign Minister Flandin sought to appease the Wilhelmstrasse by offering to submit the Franco-Soviet Pact to The Hague Court to discover whether it violates the Locarno Pact. In the Chamber he urged ratification halfheartedly, almost apologetically. Bleating that the object of the Pact is "not to encircle Germany," he added with a French twist, "It is only the spirit of aggression which is to be encircled by this pact! It has been signed in the absence of Germany with regret for her absence and in the hope of her eventual adherence. France has never ceased to desire to draw Germany into the general work of guaranteeing peace. Our most ardent wish is to see the Reich retake her place at Geneva on a footing of absolute equality as a member of the League of Nations."
Blum for Premier? To Léon Blum there was never any question but that the Franco-Soviet Pact must be ratified—even with the dangers of touching off hair-trigger Nazis, incurring possible rupture of the Locarno Pact, and entering the bear-like embrace of Bolshevik Russians. His Socialist spirit is fixed with religious fanaticism; he hates Nazis as they can only be hated by one who is a Socialist, a Frenchman and a Jew; and he hopes with something like passionate prophecy that French voters next April will for the first time give French Socialism a clear mandate to form a Cabinet. Such a result at the polls might backfire into a French Fascist coup d'état, but bandaged and prostrate Léon Blum was not worrying about that. To a question popped at him over the sheets last week he answered eagerly, "After the elections, with the approval of my party, I should willingly undertake the task of forming a Cabinet!" "
As far as I am concerned, I am a French Jew and I can conscientiously say that I am a good Frenchman." Léon Blum has written in his exceedingly painstaking Marxist style. "I find that my ancestors were Alsatians, which means that they were French. I was brought up as a Frenchman. I attended French schools, my friends were French, I have held official positions. ... I speak French perfectly and without a trace of foreign accent; even my facial features are free of particularly conspicuous racial traits. I am entitled to consider myself assimilated, and I feel sure that there is no element, however subtle, of the French spirit, French honor or French culture which is alien to me. Yet, though I feel myself to be genuinely French, I do, at the same time, feel that I am a Jew. ... I have always known that a Jew can be nothing but a Jew."
This emphatic Jewishness makes the No. 1 French Socialist thoroughly at home in Moscow, where it is Stalin's boast that Communism is equally hospitable to Jews, Gentiles, Moslems, Buddhists and persons of all colors. Yet M. Blum draws the distinction that, although he is a Socialist and his French henchmen are locked in a "united front" with the Communists, he is not a Communist.