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Blum's family were rich silk merchants. In a youthful volume, Du Mariage, he urged the Government to recognize that "man is polygamous" and adapt French law more fully to this circumstance. After penning sentimental poems, then literary and artistic criticism, and becoming some-what preciously overeducated, Léon Blum saw these things were getting him nowhere, became a lawyer and began regularly attending Europe's annual conferences of the Second (Socialist) International. Among seedy and impoverished Socialist delegates the brilliant and wealthy young French Jew began to group around himself in something like intellectual hero-worship what has gradually become the Socialist bloc of some 100 Deputies who now not only follow him in the Chamber but even ape him. When he claps his hands they all clap their hands; when he is amused they are all amused ; when Léon Blum stalks to the tribune to hurl tor rents of sarcasm and scathing innuendo at the Cabinet — any Cabinet — they are all ecstatic, then uproarious with cheers. Temperamentally a destructive critic, Socialist Blum, who has refused numerous invitations to enter the French Cabinet of the moment, is credited with having been indispensable to bringing about the fall of several of his country's recent Cabinets.
Chuckle in Bandages. Should ballots make Léon Blum Premier and bullets not turn him out of office,*he and his Socialist Party are pledged first gradually to transform the "Capitalist society" of France into a "Collectivist society." Next they would strive to create for the world an international currency of constant and unfluctuating value with international bonds paying a modest rate of interest secured by all the world's governments. The lucrative armament industry would be made a State monopoly and its profits secured in toto by the State.
Since Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir ("Gentlemen of the Leather Pads," functionaries of the French State who sit on leather pads) are the class of voters perhaps most devoted to M. Blum, they would expect to get even better jobs and more of them in the Socialist Bureaucracy his new French deal would create. With approval Orator Blum has hailed what he calls the "bold grandeur" of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "sound ideas."
In an unguarded speech which has cost Léon Blum some votes and perhaps won him others, the No. 1 French Socialist pledged that the Republic's first Socialist Cabinet will give France a vacance de légalité or "lapse from legality" resembling the NRA and AAA honeymoons.
To a great many Frenchmen the person and program of Léon Blum are so "abominable" that they can think of no other in France equally abominable. Nevertheless the "popular Front" of the Radical Socialists, the Socialists and the Communists last week finally steamrollered through the Chamber of Deputies the Franco-Soviet Pact by a triumphant majority of 353-to-164. Among his bandages Jew Léon Blum chuckled as this harsh stroke immediately moved Nazi Adolf Hitler to make the most fawning and friendly gestures he has ever made toward France (see p. 21).