Deputies bustled into the Palais-Bour-bon last week for what was sure to be a wild scene, reception by the Chamber of new Premier Leon Blum, a prosperous and infirm old Socialist whose spidery limbs and thin beaked nose give him the air of a flamingo. Flapping gestures complete the illusion and Premier Blum last week was also bird-like in his air of being exquisitely preened and valeted. Spotless were his pearl-grey spats. Faint was his aroma of eau de Cologne. He had just set up one of the very largest Cabinets ever formed in France, a ministry in which so many Radical Socialists and Socialists had found places (along with a self-styled "Dissident Communist") that the Cabinet had to be officially divided into seven sections, an unprecedented step.
For the first time France had a Cabinet including women, of which for good measure cultured, bookish, music-loving Premier Blum had included three: Madame the Undersecretary for Scientific Research Irene Curie-Joliot, daughter of the discoverers of radium; Madame the Undersecretary for National Education Cecile Kahn Brunschwig, longtime French feminist; and Madame the Undersecretary for Child Welfare Suzanne Lacore, a onetime village librarian who of late has been outstanding in French child welfare leagues. Under French law these ladies have no vote and, should one have occasion to sign a check while in office, her husband must countersign it to make it legal.
Irrepressibly Parisiennes declared that "The best men in the Blum cabinet are Irene, Cecile and Suzanne." Great & famed Irene was at the time of her appointment by Premier Blum just leaving for London last week to lecture medical savants on her most recent work in evolving synthetic radioactive drugs which, because of their light atomic weight, can be injected and tolerated by the human body while they do their cancer-killing work. Radium's great Irene then flew from London to Paris, prepared to consecrate herself to Politics.
Bigwig Socialists and Radical Socialists who received the Cabinet's best plums were mostly Frenchmen who have made their mark as faithful party wheelhorses. Some idea of the calibre of these men could be had from the fact that France's longtime League of Nations Delegate Joseph Paul-Boncour, who for years has been willing to serve with almost any Cabinet, was understood to have rebuffed overtures from Premier Blum, declaring, "I will not serve with such nonentities!"
Strikes, Strikes, Strikes— Shrewdly all over France the country's well-read and canny working class sensed that with Leon Blum & Friends warming the seats of power, proletarians need fear no interference from police if they chose to strike and make demands on their employers. Simultaneous but individual strikes had already begun on a large scale fortnight ago and many French employers were already knuckling down to their workers by granting 10% and 15% pay increases (TIME, June 8), but last week strikes spread and grew until Jean Frenchman, some 1,000,000 strong, was telling his employer not to go to Hades but simply to ameliorate working conditions.