(See front cover)
In toppling European monarchs off their thrones, inspiring oppressed peoples to rebel, and in twisting world public opinion around until it cried for Democracy there has never been anything like the original French Revolution. Last week in many lands grave heads were wondering what plain Jean Frenchman, a million strong, may now be starting with his spontaneous and uncontrolled strikes (TIME, June 8, et seq.), his gay singing of Red songs in the anxious streets of Paris, his candid nose-thumbing, half amused and half contemptuous, at new Premier Blum of the Third Republic.
Somewhat over one million French proletarians continued on strike as last week opened, despite frantic efforts by Socialist Blum to give them all they said they wanted and get them back to work. Even the French Communist Party, which at first had encouraged and sought to foment strikes, grew appalled by the extent to which they had got beyond what anyone could imagine was Communist Party control. In a speech which the Socialist Premier himself might have made, apple-cheeked Maurice Thorez, head man of French Communism, sought to stem the spontaneous, nationwide strikes, declared: "Strikers must know how to end their strike. They must even know how to consent to a compromise so as not to lose any of their force and especially so as not to facilitate any campaign of reaction."
Unheeding, 8,000 Paris slaughterhouse employes walked out. Clerks of all Paris' great department stores continued their "stayin strikes." The world-famed dressmaking houses had to close. Guests made their own beds in hostelries as various as the ultra-conservative Grand Hôtel and the swanksters' Hôtel Georges V. Outside Paris, for every strike settled when the week opened, another was declared. French trade union leaders were frantic, their supposed authority flouted and slipping everywhere.
Most vexed was paunchy old Léon Jouhaux, longtime French trade union superboss. On paper his Confédération Générale du Travail (General Labor Confédération) "represents without political leanings all workers aware of the struggle to make final the distinction between the employer and his employes," to quote its grandiose Charter. Strictly speaking, "Papa" Jouhaux had been supposed to represent the great bulk of employes in French large-scale industry. Soon after the new Cabinet took office fortnight ago he met French employers' representatives at a conference presided over by nervous Premier Blum, signed a pact promising to end the nationwide strikes in return for the granting of virtually all demands known to have been made by strikers. Boomed joyous Jouhaux as his fat fingers signed, "not merely a success but the greatest victory for workers which the history of trade unions has ever recorded!"