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Five major bills were voted by the Chamber in two exhausting sessions by such colossal majorities as 528-to-7 and 563-to-1. A stand was made by Capital against Labor only on the most drastic measure, that intended to make 40 hours the maximum working week hereafter in French industry. Standard in France since 1919 has been the 48-hour week. The 40-hour week passed the Chamber last week 385-to-175, went to the Senate along with the four other bills which seek to compel two-week vacations with pay for all French workers, collective labor contracts to protect their rights, higher wages and reduction of some taxes paid by War veterans.
Since the French Senate consists mostly of wealthy greybeards, their rage at being sent five such bills by the Chamber of Deputies showed itself in rudeness to whomever they could snub. Normally a Premier entering the Senate through its lobby is handshaken by dozens of greybeards. Last week Senators pointedly cut M. Blum, greeted in silence his appeals to pass the bills, refused so much as to debate them until the following week.
Soon French workers singing the Internationale were sedately parading around with figures of capitalists whom they had hanged in effigy and a great scare shot through bourgeois Frenchmen, including their spat-wearing new Premier who is a Socialist by party but no revolutionist at heart. In his new fear Premier Blum finally announced that, although French police would not arrest occupiers of factories, they would suppress any disorder in the streets. That night jumpy Socialist Salengro, Minister of Interior, called to Paris steel-helmeted gardes mobiles with rifles in their hands, bade them keep gimlet eyes on his own Socialist followers and the Communists in the radical "Red Ring" districts around Paris.
This was so definitely risky, so likely to turn the workers against the Jewish and Socialist Premier, that he hastily announced that "foreign agents provocateurs" were fomenting strikes. He cited one Greek agitator, hinted strongly that others were Nazis who had slipped in from Germany.
"Collaborate With England!" Prone is Léon Blum to surround himself with yes-men and of these the most modest is Radical Socialist Yvon Delbos. When offered the Foreign Ministry he cried, "Oh, that is far too great an office for me!" and last week was frankly floundering at the Quai d'Orsay. Since the new Premier, too, has no experience in foreign affairs, M. Blum and M. Delbos hit on the idea of calling to Paris last week all the principal European envoys of France, to ask each of them how things were in the country to which he is accredited.