The great socialist leader you never heard of
How Léon Blum's tactical utopia changed France for ever
tl;dr, He united the left and center against fascism. He introduced a massive reform package that changed the life of workers forever. He stood firm when other fled or collaborated with Nazis. He proudly defended socialism when fascists put him on trial. His wife demanded she accompany him to the concentration camp they sent him to. From that camp, he wrote about his hope for humanity, insisting that we must not condemn the entire German people for Nazi crimes.
On this day in 1936, France elected its first socialist government, led by its first minority leader, Léon Blum. So we have a special edition dedicated to this extraordinary leader gets too little credit from history, both within and outside France.
French Radio recently released a wonderful podcast about him. French speakers should check it out, but his story should be better known beyond France.
The career of Léon Blum has a lot to teach us today about social change, about forgiveness and about hope. You will struggle to find a more anti-fascist figure than Blum: a man who was Prime Minister of the Popular Front government - an unprecedented anti-fascist alliance between centrists, socialists and communists in 1930s France.
Creating hope - a lesson for advocates of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and all change makers
Léon Blum is responsible for one of the great reforms of the 20th century: one that we use as an example of hope-based shift no.2: from problem to solution.
After just a few months in power, he introduced paid leave for all French workers. Until then, only a small elite of public civil servants received paid leave. Most workers did not, meaning they hardly ever had enough free time to see their families, let alone enjoy a hobby or simply have time to themselves.
This was a major event in the life of French workers, and indeed, in French public life altogether. It was captured in this photo essay by the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His photos show the birth of tourism in France: people having picnics by the water, playing, lounging at ease, basically having a good time. It looks normal to us today, but back then you would only ever see the bourgeois elite engaging in pleasure. Pleasure was for the rich and powerful, not the workers. For many, it was the first time they had ever seen a beach or the sea.
Looking at those images, you can see the importance of showing people how the world looks once your reform is in place. Once people get a taste of your change, it becomes very hard to roll it back.
For Blum, this was about far more than free time, it was about the very idea that leisure was something that every human being should enjoy, not just the rich. And it was driven by compassion, by love for people.
Looking back on this moment from captivity in a concentration camp, he wrote about leaving his office and seeing the streets full of workers on holiday, out on scooters or tandem bikes, wearing their nice clothes and he reflects that, despite everything, his reforms were not just about time with family or getting people out of bars into nature, but about bringing “a kind of embellishment, of light into dark, difficult lives”:
“We had offered the prospect of a future, we had created, in them, hope.”
Letters to Léon
The thing I find most inspiring about this story is the love the working-class felt for Blum.
While the right fumed and ran alarmist campaigns saying the French economy was doomed, letters from joyful workers around the country poured into Leon Blum’s office. Some were short notes sent on behalf of groups of workers from towns or factories simply saying thank you for the paid leave - full of solidarity and camaraderie. Others were longer and more passionate, collected by Pierre Birnbaum in his biography of Blum:
“Thanks to you, Mr. President, workers have enjoyed the love of their children during the holidays.* Thanks to you, Father Christmas will visit our most deprived comrades. Take pleasure in all this familial joy, Mr. President. I salute you as the father of the people.”
(*Note that at that time many people worked so far from home that a single day off was not enough to get home, so they rarely saw their families at all - like workers who today cross continents to earn a living.)
“Dear sir, I am seventeen years old and I just made the most beautiful journey, which I would not have done without you. [I want to tell you] the new sensation for me of feeling free and no longer hear the sound of that factory bell and rolling of machines, to no longer see those aggressive faces, to finally feel free and breath freely and shout my joy wherever. Sir, this is good. I will never forget it. My father told me that if I had paid leave it was thanks to you and the Popular Front. So, dear sir, let me thank you.”
(you can hear some of these letters 15 minutes into episode 5 of the podcast series)
I find these letters deeply moving. Firstly, because they show how precious and wonderful are simple things like earning a decent living and having free time. Secondly, because that period of history is so clouded by hatred of Jews, that it’s important to remember that a Jew not only led France, but was loved and cherished by the workers (and hated by its richest and most powerful).
— The lesson: facts and data can dull and dehumanize a conversation, making your argument less powerful. Remember, people are more likely to react to and remember your message if it resonates with past emotional experiences they have had.
This appeal to experience and joy is crucial. At the time, fascism was far more advanced in its use of sports and culture to create belonging and identity, and the Popular Front government signaled the realization among democrats of the need to build their own political community. As Ziad Munson’s work has shown, community forms values.
Progressives often have ambitious plans but we start our story with policies that feel remote (free internet, regulating banks or tax evasion) - we should rather start with changes that bring fulfilment, meaning and joy to people’s lives.
Andrew Yang does this when he talks about how UBI helps us fully realize our humanity.
“The $1,000 a month is, in many ways, about everything but the money. It’s about our humanity and what we would actually value… So when you translate what the money means in people’s lives, it means the things that make us human.”
The Popular Front was an exercise in ‘Tactical Utopia’
When city planners quickly introduce cycle lanes to show us how much better greener cities are, they call it tactical urbanism. But the same applies to all radical reform: you have to give people a taste of life they could live and the world they could live in.
Let’s call it tactical utopia - bringing a little piece of your radical vision for the future right into people’s daily lives so they can touch, feel and taste it.
Léon Blum firmly believed that reform was revolution. His mission was to improve people’s lives with incremental gains that improved lives. The joy with which workers received his reforms bears him out.
And what he did showed the workers that the state was not its enemy - that it could also be in their service. In a radio talk, he appealed to them to pursue change through law, calling for “calm, dignity and discipline”. And once that trust and expectation was established, it could not be rolled back. Just look at how much French citizens expect of their state today (and rightly so).
— The lesson: We cannot defend our values by looking back at what we have achieved, or what we stand to lose: we have to look forward to the progress we can still achieve. A bicycle that stands still falls over. We need to inject democracy with the same sense of momentum authoritarian populism gets from all the articles we write worrying about the rise of authoritarian populism. We have to show people how having more democracy, rule of law and human rights will make their lives better. Activists cannot just attack what the state does wrong. We need a vision of the state that delivers and cares.
First socialist leader. First Jewish leader. Women in government for the first time. The Popular Front was an anti-fascist coalition but Blum gave it direction with a strong reformist and humanist agenda.
Perhaps the most important lesson Leon Blum leaves us is the importance of maintaining alliances with people who do not entirely agree with us. Like the activists celebrated in Anand Giridharadas’s book, Blum was a persuader.
Already in 1934, two years before "No pasarán", Léon Blum insisted to a united march of socialists and communists that the fascists “ne passeront pas” (“they shall not pass”). When the new Communist Party split from the Socialists in in 1920, it was Léon Blum who called on both sides to “abstain from words which wound and lacerate…from anything that would be fratricidal struggle” and remain “brothers separated by a quarrel”.
Confronting the collaborators
Blum was not just a reformer with great compassion for the working-class. He was an incredibly brave and stoic opponent of Nazism. Few people confronted it as bravely and as selflessly as he did.
You cannot emphasize enough how much the right hated Blum and how bitterly they opposed his reforms. They made posters using a too familiar “we can’t afford it” narrative, warning that free time would lead to higher prices, unemployment and falling exports that would crush the French worker (they actually used an image of a steamroller crushing a worker).
They hated him so much, in fact, that they put him on trial and sent him to a concentration camp.
While most French politicians either chose to collaborate or flee the country and form a government-in-exile in London. Léon Blum, doubly in danger as a socialist and a Jew, stayed. He did not want anyone to say he had abandoned France. Not only that, when he heard that what remained of parliament was meeting in the French spa town of Vichy to end the Republic and hand power to the traitor Marshall Petain, he went to Vichy to debate and vote against the measure. This meant certain arrest and possible death - but he went anyway.
He was one of the main scapegoats for the fascists, and he wanted to defend his government, his values, and his Republic. Sure enough, he was put on a show trial (he had already been convicted), which he turned into a great defense of socialism. It created such bad publicity that the Nazis intervened, ending the trial and deporting him to a concentration camp (where he was kept in a separate building from the main camp, together with another French-Jewish politician).
Hope and forgiveness in the darkest of times
The awe-inspiring courage Blum showed in defense of his beliefs is matched only by that of his wife, who insisted on joining him in captivity in Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The courage, love and dedication in this story is astounding. They married in Buchenwald.
Writing from a concentration camp, he remained determined to keep working for a better future, insisting that not everything we do is for immediate gain, but in the conviction that we can make a better tomorrow:
“We are not dreamers, we do not have the means to dream. But the moment will pass, the dictators encamped across Europe will pass. The misery and evil will pass.”
“We work in the present, and not for the present.”
Writing a letter to his son from a concentration camp, surrounded by SS guards, he refused to condemn the German people. All people could fall prey to fear and hate - just as they all hold the potential for goodness.
The cruelty we have seen among the Germans is something latent within all people. He rejected the idea that any group of people is better or worse than another, and said he rejected the racial condemnation of Germans, just as he would for Jews.
He warns that within all humans the wrong conditions can trigger savagery, but that all people also have “an instinct of solidarity and fraternity that we can also reanimate, by acting on people’s feelings and interests”. This is the spirit of the hope-based approach to human rights: we have to cultivate the humanity in everyone.
If we learn anything from Léon Blum, it should be that society’s immunity to fascism is built not on fear but on solidarity, compassion, trust and hope.
More hopey, changey stuff about Léon Blum:
Pierre Birnbaum’s biography of Léon Blum and his article warning about the danger of failing to unite against fascism (french & paywall).
One of the best podcasts of last year: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/leon-blum-une-vie-heroique
Podcast trailer https://twitter.com/franceinter/status/1599728369255473154?s=20