Léon Blum
Léon Blum
1872–1950
○ Heart disease
France's first Socialist prime minister, who left behind paid holidays and the 40-hour week
'I rarely left my desk while in power; but whenever I went out and crossed the Paris suburbs and saw the roads covered with processions of jalopies, motorcycles and tandems, with working-class couples in matching pullovers, I had the feeling that, despite everything, I had brought a kind of clearing, a break in the clouds, into difficult and obscure lives', statement at the Riom trial, March 1942
A literary critic drawn into politics by the Dreyfus affair, he kept the Socialist SFIO's 'old house' standing at the 1920 Congress of Tours when the majority left to found the Communist Party. As prime minister of the 1936 Popular Front government he brokered the Matignon Agreements and enacted two weeks of paid holidays and the 40-hour week, becoming France's first Socialist and first Jewish head of government and a target of the far right. One of the eighty parliamentarians who voted against full powers for Pétain in 1940, he turned Vichy's Riom trial into a platform for defending the Popular Front, survived internment near Buchenwald, and briefly headed a caretaker government in late 1946.
Career timeline
- 1894–1906Conseil d'État jurist and literary critic; the Dreyfus affair draws him to Jaurès and socialism
- 1914–1919Chef de cabinet to a Socialist minister in the war government; elected deputy in 1919
- 1920.12At the Congress of Tours, keeps 'the old house' as the majority founds the Communist Party
- 1921–1936Rebuilds the SFIO; political director of Le Populaire; parliamentary leader
- 1936.02Beaten nearly to death by the royalist Camelots du Roi
- 1936.06–1937.06Prime minister of the Popular Front: Matignon Agreements, paid holidays, the 40-hour week
- 1938.03–04Second Blum government collapses within a month against the Senate
- 1940.07One of the eighty who vote against full powers for Pétain at Vichy
- 1942–1945Defends the Popular Front at the Riom trial; interned in a special camp near Buchenwald
- 1946.12–1947.01Heads the caretaker government; postwar reconstruction and the Blum-Byrnes loan agreement
- 1950.03Dies at Jouy-en-Josas