In May 1935, Pierre Laval, France’s conservative minister of foreign affairs and future premier, signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union designed to protect its signatories against German aggression.1 Two months earlier, on March 13, Hitler, in flagrant violation of the Versailles Treaty, had decided to reintroduce conscription and increase the size of the German army fivefold. Crowds rejoiced in front of the Reich Chancellery. Newspapers declared that the first great measure had been taken to “liquidate Versailles.” On March 17, a day known thenceforth as “Heroes’ Memorial Day,” General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s servile minister of defense, told a uniformed audience at Berlin’s State Opera House that Germany would again take the place she deserved among the nations. “We pledge ourselves to a Germany which will never surrender and never again sign a treaty which cannot be fulfilled,” he declared, with nods of approbation from Hitler sitting in the royal box.
The ink had not yet dried on the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact when Ilya Ehrenburg—a prolific novelist and Izvestia’s correspondent in Paris—organized the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Moscow had decided to repudiate pacifist principles and march with Socialists and Radicals against the common foe. Between June 21 and June 25, crowds ebbed and flowed into the Mutualité conference hall on Paris’s Left Bank for three daily sessions that addressed topics such as “cultural heritage,” “the “role of the writer in society,” “the individual,” “humanism,” “nature and culture,” and “the problems of creation and the dignity of thought.” Writers came from Germany, the USSR, America, England, Turkey, China, and Holland. Among those who spoke were André Gide, André Malraux, Louis Aragon, E. M. Forster, Isaac Babel, Waldo Frank, Max Brod, Aldous Huxley, Julien Benda, James Strachey, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Heinrich Mann, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Henri Barbusse, Paul Nizan, Lion Feuchtwanger, Boris Pasternak. Their shades of opinion ran from liberal to Stalinist.
For the Soviet Union, anti-Fascism was a supremely effective propaganda tool. Just as Mussolini extorted tacit approval from foreign minister Pierre Laval for his invasion of Abyssinia by condemning Germany’s plan to annex Austria in the Anschluss, so Stalin, holding high the torch of anti-Fascism, blinded Western intellectuals to the evil that committed as many as 140,000 slave laborers to a cold grave digging the White Sea Canal and starved almost four million Ukranians in the so-called Holodomor. People who spread the word—who lived by words—were the special object of Soviet ardor. Russia’s overtures had begun well before January 1933, but when Hitler took office, promising in the name of race and nation to destroy “individualism and bourgeois culture,” the courtship came to include luminaries who qualified for a warm embrace as fellow travelers. Conspicuous among the latter was André Gide, France’s most celebrated writer. On March 21, 1933, at a rally of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (a branch of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers created by Moscow in 1927), he declared, “Why and how I approve today what I reproved yesterday has everything to do with German terrorism, in which I see a reprise of the most deplorable, the most detestable past. In Soviet society I see the opposite—the promise of a bountiful future.” L’Humanité, characterizing Nazism as “one more atrocious episode in the international saga of class conflict,” reported that Gide’s vow “to stand with the proletariat” excited wild applause. The paper then advertised his solidarity by serializing Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures), an odd choice of fiction for apostles of realism. His old friend Roger Martin du Gard, disregarding the guilt born of inherited wealth and the horrors Gide had recently witnessed in the Belgian Congo, urged him to “expunge from your revolutionary vocabulary this ‘class struggle,’ which does not comport with anything else in your mind.” He couldn’t imagine Gide “waving the red rag.” Gide would come to the same conclusion, but not until he visited Moscow, three years later.
André Gide speaking at the 1935 Congress of Writers, which he cochaired with Malraux.
André Malraux, who rose from relative obscurity in 1933 with the publication of La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate), was a younger star courted by the Soviet Union. In June 1934, a year after receiving the Goncourt Prize, he traveled to Moscow with his wife and Ehrenburg for an international congress held under the auspices of the Union of Writers for the purpose of enshrining realism. They endured hours of lip service to that doctrine in a huge hall whose facade was emblazoned with Stalin’s lethal aphorism “Writers are engineers of the soul.” In an address verbose even by Soviet standards, Maxim Gorky observed, after meandering from Greek mythology to Cervantes and beyond, that Immanuel Kant would not have cudgeled his brains over the Ding an sich—the thing that exists independently of us, unfiltered by the forms of sense—if he had been a primitive man in animal skins. “Primitive man,” he concluded, “was a materialist.” Hours later, Karl Radek, a Bolshevik warhorse, laid down the line in a more coherent argument entitled “Bourgeois Literature and Proletarian Literature,” the burden of which was that the literature of late-stage capitalism displayed the symptoms of “intellectual degeneration.”2 It was effete, if not senile. It no longer produced the sturdy novels of Balzac’s Human Comedy but instead issued the sickly ruminations of Marcel Proust (whom he likened to a mangy dog incapable of action, lolling in the sun and compulsively licking its wounds) or the “dung heap” of Ulysses, populated by worms whose wriggling Joyce observed under a microscope with evident delight.
What Malraux had to say about literature, after paying homage to the Soviet government for “saving saboteurs, assassins, and thieves” from their criminal lives by having them shovel out the White Sea Canal, did not ingratiate him with the prelates of realism.3 To declare that recent Soviet literature faithfully presented “the external facts” of the USSR without touching on its ethics and psychology was considered blasphemous. If writers are “engineers of the soul,” he asserted, the engineer’s highest aspiration must be to invent—to invent as Tolstoy invented when there was no Tolstoy to imitate. “Art is not a submission, it is a conquest,” he said. Marx’s lessons explained troubled economies; they did not necessarily promote “cultural progress.” Refuting Stalin’s dictum, he declared that “there is consciousness of the social and consciousness of the psychological; Marxism is one, culture the other.”
For all his waywardness (he also raised a glass to the absent and vilified Trotsky), Malraux was not excommunicated by the Comintern.4 Nor did dialectical-materialist cant lead him, one year later, to regard a Communist-sponsored congress for the defense of culture as a lure and a derision. To be sure, anti-Fascism spoke much louder than intellectual stringency. It kept odd bedfellows in bed together. But so perhaps did the demon that tormented Malraux with the sense of being an actor, a third person to himself, condemned to ventriloquize and to dream—not unlike Drieu—of transcending his “otherness” in revolutionary action. “Virile brotherhood,” a phrase reminiscent of Barrès’s “spirit of the trenches,” was his ideal. One of the speeches he gave at the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture signals a departure from his earlier pronouncement that art is a conquest rather than a submission. By 1935 he was apparently no longer inclined to champion conquest except as conquest over self, or to befriend individualism (which he associated with inner division) except as a collective “I.” Being a man, he noted emphatically, “requires each of us to stop playacting.” We have heard this before and shall hear it again: to be wholly human was to overcome the breach between self and other, between face and mask, between bourgeois writer and proletarian audience. If the revolution did what it should, men would cease to “live biographically,” he declared, implying the possibility of an impersonal rebirth.5
Excluded from a congress that excluded a select few of the Comintern’s bêtes noires was André Breton, who had sought, since the late 1920s, when he became a passionate reader of Trotsky’s memoirs, to persuade skeptical French Communists that Surrealists were reliable henchmen in the struggle for revolutionary change. Ten years earlier, on November 8, 1925, L’Humanité had published an article reporting that a symposium hastily organized by “dissident anarchists” to discuss the idea of revolution had elicited a letter from the Surrealists pledging fealty to the French Communist Party (PCF). “The so-called ‘Surrealist group’ insists on protesting publicly against the misuse of its name,” it began. “Some have been led to believe that there is a Surrealist doctrine of revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Gide in the middle and Malraux to his left at the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.
Surrealism is first and foremost a method of thought, conferring greater value on certain elements of the mind than on others; it is the violent critique of a certain hierarchy of mental faculties. It far surpasses the artistic and literary applications to which people have sought to reduce it.… Because of the morality and method in which Surrealists ground themselves, we have, in the very exercise of Surrealism, come increasingly to count on the fundamental idea of Revolution.
Despite the title of their magazine, Surrealists never believed in a Surrealist revolution, he asserted. “We want the Revolution because we want the means of achieving it, and the key to that achievement lies with the Comintern and the PCF, not with individualistic theoreticians … who are necessarily counterrevolutionary.”
Breton persisted in the illusion that the PCF (unlike Sigmund Freud, to whom he made a futile pilgrimage during the fall of 1921) would embrace a poet preaching revolution of the mind and seat him among its elite.6 When he applied for membership in 1927, the party thought that his talents could best be used, and his ideological fiber tested, by assigning him the task of writing a report about the coal industry in Fascist Italy. This humbling ordeal did not result in a report or in membership. Nor did it put an end to his vexed relationship with the party. Three years later, soon after publishing his second manifesto, he founded a new review called Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, the first issue of which answered a question telegraphed by the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature: “Please reply following question what your position if imperialism declares war on Soviets stop.” Breton replied, “Comrades if imperialism declares war on Soviets our position will conform to directives Third International position of members French Communist Party stop If you judge better use of our faculties in such case we are at your disposal for specific mission requiring any other use of us as intellectuals stop.”
Striving for intellectual heft, Breton favored philosophical and political essays in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution but otherwise made his presence felt, as always, with épater les bourgeois demonstrations. There was, most notoriously, the screening he organized of Luis Buñuel’s film L’Âge d’Or at a Montmartre cinema whose lobby was hung for the occasion with scabrous paintings by Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. Right-wing militants, including an “Anti-Jewish Youth League,” took exception to Buñuel’s portrayal of Jesus as a Sade-like child molester and trashed the premises, splattering ink over the screen, destroying the projector, hurling stink bombs, attacking spectators with blackjacks, damaging the art, and tearing up copies of Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution on sale. In a front-page article, Le Figaro inveighed against the film as detrimental to everything of human dignity. Not closing it down would be tantamount to official complicity with “the work of intellectual Bolshevism making its mark in the heart of Paris” under cover of “avant-gardism.” Hadn’t the leagues done what the police ought to have done? Their violent foray was the “instinctive defense” of upright people (“honnêtes gens”) against a “satanic enterprise.” The author, Gaëtan Sanvoisin, praised the high-mindedness of a municipal councillor at whose behest the authorities had made cuts in the film and quoted his letter to Chiappe, the prefect of police:
I attended a showing on Sunday. The spectators were mostly youths and foreigners. We elected officials are responsible for them. Our responsibility extends to a bookstore next door to the cinema, where a review called Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution is on sale, along with so-called avant-garde literature. I have several issues for you to peruse. It is because they tore up this garbage that young members of the Ligue des Patriotes were jailed for a night last week. To avoid such incidents, which will unfailingly recur, you have a dozen policemen guarding the cinema, while suffering from a shortage of personnel elsewhere. I won’t press you further. Knowing you as I do, I know where you stand. Your men will tire of stifling their just indignation to defend a spectacle conceived by neurotics and an agency of revolutionary propaganda. More of us than ever will no longer put up with the systematic poisoning of society and French youth.
Sanvoisin was certain that Chiappe, if he bothered to peruse the review, would find abundant evidence of Bolshevik sentiment. It declared, among much else, that Indochinese revolutionaries served the oppressed of all nations by fighting to throw off “the French yoke.”
Breton’s break with Communism followed his break with Louis Aragon. Largely responsible for their estrangement, after thirteen years of literary partnership, had been Elsa Triolet, a Russian novelist better known for her close ties to Ilya Ehrenburg and to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky than for her own writing.7 Tired of his role as the fidus Achates of one despot, Aragon fell under the spell of another, who made it her business to unburden him of his Surrealist past and remodel him along party lines. As labile a personality as Drieu, and as desperate for an ideological home, Aragon lent himself to the remodeling, in the course of which 1930 proved to be a significant year. It was the year that the Congress of Revolutionary Writers took place at Kharkov. Aragon attended it in November, representing the Surrealists, whose review he touted with apparent success and whose grievances against members of the PCF were heard with apparent sympathy. Elsa Triolet (distraught over the recent suicide of Mayakovsky) stood beside him, translating. When the congress ended, five days later, Aragon was prepared to sign a letter drafted by the party demanding that he retract his criticism of Barbusse, repudiate Breton’s “Second Manifesto,” eschew Surrealist activities, purge himself of Freudianism, and submit all future work for party approval. “This was the first time that I saw open at my feet the abyss that since then has taken vertiginous proportions,” wrote Breton.
Soon other long-term companions defected to the Communist camp, notably the poet René Crevel. In 1935, Crevel joined Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Malraux, and Ilya Ehrenburg on the organizing committee of the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Except for Crevel, Breton was not much loved by any of the above. By Ehrenburg he was hated. In Ehrenburg’s study of contemporary French literature, the Surrealists were described as mentally ill or charlatans playing the part of madmen for attention or profit. “These young self-described revolutionists will have nothing to do with work,” he wrote. “They go in for Hegel and Marx and the revolution, but work is something to which they are not adapted. They are too busy studying pederasty and dreams.… Their time is taken up with spending their inheritances or their wives’ dowries; and they have, moreover, a devoted following of rich American idlers and hangers-on.… In the face of all this, they have the nerve to call the rag they publish Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.”
Breton was all the more eager to address the congress for having been slandered by its chief impresario. Crevel, despite his defection from the Surrealist movement, persuaded fellow committee members to let Breton speak. The arrangement was canceled a few days later, however, when Breton encountered Ehrenburg on the street and slapped him. The Soviets insisted that Breton be excluded. Breton, in turn, made no apology. Crevel tried to reconcile the parties, shuttling between them frantically, as if life itself depended on the success of his negotiations. And indeed it did. They failed and, four days before the congress opened, he killed himself. “The silly incident was the last drop for René Crevel,” wrote Ehrenburg. “Of course a drop is not the whole cup, but it grieves me to recall it.”
His suicide succeeded where his mediation had not. The shocked antagonists agreed that Breton should have his say, unofficially and through a proxy. Paul Éluard read his speech late at night on June 24. It was restrained but nonetheless staunch in its opposition to a policy and a doctrine for which the USSR wanted endorsement from European intellectuals: the doctrine being realism and the policy her treaty of mutual assistance with France. Pacifists traumatized by World War I deplored a treaty that might justify the aggressive strategy of French warmongers.8 “Is it not true,” Breton asked, “that … ultra-imperialist France, still stupefied at having hatched a monster in Hitler, invokes the blessing of world opinion … to accelerate the arms race? If Soviet leaders regard their rapprochment with France as a matter of harsh necessity … let them at least not allow themselves to be guided like blind men or to be swept into making a sacrifice greater than that which is required of them. Beware of faith independent of reason, of lurking fideism! The Franco-Soviet pact may be necessary, but it befits us as intellectuals, now more than ever, not to desert our critical senses.… So long as bourgeois France has an interest in it, there is danger.” It was very much on his mind that Premier Daladier had agreed to Stalin’s demand, as part of the Franco-Soviet pact, that Trotsky be expelled from France, where he had been living in exile.
Breton, who was known to threaten followers with expulsion from the movement for writing fiction, or even for defending a genre he scorned, addressed the issue of realism with as much tact as he could muster. While revolutionary Western writers were urged to survey “the great tableaux of collective life” in Soviet novels (which he dubbed “a school of action”), the Soviet writer was urged to visit “the great provinces of the inner life” reflected in Western literature. “Romain Rolland, describing ‘the role of the writer in present-day society,’ comes to this lapidary conclusion: ‘Lenin said “One must dream”; Goethe said “One must act.” ’ Surrealism has never aspired to anything else; all its efforts have tended toward a dialectical resolution of these alternatives.”
“Dialectical” rolled off many tongues in the extreme heat of June 1935, like the verily verilies of panting celebrants. It rolled off Breton’s again when he came to denounce the mythology of patriotism. “We Surrealists don’t love our homeland,” he declared.
A photomontage by René Magritte of sixteen Surrealists. It appeared in issue 12 of La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1929. Magritte’s hermetic caption reads, “I don’t see the woman hidden in the forest.” Breton is in the middle of the top row. To his right is Louis Aragon, who defected to the Communist Party several months later.
As writers or artists, we have stated that we do not at all reject the cultural legacy of centuries. It is exasperating that we should be obliged today to recall that it is a universal legacy, for which we are indebted to German thought no less than to any other.9 Better yet, we can say that philosophy written in German is where we have discovered the only effective antidote to the positivist rationalism that continues to ravage us. This antidote is dialectical materialism as a general theory of knowledge.
Reserved for the peroration was a mordant reference to “genuine poets” who had traded “the inner life for the externality of propaganda,” meaning their birthright for a mess of pottage. He declared that they would not succeed in “liberating the mind forever” with hackneyed impeachments of Fascism. Everyone familiar with Surrealism’s feuds knew that the reference was to Louis Aragon.
If Aragon, who now cut the figure of French Stalinism’s tenor voice, had not stayed to hear himself belittled late at night in an almost empty hall, he learned about it soon afterward and made his own speech a diatribe against the movement from which he had divorced himself. Echoing Zola’s prosecutorial “J’accuse” with the refrain “I call for a return to reality,” he denounced Breton’s Marxism as a shell in which the Surrealists smuggled their poetic “baggage.” They were impostors bending Marxism to the theories of Sigmund Freud without regard for economic or social truths.10 “It’s laughable, the scorn these woolgatherers have for the ‘baseness’ of social reality, and their fear of the subject in poems, they who are inspired by a woman’s farewell or the flight of time, but who marshal all their abstract energies against the establishment of the new world in poetry.”
Aragon’s speech chimed with the Soviet party line presented by delegates of the Union of Writers, whose shibboleth was the word “new.” The bourgeoisie, proclaimed Ivan Luppol, a professor at Moscow University, had lost its title to the cultural heritage of the past, having shown itself unworthy of it. He averred, “The working class, which is also the creator of a new culture, has been appointed by History as sole heir.” Clearly outside the realm of doctrinaire pretensions, if not of revolutionary tropes, were two Russians who had come from the USSR under guard, and only after Gide and Malraux insisted upon it: Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel. Pasternak received thunderous applause when he rose to say,
I wish to talk here about poetry, not about sickness. Poetry will always be at our feet, in the grass. One will always have to stoop to perceive it. It will always be too simple to discuss in assemblies. It will forever remain the organic function of a happy being, brimming over with the felicity of language. It will be clenched in the heart from birth. And the more happy men there are, the easier it will be to be an artist.
He then read a love poem about poetry growing in him from wild melody to words and meter, to “thee are not thee, I am not I,” to his face buried in the grass for “nights of the universe” and eyes “dawning to splendid suns.”
The last word might have belonged to E. M. Forster, who saw twilight rather than dawn for writers such as himself—writers bred in a liberal tradition and sworn to defend the literary métier against political and religious bondage. “My colleagues probably agree with my account of the situation in our country,” he said,
but they may disagree with my old-fashioned attitude over it, and may feel that it is a waste of time to talk about freedom and tradition when the economic structure of society is unsatisfactory. They may say that if there is another war writers of the individualistic and liberalizing type, like myself and Mr. Aldous Huxley, will be swept away. I am sure that we shall be swept away, and I think furthermore that there may be another war. It seems to me that if nations keep on amassing armaments, they can no more help discharging their filth than an animal, which keeps on eating, can stop from excreting. This being so, my job, and the job of those who feel with me, is an interim job. We have just to go on tinkering as well as we can with our old tools, until the crash comes. When the crash comes, nothing is any good. After it—if there is an after—the task of civilization will be carried on by people whose training has been different from my own.
Forster’s speech, as far as it was heard, did not sit well with members of the audience who had just heckled the historian Julien Benda for defending a Western tradition that understood the life of the mind to be independent of material or practical ends.11 One witness, Katherine Anne Porter, found the scene deeply disturbing: “I think it was just after André Malraux—then as dogmatic in Communism as he is now in some other faith—had leaped to the microphone barking like a fox to halt the applause for Julien Benda’s speech, that a little slender man with a large forehead and a shy chin rose, was introduced and began to read his paper carefully prepared for this occasion.” Forster paid no attention to the microphone, she remembered,
but wove back and forth, and from side to side, gently, and every time his face passed the mouthpiece I caught a high-voiced syllable or two, never a whole word, only a thin recurring sound like the wind down a chimney as Mr. Forster’s pleasant good countenance advanced and retreated and returned. Then, surprisingly, once he came to a moment’s pause before the instrument and there sounded into the hall clearly but wistfully a complete sentence: “I DO believe in liberty!”
The exclamation received polite applause, for which she was thankful. “It covered the antics of that part of the audience near me,” she recalled, “a whole pantomime of malignant ridicule, meaning that Mr. Forster and all his kind were already as extinct as the dodo. It was a discouraging moment.”
In the April 1936 issue of the NRF, Jean Grenier, Albert Camus’s professor of philosophy at the University of Algiers, commented upon the congress in much the same spirit as Katherine Anne Porter and E. M. Forster. “One is a Marxist in 1935 as one was a Republican in 1880,” he wrote. “We have witnessed the paradox of a Congress for the Defense of Culture initiated by a regime that terrorizes intellectuals, allowing no ‘deviation’ from established doctrine whether on the Right or the Left, and tolerating scholars and artists only if they remain rigorously ‘neutral,’ or rather, if they passively adhere to the catechism of the country. They may be honored and revered on that condition, and that condition alone.”
In one of the closing speeches, Malraux expressed the hope that in the future, when all the differences at play during the congress were reconciled in the “fraternal beyond,” history would chronicle only the common will that had brought everyone together for five days in June.
At the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, from left to right: André Malraux, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Boris Pasternak.
His optimistic eulogy could have been repeated, several weeks later, to announce the birth of a political coalition called the Front Populaire—the Popular Front. On Bastille Day 1935, Socialists, Communists, and Radicals stood side by side, under an anti-Fascist banner, with an eye to legislative elections scheduled for April 1936. Communists (whose cues came from the Kremlin), Socialists (whose economic program, for lack of an absolute electoral mandate, was more Rooseveltian than revolutionary), and Radicals (whose constituency was a middle class of entrepreneurs, artisans, doctors, and lawyers generally averse to government regulation) made a motley crowd. Bending more to the left or right than was their wont, they squeezed together on a platform that included the dissolution of paramilitary leagues, the defense of unions and the secular school system, the nationalization of the aviation industry, ambitious public works, unemployment insurance, a forty-hour work week, paid vacations, and an agency charged with protecting the grain trade against speculation.12 Their slogan, “Bread, peace, and liberty” required drastic accommodation, especially on the part of the PCF, which had endorsed the Franco-Soviet pact and tacitly subscribed to the Stalinist imperative that rearmament proceed apace.
Although the victory of the Popular Front in April 1936 was not overwhelming, it gained a decisive legislative majority, and its leader, Léon Blum, became premier.
Being Jewish and in former days an astute literary critic, Léon Blum resembled no one else in the higher reaches of French politics. Born in 1872, a year after France ceded Alsace, from which his father had emigrated, Blum grew up in bourgeois comfort and distinguished himself at the Lycée Henri IV, one of France’s elite institutions, where André Gide was a schoolmate. He gained admittance to the École Normale Supérieure, ranked first in philosophy, but dropped out to study law, despite his literary and philosophical ambitions. Those ambitions persisted. During the 1890s, Blum led a double life, earning his livelihood in government service as a member of the Council of State which exercised judicial review over decisions of the executive branch, while regularly contributing to La Revue Blanche, a magazine founded by the Natanson brothers, graduates of the Lycée Condorcet, and destined during its brief run (1889–1903) to mark the literary and intellectual life of fin-de-siècle Paris. In politics, it addressed such issues of the moment as the Dreyfus Affair, from a Dreyfusard perspective, and the massacre of Armenians. It opened its pages to writers as incongruous as Alfred Jarry, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, and the anarchist Félix Fénéon. It featured the art of the Nabis and the Neo-Impressionists; Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, and Cappiello illustrated books published under its imprint.
As for Léon Blum, La Revue Blanche welcomed reviews by the young lawyer, who moved in the wide circle of intellectuals associated with Thadée Natanson. Thus did he meet Jean Jaurès. The year was 1897, two months before Zola published “J’accuse,” and the meeting proved fateful. “Léon Blum behaved toward his elder [Blum was twenty-five, Jaurès thirty-eight] like a disciple who would consent to know nothing for the pleasure of learning everything from a master such as he,” wrote Natanson. “Their age difference was about the same as that between Socrates and Alcibiades when Alcibiades avidly sought the teaching and favor of the philosopher. As long as Jaurès lived, Blum listened to him. He never thought that he had anything more or better to do.” The Dreyfus Affair created new mentors and discredited old ones, notably Maurice Barrès. It clouded Blum’s youthful admiration for the author of Le Culte du Moi, whom he vainly petitioned to join Zola in righting a scandalous miscarriage of justice.
Blum wrote for L’Humanité when Jaurès launched the paper in 1904, one year after La Revue Blanche ceased publication. But he wrote much else besides, notably a book entitled Le Mariage, which sparked controversy by pleading the case for women’s emancipation from the pieties, myths, and legal strictures that assigned them a juvenile role in society. Conservatives bristled. Caricatures depicting a bespectacled old suffragette with Blum’s features abounded in the right-wing press and never went out of fashion: Blum the Jew, or Blum the subversive, upon whom Vichyites blamed France’s debacle thirty years later, in 1940, was seen as effeminate.13
Having established his expertise in administrative law, he was appointed principal private secretary in 1914 to Marcel Sembat, the minister of public works, and observed at first hand the dysfunction of government in a republic whose executive was constitutionally handicapped. Out of that experience came a book entitled Letters on Government Reform, which foreshadowed Blum’s commitment to an active political life.
Whether or not an active political life was yet what he had in mind or wanted unambivalently (there were financial and domestic impediments), it was what came to pass. In 1919, he drafted a party program. He then stood for election from Paris and won. A year later, the Socialists convened in the city of Tours to consider the demand of a large delegation that the party cast its lot with the Bolsheviks and accept twenty-one conditions prescribed by Grigory Zinoviev, executive director of the Comintern.14 Blum, who did not recognize greater virtue in the dictatorship of the proletariat than in dictatorship pure and simple, presented the case for social democracy. The SFIO would ultimately achieve social justice, he argued, as a party among parties, subject to universal suffrage within the bounds of a functioning republic. Incompatible with republicanism were the statutes of the Comintern, which threatened to make deputies in Paris straw men answerable to an “occult” central committee in Moscow. Blum said that he could not tolerate “a doctrine that I consider … intrinsically false, at odds with the entire theoretical and historical tradition of Socialism, and in any event radically inapplicable to action in France.” He published this credo in L’Humanité on October 27 and voiced it two months later at Tours. By then, December 27, it sounded like the parting words of a castaway to his shipwreck. At Tours, the party split in two. After 1920, L’Humanité would no longer publish Blum. The newspaper founded by Jean Jaurès had become the organ of a Communist party, the PCF, distinct from the SFIO, which considered itself Jaurès’s true heir. At the rump meeting of loyalists at Tours, Blum called upon his colleagues to save another daily, Le Populaire. The paper had served him well during the late 1920s, when he became its editor in chief and emerged as leader of the faction in Parliament.
Until the mid-1930s, however, the party’s best brain could not help the SFIO resolve the contradiction between its chartered purpose, which was revolutionary, and its modus operandi, which was reformist. While consenting to negotiate successful electoral alliances with the cautiously leftist Radicals in 1924, 1928, and 1932, it would not accept responsibility for executive action by sharing power with them (except briefly, during the “sacred union”) or vote on budgets. It thus sacrificed its muscle to its doctrinal virtue. As much may be said of the pacifism a majority advocated in the face of German rearmament, spurning opponents who preached Vegetius’s adage Si vis pacem, para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Hitler’s rise, the riots of February 1934, and the Comintern’s sudden disposition to befriend parties it had hitherto stigmatized as Fascist or “Social-Fascist” did not immediately raze barriers. Blum hesitated longer than most before yielding to the necessity of creating a common front with the heterogeneous Left and seeking power. By Bastille Day 1935 he had reconciled himself to both. “Short of repudiating parliamentary participation itself, I see no way of absolutely escaping the possible obligation [of ruling],” he wrote. “A proletarian party obligates itself willy-nilly when it gains a majority or is the preponderant element within a majority.” The view of some colleagues that an electoral victory should lead right away to the dismantling of the economic and political institutions upon which a capitalist society rested did not comport with his understanding of events. The Popular Front’s priority was not to destroy and construct but to defend France against military rule. Fascist coups had succeeded in three countries, and shadows of a fourth hung over republican Spain.
That Léon Blum had his own person to defend against violence became shockingly clear during the electoral campaign of 1936. On February 13, the funeral cortège of the historian Jacques Bainville, a pillar of L’Action Française, was proceeding along the Boulevard Saint-Germain when onlookers, widely believed to include Camelots du Roi, recognized Blum caught in a traffic jam. They smashed the windows of his automobile, unhinged the doors, beat him bloody, molested his companions, and shouted, “Finish them off!” They might have done so if not for the intervention of several policemen and construction workers who witnessed the attack from their scaffolding. L’Action Française, which made light of Blum’s injuries and blamed him for impudently exposing himself to the fury of a crowd paying its last respects to a great royalist, was denounced in Parliament by the premier. On February 16, thousands protesting the attack marched from the Panthéon to the Bastille, with red and tricolor flags held high. Later that year, Maurras was sentenced to eleven months in prison for incitement to murder.
On the cover of the March 9, 1936, issue of Time magazine, Léon Blum is pictured in bandages after a savage beating by right-wing thugs. He became premier three months later.
Léon Blum convalesced during an ominous month. Hitler marched into the Rhineland with seventeen infantry battalions, in violation of the Locarno Treaty of 1925, whose other signatories—France, Belgium, England, and Italy—did nothing to oppose him. Keeping faith with his memories of Jean Jaurès in July 1914, and judging prudence to be the better part of valor on the eve of an election, Blum supported nonintervention.
The Popular Front emerged victorious from the election of 1936, which made Socialists the single largest party in Parliament, benefiting from a misguided monetary policy that had crippled production and thrown multitudes out of work. L’Action Française might have regretted the likelihood that outrage at Blum’s mugging added votes to the winning margin, if regret ever clouded Léon Daudet’s and Charles Maurras’s self-righteousness. Their verbal assaults on him in L’Action Française became more vicious. They lost whatever they still possessed of a civil tongue after the Popular Front’s victory and vented their anti-Semitism when Blum took office. “France Under the Jew” ran across the front page in bold print on June 5, 1936. Two days later it reported the first appearance before Parliament of the cabinet appointed by “Blum the Jew,” derisively noting its female and Jewish ministers.
L’Action Française was not the only propagator of virulent anti-Semitism.15 Politicians could be relied upon by the right-wing press to provide quotable copy. On June 4, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who later reached the acme of his career as Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish questions, proposed that the General Council of the Seine, on which he sat, urge unspecified “public powers” to combat what he called Jewish tyranny by reconsidering the enfranchisement of Jews and challenging their right to run for office. Given the fact that certain politicians owed their success to an electoral clientele of foreigners imported en masse and hastily transformed into French citizens by a complicit administration, it behooved the state, he argued, to declare null and void all naturalizations approved since November 11, 1918. Unless measures were taken to neuter the alien within, Frenchmen—real Frenchmen, whose “personal destiny” was bound up with that of the nation—faced destruction.
More widely reported was a statement made in the Chamber of Deputies the next day, when Léon Blum presented himself to Parliament for his formal confidence vote and entertained challenges from the Assembly. One such challenge, or interpellation, came from Xavier Vallat, representing the Ardèche region, whose tirades against Jews, Freemasons, and foreigners were notorious. Vallat declared that Blum himself was the reason he could not vote for the new administration, and he explained why in a speech frequently interrupted by remonstrances on the Left, applause on the Right, and words of caution from the Speaker.
Your assumption of power, Mr. Prime Minister, is unquestionably an historic event. For the first time, this old Gallo-Roman land will be governed by a Jew.… I say what I think—and bear the disagreeable burden of saying aloud what others only think—which is that this peasant nation would be better served by someone whose origins, however modest, reach into the entrails of our soil than by a subtle talmudicist.… The average Frenchman will be uneasy when he considers that M. Blum’s decisions were taken in council with the likes of M. Blumel (his general secretary), M. Moch (his general sec- retary), Messrs. Cain and Lévy (his confidants), and M. Rosenfeld (his penholder).
The Speaker, Édouard Herriot, finally restored order, but not before deputies on the Right and Left had leapt from their benches and invaded each other’s quadrant of the amphitheater with fists flying.
During the run‑up to Blum’s premiership, disgruntled workers were occupying airplane factories, mines, large farms, railroad sheds, construction sites, and department stores throughout France. The slow economy ground to a virtual halt, and the right-wing press stoked fears of revolution. L’Action Française, Le Figaro, and other papers suggested that in a scheme devised by the Comintern, Blum had been assigned the role of Kerensky. What credulous deputies thus saw when he delivered his inaugural address was a stooge destined to make way for a Bolshevik despot. If the plot unfolded accordingly, Blum’s prudent agenda would prove to have been a Menshevik fable.16 Blum haters disposed to suspend disbelief cited a pamphlet entitled Les Soviets Contre la France, which read like a well-plotted spy novel, asserting that France’s version of the October Revolution would take place on June 12.
By June 12, Blum’s government had helped union officials and employers negotiate a settlement, called the Matignon Accords.17 Strikes ended and doomsday passed without incident. But alarmists, above all L’Action Française, did not want for alternate versions of the apocalypse. Maurras declared that Blum’s economic reforms spelled disaster, and especially his proposal to tax the rich. The rich were not wealthy enough to afford additional taxes, as their fortunes were il- liquid. They would be compelled to sell property at a loss. And who would profit? Flocks of Jews from all over the world would darken the sky, like buzzards circling carrion. They would acquire whatever it pleased them to own: factories, ateliers, fields, houses, châteaux, historical and art treasures, sacred relics. “Already, thanks to the state-controlled revenue service, established fortunes are no longer renewing themselves, capital is no longer making up its losses. With a Judeo-Socialist tax collector, the residue will soon evaporate.”
1Mussolini, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and Pierre Laval met at Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, to address the issue of Germany rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Mussolini was anxious to shore up his own imperial ambitions by conquering Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and Laval tacitly bolstered them in order to secure what turned out to be a short-lived and disingenuous alliance against Hitler.
France’s pact with the Soviet Union, which Laval inherited, unfinished and unsigned, from his assassinated predecessor in the ministry of foreign affairs, would never include a military convention and remained toothless.
2Radek, born Karol Sobelsohn to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine), participated in the 1905 revolution in Warsaw, became an active Bolshevik functionary in 1917, was one of the passengers on the “sealed train” that carried Lenin through Germany after the February revolution in Russia, and made an unsuccessful attempt to launch a second German revolution in October 1923, before Lenin died. Expelled from the party in 1927 and reinstated in 1930, he helped write the 1936 Soviet Constitution but was accused of treason during the Great Purge of the 1930s and was forced to confess at the Trial of the Seventeen in 1937. He was sentenced to ten years of penal labor and killed in the Gulag on orders from Beria.
3Malraux was by no means alone in lauding the project. George Bernard Shaw, Saint-Exupéry, Edmund Wilson, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Harold Lasky, among many other Western writers and intellectuals, hailed it as a Soviet tour de force.
4The Comintern was also called the Third International, or simply the International.
5On the contempt for history and the ideology of newness in Soviet Russia, no one wrote more eloquently than Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was sent into internal exile in 1934. In chapter 12 of Hope Against Hope, entitled “The Irrational,” she wrote, “Our encounter with the irrational forces that so inescapably and horrifyingly ruled over us radically affected our minds. Many of us had accepted the inevitability—and some the expediency—of what was going on around us. All of us were seized by the feeling that there was no turning back—a feeling dictated by our experience of the past, our forebodings about the future and our hypnotic trance in the present. I maintain that all of us—particularly if we lived in the cities—were in a state close to a hypnotic trance. We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era, and that we had no choice but to admit to historical inevitability, which in any case was only another name for the dreams of all those who had ever fought for human happiness.”
One is also put in mind of Jean-Paul Sartre asserting in his later, Marxist years that total transparency between humans was a consummation devoutly to be wished. “I think transparency should always be substituted for what is secret, and I can quite well imagine the day when two people will no longer have secrets from each other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone, because subjective life, as well as objective life, will be completely offered up, given.” There is a historical resonance in all this with Rousseau’s boast that he would unashamedly present himself in public if his head were made of glass, with everything inside it open to view. The paranoid Rousseau will also be remembered for denouncing theater as a breeding ground of secrets.
6According to Breton’s biographer Mark Polizzotti, he was made to sit in Freud’s waiting room, given as much time as the doctor had between patients, and told, courteously no doubt, that they did not have much in common. “The two were clearly speaking at cross-purposes. Freud considered the practical techniques and raw materials of psychoanalysis the means to a therapeutic end, whereas for Breton their primary aim should be ‘the expulsion of man from himself.’ ”
7Elsa Triolet was born Ella Kagan in 1896, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish lawyer, and brought up in Moscow. In 1918 she married a Frenchman named André Triolet. By 1928, when she met Aragon, they had divorced. Her older sister, Lili Brik, had long lived in a ménage à trois with two poets, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
8This proved to be immaterial, since the military convention associated with the treaty was never completed.
9Breton here refers to an article by an editor of the Communist daily L’Humanité and, in particular, this sentence: “If, as Marx said, proletarians, being internationalists, ‘do not have a homeland,’ from now on they have something to defend: the cultural patrimony of France, the spiritual wealth accumulated by all that its artists, its artisans, its workers, its thinkers have produced.”
10Aragon opened himself to the accusation of shaping Rimbaud and Lautréamont, those icons of Surrealism, to suit the arguments of Marxist dogma.
11By the end of the year, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October, Benda proved to be more politically militant than many left-wing intellectuals, whom he criticized for contenting themselves with endless jeremiads against Mussolini but their unwillingness to demand that Fascist aggression be countered with armed force.
12Among the young Turks who fought against doctrinal sclerosis in the Radical and Socialist parties were Pierre Mendès France and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
13The book certainly reflected the influence of Blum’s mother, a woman devoted to the cause of social justice, with whom he had a loving relationship. It also points to Blum’s great admiration for Stendhal, and in some ways takes Stendhal’s De l’Amour as a model. He may not have been aware of a stirring speech that a great Radical politician of an earlier generation, Jules Ferry, had delivered at the Sorbonne in 1870, when the institution of a republic hung in the balance: “Bishops know perfectly well that whoever controls a wife controls her husband. That is why the Church wants to hold her fast, and why democracy must make her its own. Citizens, democracy must choose, under pain of death. Woman must belong either to Science or to the Church.”
14Since the war, membership in the SFIO had increased threefold, with veterans radicalizing the party. As one leader explained, “These new memberships included men severely tried by the bloody tragedy, who had suffered physically and emotionally, in their livelihoods and in their affective life, in their social situation and in their flesh, small tradesmen whose businesses were extinguished, men of the liberal professions who had lost their clientele, ruined households, sons killed, wounded, mutilated. Among casualties of the great storm, the most quixotic and the most desperate.”
The second of the twenty-one conditions specified that “every organization that wishes to affiliate to the Communist International must regularly and methodically remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post in the labor movement (party organizations, editorial boards, trade unions, parliamentary factions, co-operatives, local government) and replace them with tested Communists, without worrying unduly about that fact that, particularly at first, ordinary workers from the masses will be replacing ‘experienced’ opportunists.”
Zinoviev (born Osvei-Gershon Aronovich Apfelbaum) served as a member of the Politburo and first executive director of the Comintern. Under Stalin he fell from grace, and in 1936 was the chief defendant in the Moscow show trial called the Trial of the Sixteen. He was of course found guilty and executed.
15In language common to anti-Semites overt and covert alike, Blum was often portrayed as straining to make himself heard while his parliamentary antagonists spoke in strong, resonant voices.
16“The mission of the Party, which is to construct the new society, has not varied, but the task of government is different,” said Blum. “We must find out whether we can assure a peaceful, amiable transition from society as it is now to the society whose ultimate realization is and remains our goal. We shall have to be at once bold and wise, to accomplish a long-term project and straightaway take measures that tangibly and effectively affect national life.”
17The Hôtel Matignon, on the Rue de Varenne, is the official residence of the premier.
