"My Generation Failed . . ."

"Papa," said the boy Leon Blum, "how dare you sell your ware for more money than you paid for it?" There is no record of Papa Blum's answer; of Alsatian Jewish stock, a Parisian merchant in the reign of Napoleon III, he went right on selling laces and ribbons for a tidy profit. But son Leon rebelled against what he later called the dishonesty and decay of bourgeois capitalism.

He was always a lace-and-ribbon rather than a cap-and-sweater socialist. He adored reason and persuasion above emotion and force. He also loved the elegance of the society he deplored. He liked to recite by rote for hours at a stretch from Pascal, La Bruyere, Saint-Evremond. He knew Anatole France, Zola and Proust. He wrote Latin verse, brilliant dramatic reviews for avant-garde magazines, a study of Stendhal, an imaginary talk with Goethe, a book on marriage (dedicated to his wife) that shocked the bourgeoisie because it favored as much premarital experimental love for women as for men.

The Popular Front. Young Lawyer Blum helped defend Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He became a protege and confidant of the great French Socialist leader Jean Leon Jaures. But Blum's approach was steadfastly intellectual: he seemed to disdain practical politics. The assassination of Jaures and the shock of World War I changed the current of his life. In 1919, at 47, the dilettante was elected a deputy.

Fifteen years later Blum stood at the apex of his career--the Socialist leader of the Popular Front. He had never liked the Communists but, uneasily, he allied himself with them against the rising menace of fascism. His long legs and long nose, stringy mustache and thick-lensed spectacles, wide-brimmed hat and spats were targets of caricaturists of Right and Left. Once Royalist hoodlums dragged him from his car and beat him up; he refused to prosecute them. In 1936 the Popular Front carried the elections. Leon Blum took the premiership.

"We will not ruin but also we cannot cure and save this bourgeois society," he proclaimed. Before his government fell a year later, he had given France government-enforced collective bargaining, a 40-hour week, vacations with pay, regulated banks, a nationalized arms industry. Later, some men said that Blum's alliance against fascism had weakened and divided France, made it an easy prey to fascist aggression.

Under World War II's Vichy regime, Blum was imprisoned and brought to trial. At Riom, he defended himself and the cause of French liberty so eloquently that the Nazis called off the show. Blum was transferred to Buchenwald. During his imprisonment he wrote another book, For All Mankind.

"My generation," he confessed, "failed in its task." Chiefly it had misjudged the nature of the totalitarians, had wishfully believed in the "peaceful coexistence" of democracy and warlike autocracy. He urged the next generation not to lose hope or faith in socialism, reason and persuasion--"Nothing established by violence and maintained by force, nothing that degrades humanity and is based on contempt for human personality can endure."

In 1945, the soldiers of the capitalist U.S. freed Socialist Blum.

The Third Force. For a postwar month (December 1946-January 1947) the old man was Premier again. He dreamed of French and British socialism as a "third force" between American capitalism and Russian Communism. But more & more he withdrew from the hurly-burly of events. Tired, his health failing, he stayed in his steep-gabled villa at Jouy-en-Josas, southwest of Paris, where he kept four cows, several sheep, a couple of dozen chickens (the milk and eggs he donated to needy local families). He remained a respected elder statesman. Younger politicians came to him for counsel. He wrote articles for the Socialist Le Populaire, and the Communist press continued to caricature him as a lackey of capitalism.

Last week he penned a eulogistic obituary of British Socialist Harold Laski (TIME, April 3). "It is with pain and effort that I am writing," wrote Blum of Laski. "I find it hard to indicate the full extent of the void so dramatically created within a few hours for international socialism." A few days later, Blum sat in his study writing an editorial for Le Populaire on French wages. After he finished it, he suddenly complained, "Je suis mal" pointed to his throat to show that he was choking. His secretary helped him to a sofa. There, after a few moments, death came to Leon Blum, and international socialism faced a greater void than that left by Laski's death.

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