Léon Blum

"What interested me in Blum as a Jew was precisely that: the hatred he aroused. We find it hard today even to imagine the degree of overt, unapologetic prejudice and dislike that someone like Blum could inspire in those years, primarily and simply on account of his Jewish origin. On the other hand Blum himself was often deaf to the scale and implications of public anti-Semitism and its invocation against him. There was, of course, a certain ambivalence in Blum’s own identity: unashamedly and totally French, he was no less overtly and proudly Jewish. In later years he combined great sympathy for the newborn Jewish state in the Middle East with near indifference to the Zionist message itself. These ostensibly incompatible identifications and enthusiasms were perhaps not so far from my own at various times, which may explain my long-standing interest in the man."

"On a personal level, it turns out that Blum was, in an unusual sort of way, charismatic. He was so obviously honest, so manifestly meant what he said, so clearly wasn’t trying to be anything other than he was, that he was actually quite appealing and accepted on his own terms. His style—which to us would seem rather romantic and a bit elegantly over-polished for political use, especially on the left—was actually regarded as evidence that the Left had a leader of class. And of course one deeply hated by communists, on the one hand, and the French right on the other. Blum was also the only person who understood what his party, the Socialist Party, had to do to remain a political force in France. If socialists abandoned Marxism and tried to become a sort of social democratic party on the northern European model, they would simply blend into the existing Radical party, with whose social base they had much in common. On the other hand, socialists could not compete with the communists as a revolutionary, anti-system party. And so Blum walked a narrow path between pretending to lead a revolutionary party committed to the overthrow of capitalism, while functioning in practice as the nearest thing France had to a social democratic party."

"By 1937 Frances Prime Minister Léon Blum had embraced the notion that concessions to Germany in both Eastern Europe and overseas were necessary if peace were to be preserved. But Chamberlain had little confidence in the French and did practically nothing to make joint Anglo-French action effective. The Soviet Union was viewed with revulsion by most Conservatives, Chamberlain among them, on ideological grounds. Even Churchill found it hard to contemplate having Moscow in his grand alliance, though that was clearly a logical inference to be drawn from his own analysis of the situation. Much hope was pinned on Mussolini, who in 1934 had appeared to take a firm line against an abortive Nazi putsch in Vienna; this was to exaggerate Italys strength and to underestimate Mussolinis desire to overturn the status quo, which he revealed when he invaded Abyssinia and ignored all inducements to negotiate a settlement. The 1935 Stresa Front of Britain, France and Italy proved to be just that: a front. When Italy defected, Britain and France could not agree what to do first: get Mussolini out of Abyssinia or keep Hitler out of the Rhineland. They did neither. This pattern of Anglo-French mal-coordination, not helped by the divergence of domestic politics in the two countries when France briefly had a Popular Front government, was to continue until the outbreak of war."

"Although I am not a legalist when it comes to the conquest of power, I am one when it comes to the exercise of power. If parliamentary processes result in our being called upon to exercise power within the framework of existing institutions, we should do so legally and fairly without taking advantage of our presence in government to fraudulently transform the exercise of power into the conquest of power."